The Disciple

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.

The Cloud-Capped Star

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.

Bicycle by RM

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

Vincenzo

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

 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.

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?

Jane (documentary)

 Jane is a 2017 documentary, directed by Brett Morgan, about Jane Goodall. Drawing on 100 hours of footage that had been lost in the National Geographic archives until 2014, it documents her beginnings as a primatologist in Tanzania. The musical score is by Philip Glass. Things I learned: she had no scientific background and no degree, and thus was not steeped in some of the prejudices of the time; she seems to have had the ability to scramble bare-legged through the bush without getting scratched; her young son Grub hated the chimps (probably because they took his mother away from him) and now builds boats in Dar es Salaam. The shots of caterpillars and birds are as glorious as those of the chimps and other animals. 

Brooklyn Botanic Garden

 I leave for Brooklyn on Monday, and I'm so excited to be going there in May. The weather will be perfect, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden will be in full spring bloom with cherry trees, lilacs and a host of flowering trees. We will visit it on Tuesday with a dear friend who lives in Park Slope.

 

We will just miss the Sakura Matsuri this weekend, but the blossoms should still be out! I wonder if there will be wisteria (fuji no hana). When I was little and living in Japan, I learned folk dances to Sakura, Sakura, and Fuji no hana. I still have little garbled bits of the songs in my memory.

Haider

 Haider (directed by Vishal Bhardwaj) is an Indian film set in Kashmir that rewrites Hamlet. Haider is the son of a doctor who has been disappeared by the military for performing surgery on a militant leader. When Haider returns home, he becomes angry when he sees his mother laughing with his uncle. He sets out to try to find out whether his father is alive or dead. The film shows the situation of being caught between military occupiers and Pakistani-backed resistance, with both sides attempting to manipulate Haider, and family and friends betraying him. The grimly realist tone of some portions gives way to heightened musical interludes in others. Our discussion group mostly wanted to map the film onto the play and didn't have much to say about the film itself. The biggest difference for me was that the internal conflict of Hamlet becomes the political conflict over the revenge story. Finally, whether or not Haider shoots his uncle to complete his revenge is moot because the uncle has been fatally wounded by Haider's mother's act of self-destruction with a suicide bomber's vest.  

The play-within-the-play is a big production song-and-dance number:

My Antonia

 I just finished reading My Antonia by Willa Cather. This was a book I had on my shelf for many years but never read. My mother had told me it was a favorite of hers, so I had picked up a used copy. I just never got around to opening it, and it joined the many books I gave away, unread, when I made my big move. Recently it turned up in a Free Little Library box, so I decided to get past my reader's sloth and crack it open. I enjoyed it. The descriptions of the seasons resonated with me, after twenty-eight years of living in the Midwest. Cather's work was successful in her lifetime, but critics and literary historians have been divided on her legacy: those who admire the modernists saw her as old-fashioned. But Lee Isaac Cheung, director and author of Minari, writes movingly about how he was inspired by My Antonia and Willa Cather to write what he remembered of growing up on a farm. I gather that Judith Butler has written about Cather in Bodies That Matter. I should look for that.

The edition I found also had these lovely illustrations by WT Benda that Cather commissioned and always insisted be included when the book was reprinted, often having to fight to have her wishes fulfilled.

Shadow and Bone

 Just watched a TV series on Netflix, Shadow and Bone,  based on a YA fantasy series by Leigh Bardugo (also incorporating elements of her Crows series). Inevitable comparisons to Game of Thrones are made in the reviews.While it's not great, it's still entertaining in a tropey kind of way. This first set of episodes is based on the first book in the trilogy, and we have yet to see (officially) if the series will be renewed, so we're left with big cliffhangers. I like the characters from the Crow books the best.

Salome's Last Dance

I have never been a fan of Ken Russell's films. We watched his 1988 film Salomé's Last Dance for our cinema discussion group. It's a recreation of Oscar Wilde's play Salomé, with the conceit that the performance is staged for Wilde in a brothel. Ken Russell himself plays a photographer/pornographer, so we have layers of meta. The acting style of both the frame story and the play is campy and over-the-top, and on that level the film succeeds, but I found the humor not always successful and the performances shreiky and grating. Maybe it also leaves me cold because I find the Wildean source material misogynistic. Both on the surface and symbolically,  female desire is tainted and destructive, and Salomé is murdered in the end ("Kill that woman!"). I was never a huge fan of that particular strain of decadent symbolist modernism, although I read an awful lot of it for my PhD exams.

