Japchae

 It takes me an hour to walk from my place to the Albany Twin theater over on Solano. Saturday I walked over to watch Almodóvar's latest, Madres paralelas and today I walked there again to watch Jockey and eat Korean food at Bowl'd. I had been craving japchae. It wasn't quite as good as I remembered.  I should say I could tell the difference between what they served and what I made back when I made it myself. I could tell that they just sauced the noodles at the end and didn't stir-fry and sauce each ingredient separately. The recipe I followed is Maangchi's. Really delicious, a little labor intensive, though.

Spotify and hulu

My goal is to cancel my Spotify Premium account without losing access to the playlists I've created. I found an app (SongShift) that helped me migrate my Spotify playlists over to Apple Music, and I also started shifting my podcast subscriptions to Apple Podcasts. I am very heavily Spotify dependent, so canceling my subscription will mean a big change in habits, but I'm on the verge of doing it. The main disruption will be that I will no longer have the "played" episodes of a podcast in the system so it will be hard for me to go back to the archive and not accidentally repeat, or to tell where I am in a podcast's history. And the podcasts will now live separately from the music on a different app. But these are minor quibbles, and I am ready to cancel my sub because I, like a couple of Canadian artists, am bummed that they are paying the big bucks to a podcaster who lives off Covid misinformation. They also pay the least to the artists of the streaming services.  If I cancel my Spotify premium, I can still use the service with ads, but I'll lose my hulu sub. But will I really miss it? I have a queue of stuff I have not been motivated to watch and I haven't watched anything on it for ages. Maybe it's time to pull the plug. I'll give myself the weekend to finish migrating playlists and bookmarking podcasts and then I'll cancel. I'll go from $10/month to $15/month for Apple ONE which gives me both Apple TV and Apple Music. I'm already paying for Apple TV so it consolidates those subscriptions. But to be honest I haven't watched anything on Apple TV for quite a while either. Too many streaming services!

Tiger is Coming!

Today I went to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco where I renewed my membership at the premium level. This will get me reciprocity at a national network of museums and art galleries. I visited their exhibition Seeing Gender in Asian Art. The best part of the show was the video interviews of the young art interns. If I had been exposed to alternative conceptions of gender at their age, how might my life have been different? I ask myself.

I then visited the Korean galleries which have highlighted a series of tiger paintings in honor of the upcoming lunar new year of the Water Tiger. Korean tigers can be leopard spotted, and are often paired with magpies. The tiger has an important role in Korean mythology and folk art, including the origin story of Dangun. I love their expressions. The word for tiger in Korean is horangi. Five baby tigers were born last year to the tiger pair in the Seoul zoo.

Here is a wonderful performance of a song "Tiger is Coming!" by the group Leenalchi that I just love (and here is a lyrics translation)

 

I was tired by the time I got through those galleries so I strolled rather quickly by my favorite Chinese snuff boxes and Japanese ceramics and baskets; I've already seen them but will come back to see them again. The idea is to be able to pop in and out for short visits without feeling as if I have to plow through the entire collection in one visit just to get my money's worth. I'm good for about an hour and then I feel overwhelmed.

Next up: The Contemporary Jewish Museum's Leonard Cohen show, that is ending soon.

Excursions: museum reciprocity

 I'm going to go to the Asian Art Museum in SF tomorrow and get a premium membership that will get me into other museums in a nationwide network of reciprocity. There are about 25 venues in the Bay Area that I'll be able to visit, so I plan to go to all of them in the next few months. If I'm going to move away, I should take advantage of all the excursions possible. 

First up: the Asian Art Museum has a small show about seeing gender in Asian art.

Before she died my mother was still eager to visit all the museums and really liked the Leonard Cohen exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. I should go before it closes in early February.

The Museum of the African Diaspora has a show called Soul of Black Folk.

The California Historical Society has a show of SF photography by Minor White.

I love the Museum of Craft and Design, and their next exhibitions open Feb 12.

I should make multiple visits to the Oakland Museum of California, for their Afrofuturism show and the upcoming Edith Heath show. 