One thing I do like about the film is the way the credits are displayed as Oscar Wilde flips through a book of the Aubrey Beardsley illustrations, giving us the opportunity to see this suite of amazing illustrations before the play is performed.

I also watched the Alla Nazimova silent film of Salomé, whose production design was heavily influence by Beardsley's illustrations. It is not intentionally camp the way Russell's film is, but it is extremely stylized and aesthetically daring for its time.

Alla Nazimova was a fascinating figure: born in Yalta, she came to the US after studying with Stanislawsky, and was a huge success in the theater. She then moved to Hollywood where she also met with success both as actor and producer/director/writer (although not always credited for her work). She was a lesbian (or possibly bi) who had relationships with many celebrated women in Hollywood. She purchased an estate that she called the Gardens of Allah, where she threw lavish parties, and later turned into a hotel. At the end of her life, she had lost most of her money and rented one of the villas at the hotel. The buildings were torn down, but Frank Gehry purchased the site and is building a complex on it that he says will, in some way, be inspired by Nazimova. 

The Mole Agent

 El agente topo (The Mole Agent) is a Chilean film that is nominated for Best Documentary and also Best Foreign Film in tonight's Oscars. Since it's raining, I decided to catch up on a couple of the nominated films before the ceremony. The premise of the film is that a woman hires a private detective to investigate the institution where her elderly mother is living, to see if she is being treated well. The private detective in turn hires a man in his eighties to go live in the home and report back on conditions and the treatment of his client's mother. The man who is hired, Sergio, is given a pen with a camera and glasses with a camera. At the same time, the documentary crew has already been installed in the home, ostensibly to make a film about the everyday life of the elderly. When Sergio arrives, they are able to film his interactions with the residents, as he goes from spying for his job to getting to know the residents, almost all of them women, who are mostly lonely because nobody comes to visit them. The film is touching and funny, and I did cry. 

I had some misgivings about the invasion of privacy inherent in the project: not so much for the nursing home and whether or not they were mistreating the residents--they were treating them very well--as for the residents themselves. They may be elderly, but do they want their frailty, their memory problems, their emotional struggles, to be fodder for an undercover genre experiment? I wondered if all the residents who ended up in the film were given releases to sign. The director says yes, that they showed the home the rough cut, and they ended up being very favorable to the film because it focuses on the plight of the lonely elderly, and the home comes off well.

Dora Maar

Dora Maar (born Henriette Théodora Markovitch in 1907) was an artist who exhibited with the first surrealists. She grew up between Argentina and Paris, and began her art studies as a painter. She went on to become a successful photographer, beginning work as an assistant of Man Ray, and going on to work for press, fashion, and advertising in the 1920s. She also was a photo-journalist after the Crash, documenting the impact of the crisis on the poor, in line with her leftist politics. Her influential experimental photo-montages used her own photographs, and were exhibited in various surrealist shows in the thirties.

 This podcast tells the story of both Dora Maar, and of Brigitte Benkemoun's reconstruction of her life and career based on the artist's address book, which fell into her hands from ebay. Thumbing through the diary, she realized that its owner had known everyone in the Parisian artistic milieu between the wars, and set about trying to discover who this was. This reconstruction is echoed on a broader scale by the recent solo exhibition of her work.  A major retrospective organized by the Tate Modern (with the Centre Pompidou and the Getty Museum) returns focus to her work itself. Dora Maar's relationship with Picasso has overshadowed her own artistic story, as is so often the case with women artists who are relegated to the role of muse. He was awful to her, as he was to so many women, but they also collaborated with photographic experiments and influenced each other's work. She photographed Guernika while Picasso was painting it. He pressured her to give up photography, and she returned to painting which she was to carry on for the rest of her life. She also became severely depressed after the war and the end of the relationship with Picasso, but recovered in part due to analysis and electroshock therapy with Jacques Lacan. Later in life she became very religious. Her house in Provence, where she spent time every year, has been transformed into an artist's residence. Her painting and later photography were re-discovered after her death at 89. She apparently never stopped experimenting with photography, as we can see in this preview of the restrospective at the Centre Pompidou:

Top Chef season 17

 During my pandemic year, I watched 16 seasons of Top Chef. That's a lot of salmon, scallops and ceviche. Now I have discovered that last year there was a season 17 All Stars, in which all of the chefs were returning contestants--I remember all of them! Season 18 is the most recent one, and I will have to wait until it gets put on hulu to watch it.