The Berkeley Art Center is not far from my friend's house, so I could combine a visit to her with a stop for their show.

New to me is the Doug Adams gallery at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, with a show coming up that looks cool.

Also new to me is the Kala Institute, which has residencies and studios for artists as well as a gallery. It's down by the Berkeley Bowl West, on San Pablo.

The DeYoung and the Legion are included as well. I want to see the pastel show at the Legion before it leaves in February. 

The GLBT History center looks as if it has a lot of permanent exhibitions.

The Mexican Museum remains maddeningly closed but seems to have a  lot of online shows.

Spirit In The Sky

Someone just drove by blasting "Spirit In The Sky" from their car, so I had to go listen to the song. It is one of those "one-hit wonders" for its writer Norman Greenbaum. It reached number one in 1969 and then twice more for other groups. The Blind Boys of Alabama covered it and so did Elton John! The fuzzbox guitar, the hand claps, the gospel vocals in the background, the subtle key changes, the psychedelic wah wah wah wah-it has a gentle but relentless propulsion, it's great for clapping along and singing along, it's hopeful about where you're going to go when you die. Then I cried for my mom.

Apparently this is the most requested funeral song after Danny Boy.

Station Eleven

 I will have to watch this show again.

Condo sold

Today a notary came to my apartment and I signed all the documents for the sale of my mother's home. We got an offer on New Year's Eve, and closed for the end of January. All has gone well. I'm so relieved that we will be able to pay off the reverse mortgage. There won't be much left over once all the expenses are paid and we share it among the three of us, but it's still something. I'm grateful. I hope the new owner gets joy from her new home. We didn't fix up everything but we made it nice and it's a great location. There were so many financial and legal steps to take to be recognized as the trustee, get financial control of her affairs, get legal access to the property to sell it, etc. I just put my head down and did it, step by step. There are still some financial logistical hurdles yet to come but I'm going to continue to assume that all will go well. I have not had the mental space to think about missing my mom yet today. She would be glad that we have been able to manage things this well so far.

If I had been in the financial position to keep the condo I would have tried to stay there myself but to be honest, I'm starting to talk to my daughter about moving to Brooklyn to be close to her. That's a whole new chapter of life to come.

Book 4: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

After finishing The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For, I was able to get Fun Home and Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel out of the library. I have read them already, but my copies are sitting in a barn in Minnesota with a bunch of other graphic novels I saved for my daughter. I sped through my re-reading of Fun Home and was struck by how much it relies on literary texts to convey the sense of relationships. I no longer practice the kind of reading that was my profession for so many years; my brain just can't handle it. But I found this video essay that gives a good overview:

Book 3: The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For

I set my new year's intention of reading a book a week, and so far I've kept up (three weeks, three books, yeah!) 

Book #2 was a Tana French mystery, Broken Harbor (I had previously read her first novel In The Woods).

Book #3:  Alison Bechdel, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. I bought this  from Moe's Books on Telegraph Avenue because my nephew and his wife gave me a gift card for Christmas, so I had to go the store and buy some new books. When I lived in Minneapolis, I used to read the strip in the weekly newspaper, back when Bechdel still lived in the Twin Cities (St Paul). She started it more or less when I moved out there. I've read both of her memoirs, Fun Home and Are You My Mother? (and they are probably sitting with a bunch of other books I left in Minnesota), but I'd like to read them again. I just put them on hold in the library so I should get them soon. Then I'll check out her latest book The Secret To Superhuman Strength.

Company

I've been listening to a podcast that covers Sondheim's body of work, show by show and song by song in order. I just finished the episodes about Company. Somehow I know the music although I've never seen the show!  Host Kyle Marshall has conversations with other Sondheim fans about the lyrics, the productions, all their Sondheim opinions. It's perfect for bedtime. I know West Side Story, Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George, and (somehow) Company. I also saw a production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum with Tevye way back when. I have never seen Gypsy, Follies, or some of the later shows like Passion or Assassins. I despise Sweeney Todd--I saw the movie the same day I got my shoulder joint injected with cortisone for a case of frozen shoulder, and was in hideous pain. I just remember wanting it to end but sitting through the whole miserable experience. 