I really really miss going out to a good restaurant and having a complete indoor dining experience. So many restaurants have closed, and the few meals I have had with take-out or outdoor dining have just not been that good. Yesterday and today, my mother and I had lunch outdoors at two restaurants on Fillmore street--a burger joint and a fish place. Both of the meals were way overpriced, but at least my fish and chips meal had decent french fries, unlike the burger place's sad mealy fries. But they were not chips! I want wedge style hand-cut chips, not skinny little frites. The fish however was perfectly cooked with a light delicious batter, a good dipping sauce, and a perfect little cole slaw side dish. I will go to Berkeley Bowl and get the ingredients for a cole slaw. 

I've already been spoiled as to who wins season 17, but that's fine.

Taking Stock in April

 I have been looking for blogs I used to read, back when we all were blogging up a storm. One was Mighty Girl, whose idea for a life list inspired me to make one of my own. One of her most recents posts (from 2018!) linked to another blogger, Pip Lincolne, and her practice of "Taking Stock". I decided to give it a try! She provides a template you can cut and past with the following prompts:

Making : nothing these days. I should start another embroidery project.
Cooking : gai lan with mushrooms.
Drinking : organic gunpowder tea from the Berkeley Bowl.
Reading: Wise Children by Angela Carter.
Wanting: to write something every day in my blog.
Looking: watching movies for my discussion groups: Nomadland, White Material, Minari.
Playing: doing the crossword puzzles in The New Yorker.
Deciding: to start getting rid of excess stuff again.
Wishing: I would start losing weight again.
Enjoying: Envy apples, just the right combination of sweetness and crunch.
Waiting: to go to Brooklyn in May!
Liking: my Al-Anon meetings.
Wondering: how to avoid feeling blue after I get back from my trip.
Loving: BTS!
Pondering: getting my hair cut--how short?
Considering: getting back to a daily yoga practice. Why did I stop?
Buying: nothing these days. I have hardly shopped at all during the pandemic. I bought one shirt, and some stuff for R's apartment.
Watching: The Great Pottery Throw Down.
Hoping: I emerge from the winter with renewed optimism.
Marveling: that we got a vaccine so fast and that people are getting vaccinated!
Cringing: ? n/a
Needing: I have pretty much all that I need.
Questioning: will I rediscover a sense of purpose?
Smelling: wisteria when I go for my walks.
Wearing: my fleece jacket on cool days.
Following: Tom and Lorenzo!
Noticing: I have been feeling better this past week.
Knowing: I have enough, I am blessed.
Thinking: about moving in with my mother one of these days.
Admiring: my former energetic multi-tasking self.
Sorting: stuff for my mom.
Getting: ready to travel again.
Bookmarking: meet me at Mike's, the blog of Pip Lincolne, whose idea of Taking Stock this is.
Coveting: Heath ceramics
Disliking: garbage in the streets.
Opening: a Deschutes Fresh Haze IPA.
Giggling: Bowen Yang's SNL iceberg bit.
Feeling: timidly optimistic about emerging from pandemic shutdown.
Snacking: roasted almonds.
Hearing: sounds of baseball games from the park down the street.

An excursion

Well, for the first time in fourteen months I took public transportation to go into the City to visit my mother at her place. We've been able to see each other a few times in socially distanced picnic situations, and we talk on the phone every day, but I might as well have been living back in Minnesota for the past year. The walk to the BART station now includes many new clusters of tents. All but one of the entrances to the BART station are closed. There weren't that many people on the train and we were all able to space ourselves out. I got off at Embarcadero and took the 38R Geary, since the 2 and 3 buses have just been discontinued due to lack of ridership. Luckily, the 38 drops me just a few blocks from my mom's place. The ride back on BART included a hostile ranting crazy person who followed me from one car to another while ragefully screaming, so there was that. Sometimes I wish I had my car again, but then again I don't miss Bay Area driving at all.