This is one of two productions of Company you can watch on YouTube.

Sunday watching

Sunday was a two-movie day. In the afternoon, I went to the movie theater and saw The Tragedy of Macbeth, directed by Joel Coen. It was visually stunning but I was left rather cold by the performances. I also found myself visually confused by two secondary characters, Ross and Lennox, and had a hard time following the dialogue, even though I remembered a surprising amount. I know I read the play at least twice and I've seen at least one version on film (probably the Polanski version before I knew who he was). I just have never been enamored of Denzel Washington and didn't find his performance compelling. The best part was the three witches all played by Kathryn Hunter, who contorts her body like bonebreakers. 

Later in the day I watched Marnie, since it will be leaving the Criterion channel by the end of the month along with a slew of other Hitchcock movies. Apparently Hitchcock relentlessly tried to control Tippi Hedren and harrassed her on this film and The Birds. It was engaging.

Finally I watched the final episode of The Yellowjackets. Some truly excellent recaps over at autostraddle. This is a great show, expertly navigating the Todorov definition of the fantastic: there are equally plausible explanations of confounding events, both naturalistic and supernatural. A great cast, well written, with the collaboration of Karyn Kusama, this show really hit the spot for me.

The Velvet Queen

A French writer and a nature photographer hope to see snow leopards in Tibet. What a beautiful film! I'm so glad I was able to watch it on the big screen, just me and one other person at a midweek matinee.

Art excursions

 Since the state of California sent me a check for $600 as part of the economic stimulus measure, I have decided to renew my museum membership at the Asian Art Museum but join at the Premium level. This gives reciprocity with over 1000 museums in two networks. I checked, and that includes several museums in SF such as the DeYoung and the Legion of Honor that are now $25 a visit.  So instead of getting memberships in each museum, I will make the Asian my home museum and check out all the others in the networks. In New York, there is the Noguchi Museum, which R and I have decided to visit in April when I go there, as well as the Poster House, which I really loved when we went on my last visit. I could plan a series of excursions to all the museums where there is reciprocity in the Bay Area, old familiar friends and new opportunities. I found a succulent botanical garden in Walnut Creek that is accessible from a BART station.

Art excursion: Wesley Tongson show at BAMPFA

 Today's walk took me to BAMPFA for two new exhibitions: Spiritual Mountaints: The Art of Wesley Tongson and Lines of Thought: Gestural Abstraction in the BAMPFA Collection. The Gestural Abstraction exhibition is one gallery but with some choice pieces by artists such as Hans Hoffman, Gerhard Richter, Joan Mitchell, Jackson Pollack, and others. I especially liked a piece by Esteban Vicente because of the color palette that juxtaposed colors I associate with '80s jewel tone fashions. I will have to go back to see the Tongson show again. I was captivated by his work, both the black ink pieces inspired by Chinese artistic traditions of ink painting and calligraphy, and his pieces that explored color. Some works on paper done in Toronto combined colored inks that looked like watercolor with a Chinese technique of black ink line work. Some of the paintings use color wash next to highly textured resist techniques that evoke mountains and vegetation. 

You can get a sense of his work from this short video produced in conjunction with a show of his work in SF:

Nightmare Alley

I just saw Nightmare Alley, directed by Guillermo del Toro, a remake of a 1947 Tyrone Power movie of the same title. Based on a novel by William Lindsay Gresham, the first version was made as a vehicle for Power to go beyond the swashbuckling roles that had made him enormously popular. He was later to say it was his favorite film role.  Gresham wrote his novel after returning from being a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, where he had met someone who told him stories about carnies. In the Tyrone Power film, the carnie world is exploitative and dedicated to putting one over on the rubes, but it has its own moral code, whereas in Guillermo del Toro's remake, the moral corruption is total. The first version is in sumptuous velvety black-and-white while the second is in color and uses vivid red throughout: Molly's electrogirl costume; her coat once they have left the carnival; Cate Blanchette's lipstick; and Molly's bloody hands when she is "materializing" the dead Dorie as part of the con that goes wrong in the end. In the end, Tyrone Power's character has hit rock bottom as a geek but is saved when Molly finds him, while Bradley Cooper's Stan is left howling "I was made for this" as he accepts the job of geek.