I spent some time helping my mom go through old files to see what could be discarded and to make sure things were easy to find. I'll go back tomorrow and do some more. We walked up Fillmore Street to get a document notarized but I messed it up by filling out the signature area incorrectly so we'll have to go back and try again tomorrow. It was not a long walk but it is all uphill so I was concerned about her stamina, but she did OK. She's going to be 88 this summer. We stopped for lunch at the outdoor parklet of a burger place, and had a mediocre burger and lousy fries (so disappointing!) for a whole lot of money. Oh, well, I have to say that almost all of my dining experiences of the pandemic have been like that--I get all excited that I'm going to have someone else cook my food for a change, and then the food turns out to be not so great. I'm hoping my dining experiences will improve when I go to Brooklyn next month.

It was really foggy and cold and I was slightly under-dressed (East Bay fog isn't as damp and bone-chilling as SF fog), so tomorrow I will make sure to add a few layers. Gotta remember how these things work! Must have a hat and fingerless gloves! One more layer between the long-sleeved shirt and the sweater! Just wear that down parka!

Minari

 I saw the preview for the movie Minari (미나리) back when we could still see a movie in the theater, and was really eager to see it. I finally rented it on YouTube (for $21!) because it's next up in the Red Lantern film discussion group. It is really good, and I loved it, in spite of my farm disaster anxiety. 

The plant minari is also called Water Celery, Water Dropwort, Japanese parsley, Chinese celery, Indian pennywort. I bet I can get it at the Berkeley Bowl. Here's an easy recipe for minari namul, a seasoned side dish.

The lovely and talented Han Yeri (Monica in the film) is someone I have seen in the kdramas Six Flying Dragons, Age of Youth, and My Unfamiliar Family. She was really outstanding in all three of these excellent shows. I did not know she also sings. Here she is singing the song from the end credits of the film (with film's soundtrack composer Emile Mosseri):

kdrama watching

 I just finished watched a weekend family kdrama Yeah, That's How It Is, all 54 episodes. It was one of the better kdramas I've watched in the last several months, despite the fact that it is a few years old. I only found out about it from the comments of a DramaBeans post--a usually grumpy commenter said it was good so I checked it out. It turns out that the writer has a long track record, including a drama, Life is Beautiful, that has a gay relationship as a central plot point. I'd heard of that drama--maybe I should watch it next. Luckily all subbed episodes were easily available--unlike the situation when I first started watching dramas (in 2013? I think) and had to sit through endless commercial interruptions before I subscribed to a DramaFever (RIP). It's been a while since I really binge-watched a kdrama. Checking my watchlist, I see that I'm up to 200 kdramas completed, 96 dropped. I have not one single 2021 drama on the completed list, and 2 are on the dropped list (there are more), which just shows how few I've even started watching at all in the last four months.  Several of the ones I dropped over the years were big fan favorites but didn't appeal to me, while several of the ones I completed were not so great but I found them entertaining.  The only dramas I've watched more than once are Coffee Prince, Marriage Not Dating, and Secret Forest. Maybe I should dip into my completed list to find some good ones to rewatch.

Lately, most new dramas have been some variation on supernatural love stories, time travel, serial killers, or a combo, or have been just plain too bad to watch past the first two episodes. And I dropped the most recent time travel drama at episode 14/16 because it just was so stupid, despite the fact that it had a couple of really good actors. But the action sequences were all like first-person shooter games while the actual story was nonsensical and the romance between the middle-aged man and young woman was offensive and boring. Ugh. 

I have fewer jdramas or cdramas on my list because I find the mediocre ones unwatchable, and the good ones few and far between. It's also harder to get good recs because I don't haunt the discussion sites and I don't find the popular genres appealing. Maybe I should rewatch Fated To Love You, so ridiculous but it made me cry so hard ("Goodbye, My Love!")

White Material

 Another film by Claire Denis, White Material (2009).  After our discussion, this song by Burna Boy was recommended to us by Matthew:

Ceramics

 Watching the Great Pottery Throw Down has reminded me of my desire to own a dinner set of Heath ceramics, something that will never happen because the prices are astronomical. I do own a couple of their bud vases because I got them on sale at their Sausolito showroom, but $40 for one dinner plate is more than I am willing to fork over, no matter how beautiful they are, or how much I appreciate the process of their making. I will visit their shop at the Ferry Building when I start taking BART again, and admire their beautiful wares. 

The other china pattern I crave is Blue Danube because that is what we used when I was growing up and I love it. I have a few pieces: a jam pot I use for salt, two dinner plates and one salad plate, two cups and saucers. I only have one salad plate because I broke the other one, which is why I won't pay to collect them; I'm too accident prone. 

Here's a documentary on Edith Heath and her pioneering ceramics design business, part of a public television series called Artbound:

The Great Pottery Throwdown

 I just finished watching season one of The Great Pottery Throw down, another one of the British makers' reality competition shows. Like the Great British Bake Off, the show highlights the contestants' struggles with the material rather than with each other, and that's why we love it. That, and judge Keith Brymer Jones' tears of joy when one of the potters does something really pleasing. "It's brilliant! absolutely brilliant!"

Nomadland

Tonight's movie for discussion is Nomadland. I watched it last month but I may watch it again this afternoon. 

When I became ill some years ago and was losing my job and career in slow motion I thought I would no longer have an income, so I started thinking about how I'd survive. My disability benefits kept getting cut off by the insurance company my employer used to get rid of disabled employees, and the struggle to get them reinstated each month made me sicker. Drastic action seemed necessary.

I seriously considered relocating to Mexico. I didn't think I'd be able to handle life in Mexico City. The last time I was there, for a conference, it felt grim and foreboding.  I read some blogs by "expats" only to realize that I would not have the mental stamina to wrestle with the logistics of such a change, even if I spoke fluent Spanish and had enough money to live relatively well. Even though one of my dreams was to spend time in Oaxaca in a house with bougainvillia, I felt overwhelmed by the logistics of relocating. I was still very sick.

I also thought of becoming a digital nomad abroad. After all, travel was one of my dreams. But I couldn't afford to live short-term in the places I was most interested in visiting and I didn't think I could manage as an older woman alone in some of the places I could afford. I'm too old to backpack.

I also gave real consideration to getting a camper and hitting the road but quickly recognized that I was too daunted by the idea of keeping the vehicle repaired and dealing with the bathroom and bathing issues. This was before the book (and movie) Nomadland revealed how many older people in my situation were turning to van living as a way to survive while working exhausting temp jobs. I also had little interest in exploring the U.S. backroads--I felt too alienated.

One issue I wasn't thinking about as I weighed my options was how isolated and lonely life on the road would be; I was only looking at the budget. That was years before the pandemic gave us all the chance to deal with radical isolation and loneliness from the comfort of our own homes. Another issue is how to get my meds while traveling.

My situation changed and I didn't have to make those choices. I now have sufficient income to live close to family, modestly but well enough. Who knows, maybe travel will become safe again one day.

Here's a really interesting take on the movie by a woman who was an extra in the film, who is herself an RV nomad  

Yes, the movie is a story of grief, not just that of Fern (Frances McDormand), but also a collective experience of grief over an American dream, and especially the experiences of older women. Carolyn used to live in the SFBay Area and says she saw the writing on the wall and made a conscious choice to change her life after the crash of 2008. Maybe if I hadn't had this health crisis (how to manage refilling a Rx on the road is a whole chapter) and were twenty years younger, I would have had the guts to give it a shot.

Neighboring Sounds

Kleber Mendonça Filho, co-director of Bacurau, made his first feature-length film Neighboring Sounds in 2012. It takes place in the neighborhood where he lives in Recife, a middle-class neighborhood where apartment towers are replacing single-family homes and where every entrance has a locked gate and every family has servants. The class and racial divides are shown through the ensemble cast's interactions on a single block, on which a new private security detail is setting up operations. The first chapter is called guard dogs, but the guard dog is just a noisy nuisance to the neighbors. The second chapter is called night watchman, but the building's residents are trying to figure out how to fire their night watchman who has been filmed sleeping on the job. The third chapter features the street patrol that promises peace of mind from all the car break-ins and crime in the neighborhood, but it turns out that the thief is actually the grandson of local landowner Seu Francisco who warns the patrol to leave his grandson alone. In fact, we see that this wealthy man is still the local boss--he owns a sugar plantation while his other grandson works as a real estate agent in his condos: the old power structures extend to the newly reconfigured economy.