There are three great roles for women: Joan Blondell plays Zena (played by Toni Collette in del Toro's film) who is Stan's first partner in the art of the "mentalist" con; Coleen Gray plays Molly who is Stan's wife and partner in his high society version of the con, (Rooney Mara); Helen Walker is the "psychologist" Lilith Ritter who cons Stan (a mesmerizing Cate Blanchette).

The figure of the geek, ("man or beast"?) as the the lowest point of degeneration of the alcoholic opens and closes each film. In the first version, the geek's screams are blended with the musical score at various points in the action. There's the geek, and then there is Zena's alcoholic husband who has fallen from his former success and dies of alcohol poisoning at the hands of Stan. Tyrone Power's Stan clearly feels guilt over accidentally giving wood alcohol to his mentor, while Bradley Cooper's Stan might have done it on purpose. Both of them give a bottle to a man who clearly dying of his addiction.

Stanton is a beast in the form of a beautiful man. Guillermo del Toro doesn't have to worry about the Code or a studio imposing a redemptive ending (and then sabotaging the film's release through lack of promotion because Zanuck didn't like it) so he was more faithful to the novel, and he doesn't hesitate to display all the depravity of his characters. One result is that we don't like Bradley Cooper the way we can't help but like Tyrone Power, who seems to be a charming scoundrel but not a cold-blooded murderer like Bradley Cooper's Stan. 

Del Toro talks at length about his film noir inspirations here.

Here's the trailer for the 1947 version:

 

Here's the trailer for Guillermo del Toro's film:

What I watched the last two years

 I have been faithfully logging my films over at Letterboxd, and I note that I watched 213 films in 2020 and only 107 in 2021! I'm amazed that I watched so many movies in 2020. Either I watched more series last year or I guess we were all just less hunkered down in our COVID isolation. I didn't see my mom at all for most of 2020. This past year, with the vaccines, I actually went out to stores and even to see movies in the theaters. I'm so glad I felt safe enough to get back on public transportation to see my mom in the last year of her life. Yesterday I spoke to my therapist and ended up recounting mom's last day and crying. I haven't cried like that for a little while. We decided to cancel the Celebration of Life event we had planned for the end of the month, due to heightened risk of contagion. Everyone understands but it still makes me sad. 

There is a batch of Hitchcock films set to leave Criterion at the end of the month. We rewatched Vertigo. Next up will be Marnie, which I have never seen, and which someone on Pop Culture Happy Hour mentioned as a favorite film about sex that doesn't have explicit sex. I will watch it later today. I'm still in the middle of season two of The Witcher and halfway through the Chinese drama Luoyang; all caught up on my Korean shows.

Il Mare

Il mare is a Korean film made in 2000 that was an early role for Jun Ji-Hyun, a super popular actress who starred in the very first kdrama I ever watched (My Love from the Star) , and Lee Jung-Jae, also super famous, and most lately of Squid Game fame. It was later remade as a vehicle for Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock after their hit with Speed, as The Lake House. The idea is that a man and woman live in a special house on the water with a magic mailbox that allows them to exchange letters across time; he lived there first and she lived there two years later, but they find they are able to communicate across time and fall in love with each other. Being a Korean film, there is a "car of doom" incident, not once but twice. The OST has some good music too.

The Witcher

Taking a detour from kdramas and more serious fare with The Witcher on Netflix. It's just the kind of 1970s sword and sorcery stuff I read as a teenager: Conan the Barbarian, Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, et al. It's not a very good show, but it has kept my interest so far, in spite of Henry Cavill's bad wig. Or rather wigs because apparently there are multiple wigs, as well as colored contact lenses.