 "The sound goes beyond what you are looking at" said Mendonça Filho in this Q and A. The mood of paranoia and fear beneath the surface of everyday life is heightened by the sound design: the barking dogs, the intrusions of music, power tools, voices--the feeling that nobody is ever really alone but also that the noise is not part of a sheltering communal life is reinforced by the way characters move from locked gate to barred door in narrow alleys and guarded domestic spaces. In one sequence, the camera looks down from an apartment window as men are jumping over the gate into the garden, and we hear the slap of their feet as they land, one after another after another. The girl in the apartment wakes up and sees them. As they keep coming, the threat seems to increase from a small group of burglars to a full-scale invasion. The sequence is revealed to be a nightmare the girl is having, but the dread contaminates waking life on the block. In another surreal sequence, the real estate agent grandson is visiting his grandfather's sugar plantation house with his girl friend. They visit a waterfall where they all stand under the cascade for a long time. Suddenly the water changes to blood and we see a flash of the grandson bathed in blood like Carrie at the prom, but he is looking straight at the camera.  His bloody family heritage returns at the very end of the film when it is revealed that the street patrol leader and his brother have a family feud with the grandfather. Seu Francisco calls them to his house for something and they tell him that they are the children of men he wronged--murdered?-- on his plantation back in 1984. The very last sequence has the family that has been tormented by the barking dog setting off firecrackers to frighten it, but the last bang is probably a gunshot from the confrontation with Seu Francisco. 

  All the watchmen are supposed to use surveillance to keep the owners safe but the owners use surveillance to spy on the night watchman's naps. Throughout the film the various maids and guardians have been present in domestic interiors, supposedly in service of their employers, but with their own agendas: the maid brings her grandchildren along, and a relative who sleeps on the couch; the security patrol leader and a different maid use an absent neighbor's home for sex, and it turns out that the house is not empty as they thought; the building watchman spies on people kissing in the elevator; another maid accidentally fries the device that has been used to torment the barking dog (the "dog buster") and is berated by her employer; the street patrol knows who is having an affair, which building the lost party-goer needs to find when he returns from a beer run. There's no privacy, only the illusion of security, and it's the heir of the sugar plantation boss who is stealing car stereos and threatening the security guards if they dare to call him on it. The last shot shows the ineffectual violence of the fiercrackers covering the gunshot off-screen; we know what it means because we have observed the ways that fears of violence permeate the neighborhood.

second dose reaction

I had my second vaccine dose on Friday. This time, I felt pain with the injection and my arm got sore by the evening. The next day I felt achy and feverish, and ended up crashed out on the couch, watching episodes of a kdrama and The Great Pottery Throwdown. I was too tired to read or take a walk. I woke up in the night with aching teeth and jaws--I must have been grinding my teeth. But this morning I feel fine--no more soreness or flu-like feelings. I'm glad it didn't last too long. I'm grateful that in two weeks I'll be fully protected from the virus, at least for a while. 

Meanwhile, this is the funniest thing I've seen in a while:

Senso

Luchino Visconti's 1954 film Senso is the next film for our discussion group: splendid technicolor and high melodrama with so many floating veils, sweeping skirts, white uniforms with white capes, La Fenice and Venice by night, the beautiful veneto countryside.  Do we feel sorry for the Countess who betrays her family, and the cause of Venetian independence from Austria, for a man who turns out to be a loathsome snake? She has her revenge in the end when she rats him out as a deserter and gets him shot. 

 Visconti uses Anton Bruckner's Seventh Symphony as its score, but maybe the best part of the film is the opening sequence, set during a performance of Il Trovatore in La Fenice. We get to hear the duet between Manrico and Leonora, and then"Di quella pira" as the film uses the opera to present its themes of doomed passion and patriotic fervor.

trip to New York!

I am about to go get my second dose of the vaccine! Yesterday I bought a ticket to New York to visit my daughter in Brooklyn. I had bought a ticket to visit her in March of 2020, so I'm thrilled to finally get to see her new apartment, her studio, and her neighborhood. There are so many things we want to do together; even with pandemic restrictions, we'll be busy. We each are making a wish list. Here are ten things I want to do that I haven't been able to do on all my previous trips to New York:

1. Ride the Staten Island ferry and maybe visit the Botanical Gardens at Snug Harbor

2. Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.

3. See the Yayoi Kusama show at the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx.

4. Do a walking tour of the Bushwick street art.

5. See the formal Conservatory Garden at the North End of Central Park and walk the length of the park.

6. Check out chef José Andrés' Little Spain market, in the Hudson Yards under the High Line.

7.  check out tacos from Los Hermanos and try out some of the Mexican food here or here in Bushwick.

8. maybe we could try this bakery crawl (although we might keel over) or we could try a different one every day.

9. view the Statue of Liberty from the gardens in Battery Park.

10. traipse around the Green-Wood Cemetary. 

Little Free Library north loop

Today I took the north loop for my walk. There are five Little Free Library boxes on this routes. At the first one, I found a book that is on the reading list of the Berkeley Public Library's book club, The Library Book by Susan Orlean.

At the third box I found  Judith Butler's Senses of the Subject, a collection of essays on our "embodied existence."

I decided not to take any of the books I found in the other boxes on my route. As it is, I only dropped off one and picked up two, so the pile is increasing.

 

The Mission (Johnny To)

Caught up with Johnny To's 1999 film The Mission (the title in Chinese is Gunfire). I had already seen this but I can't remember whether it was part of a Maggie Cheung marathon (she has a bit part) or what. It's another Hong Kong action film for our Thursday night cinema club, but more cool and stylish than City on Fire. Five bodyguards are hired to protect a Triad boss. Much of the film has no dialogue but relationships are communicated efficiently. The shoot-out in the shopping mall is excellently choreographed. 

The twist at the end is a surprise. The score is a total synthy earworm (BA buh buh BA buh buh NA na na Na!). Triad professionalism, honor among gunmen, blam blam blam blam blam!

Little Free Library book crawl

 I have been trying to take a walk every day during the past year. I had originally started  because I was so out of shape from being ill for so long. As I got stronger, I continued because I wanted to be in better shape for the times I traveled: I had been brutally surprised the first time I went to Japan with Rosemary when I got wiped out and had circulation problems due to walking on pavement for so many hours. The second time we traveled there, I wore compression socks and was in better shape but still had to rest frequently. My trips to LA and Seattle were done when I was able to walk several miles without being completely worn out, so I when I had to cancel all my travel plans in 2020, I decided that I would treat my walks like running laps on a track. Just do it every day and stop worrying about whether or not I had a destination now that all the destinations were closed or off limits. 

I have ended up with three primary walks, each oriented around the Little Free Library book boxes that my neighbors have made. The first is just a straight shot down Channing toward San Pablo and back, which is about 2.5 mile. The end point is a Little Free Library box. It doesn't often have new stock but I've found some good books there so I always check. If I go up a block for the return loop, there are three more boxes: two on Spaulding and one by the school near Milvia. Not a lot of turnover there either but still some good finds.

The second walk is a north loop up to Virginia and back down Milvia. There are four Little Free Library boxes on this loop, which is just a little shorter than the first walk. These tend to have more literary offerings, and often there are uncorrected proof books, so someone must either be a bookseller or know somebody who is. The third walk is the one I take when I'm feeling tired or crabby or the weather is not great, aka my short walk. It's the southern loop, down Milvia to a Little Free Library box that is just a few blocks from the Berkeley Bowl. This is the original destination box that I found when I went grocery shopping years ago. 

There are a couple of other book boxes that I haven't visited for a while now because I'm no longer walking in that direction for a weekly appointment, but I have too many books so I don't need to add more to the huge pile of books I've found over the last several months. I return each book as I read it, but I have not respected the one-in/one-out rule and have accumulated quite a few. My last three acquisitions are: Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, a book I used to own but never read; John Baxter's The Perfect Meal, by an author I'd read when I was anticipating my trip to Paris; and Leif Enger's Virgil Wander, set in Minnesota so I must read it.