Henry Cavill talks as if he's a super-fan of the character and the genre:

January job: declutter

My goal for January is to declutter my tiny apartment. It's amazing how someone who doesn't actually own many possessions (it's a furnished apartment so almost all of the stuff is not mine) can still have too much junk. A small amount of miscellaneous stuff  arrived from my mom's place and it has no place to go. Sad detritus of her life: broken glasses, broken jewelry, old membership cards, old cellphones. Some of it just had to go into the trash, and it made me so sad. Now I have two plastic bins to get rid of, too. That goes out on the street after it rains.

I have two drawers that have nothing but old electronic gear, so I'm sorting through it to see what I should keep and what should go to an electronic recycling center, along with mom's old phones. I have: two car device chargers for the car I no longer own; a travel router for the wifi the building no longer has; four old samsung phones and one old iphone (at least three of them are my mom's phones) that I need to factory reset before I recycle them; charger cables that I'm trying to pair up with the appropriate device; an old ipod that I haven't used for years that still has a lot of great music and playlists I used when I walked around the lake or by the Mississippi river when I still lived in Minneapolis; a set of expensive Sony headphones with a broken connection that means I can only hear through one side unless I wiggle the jack; something that looks like an old clock (but I don't even know since it was mom's) that needs new batteries; a very fancy cell phone tripod, bluetooth lens shutter, and macro lens for a phone that I won as door prizes and have never used.  I have a Kindle my mother persuaded me to buy that I have never really used and which I probably won't use because I have about two hundred real books cluttering up my place that I need to read before I buy any more. And my niece and nephew gave me a $50 gift card to Moe's!

I should try to sell or give away that photo gear--someone could appreciate it! One of the things I got from mom that I will keep is a little portable battery charger for recharging my phone on the road. It has a smaller capacity than the one I took to Japan --in my backpack ready for my next trip-- and it's more portable.

I have now done the factory reset on all the phones. I actually remembered the screen lock pattern from my old Samsung so I was able to wipe it. It still had a lovely screensaver photo of peach blossoms that I may no longer be able to find, but that's OK. I will deal with my photo archive mess later this week. I can walk this small stuff over to the electronics recycling center in west Berkeley, a little past the 4th street zone. It will be a good walk on a day when it is not raining, and that is looking like Tuesday. I still have an old unusable desktop that my mom gave me when I moved her five years ago that is just taking up room. That needs a ride from my sister or brother-in-law. I should try to reformat the hard drive too.

An offer

My mother named me her trustee and the executor of her will. As such, I have the responsibility of paying bills, settling affairs, and selling her condo. My sister and brother-in-law did all the heavy lifting of cleaning, prepping, and moving stuff out. It was a huge job, and very emotional. I did all the documents, finances, and legal stuff. It was anxiety-provoking, but I have thrashed my way through it. Together we have done everything on our lists, and today we got an offer on my mother's condo. Considering that it has only been two and a half months since she died, we have accomplished a lot. It has been emotionally draining but it has also given us a sense of purpose. The offer seems good to me, but our brother raised some questions. His questions were not unreasonable, but they came accompanied by a serving of resentment which I find hard to deal with. This is where my Alanon program comes in. I cannot control him, his feelings, or his process. I tried to represent his perspective honestly with the realtor and to understand for myself if his objections would change my mind. He thought we should not trust the "coming soon" process whereby we listed the property for other realtors so they could bring in their clients. We got five visits and two of the people had large dogs that are too big for the condo association by-laws. One person was dissatisfied with the way the pipes in the bathroom rattled in the all after the water was turned off. Can't do anything about that. The person who made the offer is a young woman who brought in her mother to look the place over. She seems to be in earnest. Now we get to see if we can get through the next month and all the stages of the process in which things can go wrong. Can I turn this over to my higher power and be present with the way it unfolds? Help me, oh mycelium! I have elected you to be my higher power this month! or, in the words of Julian of Norwich: ‘all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’ 

Here is a view of the vastness of life on our planet, as seen through the lens of fungi: