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:

more albums in 2022: TxT The Chaos Chapter: Fight or Escape

 I found that I was listening to more podcasts than music this past year. I'd like to change that. There's something about my attention and my anxiety management that is involved here, but I don't really understand it. I just know that I have been bumping into an interior barrier when I think of listening to music. Something about not wanting to connect with my feelings? I don't know.

So on my walk to the Berkeley Bowl today I looked for some albums that I knew I loved; I put on j-hope's mixtape Hope World and then TxT's first EP, and that rolled me into their album The Chaos Chapter: Fight or Escape. I have still not listened to in its entirety. I like rock feel of Lo$er-Lover but so far my favorite cut is Anti-Romantic:

Setting intentions for 2022

It's that time: making resolutions, or setting intentions. I've been in a rut the last few years. I say I want to lose weight but I haven't. I mean to study languages but I don't. So this time around I want to shift to giving some more substance to the things I'll do anyway: read, listen, watch. Following Linda Holmes from NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, I want to read at least one book a week. I have a stack of books that will keep me busy for at least a year, and more on my shelves. So, my first intention for the coming year is 50 books in 2022.

The first book I've picked up is Adam Gopnik's Winter: Five Windows on the Season (2011). Drawn from a series of lectures, the essays consider how a modern sense of winter has emerged and manifested itself in cultural production. Modern winter as seen through a window from a warm place, both sweet--picturesque--and scary--sublime--in painting, poetry, music, and novels such as Frankenstein. I have generally enjoyed his essays in the New Yorker about his life in Paris; this will be a re-connection with my graduate student self.

He mentions Vivaldi's "Winter" so I listened to it on YouTube, so familiar. Then he talks about Schubert's Die Winterreise, as sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. I have listened to it enough so that it is familiar although I don't know it as well as Die schöne Müllerin.

Along with the "book of the week" I like the idea of an "album of the week." I want to spend time listening to new music, so I will look through my Spotify albums list, and look for recommendations. This can either be listening to one album a week, or choosing my favorite of the albums I listen to in a week. I'll have to see how well I stick to these intentions, but I think I can make time for intentionally listening to music, on my walks or while I read.  There was an episode of the Alt.Latino podcast that was a round-up of their favorite albums of 2021, and it reminded me that I had not listened to enough new music this past year. And also that the album format is still one I enjoy. It made me go off to listen to Cimafunk's album El alimento, and El Madrileño by C. Tangana. Next, I'm going to listen to Alex Cuba's Mendó.

 Look at this absolutely lovely lyrics video for his duet with Lila Downs, "Mundo nuevo"

I already do a "movie of the week" and I might make it a Criterion movie of the week. If I get really fancy I might also try to incorporate a "recipe of the week" into the mix. We shall see. 

Bell, Book, and Candle

We watched Vertigo last week, and last night we watched Bell, Book, and Candle, another film with Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart. It was fun. My favorite part is the starring role of Pyewacket the cat:

A busy week

 My daughter is visiting me from Brooklyn. We have been having a great time alternating working/hanging out at home with excursions. We went to see the movie Drive My Car on the day it rained. It was very engrossing even at three hours. My experience was partly that of seeing how much of the Japanese I could understand (not much but more than I expected).

One of her books that I read: My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki. I really liked this book, as I have enjoyed her others.

Watched: Vertigo. Even though I've seen this twice before, this time I felt as if I was seeing it for the first time; the San Francisco locations really popped for me.

Rewatched: Fabulous Fungi. My higher power is the mycelium!

Excursions: walked from the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero over the Filbert steps to City Lights Bookstore and Chinatown. My legs were shaky after the climb up and down that hill.

Asian Art Museum for the Team Lab show, then down Valencia Street to Silver Sprocket comics store. Valencia Street was busy! We had delicious pastries at Craftsman and Wolves and coffee from Ritual Coffee.

Kinokuniya in Japantown and Fillmore Street, then over the hill to the Castro for a drink at Harvey's. Apparently there is only one lesbian bar left in SF, Jolene's.

SFMOMA with a dynamite chicken sandwich and curly fries at The Bird and lovely mochi treats from Minamoto Kitchoan, by the Montgomery St BART station. I should have renewed my membership but I was feeling cheap.

BAMPFA then dinner at Ippuku

For the holiday we will go to my sister's house and have Dungeness crab that my brother-in-law will have fished for us. We'll stay that night and go down to my nephew's place for Christmas Day dinner with his family, and give presents to the the three-year-old.

Belfast

 Halfway through viewing Belfast, Kenneth Branagh's new film, I had the urge to tell my mother about it before I remembered that she isn't here to talk about movies with me any more. I'm sure she would have liked it.

Cimafunk

 NPR's alt.latino show did a year-end episode on their favorite albums and one of the groups they mentioned was a young Cuban group called Cimafunk (from cimarrón) that mixes traditional Cuban styles, hip hop and funk. The album is El alimento.

A big hit for them in Cuba is "Me voy"

 

They also performed it for the NPR Tiny Desk Concert series

The Rain People

The Rain People (1969)  is Francis Ford Coppola's early feature film, as part of a PFA series of Zoetrope productions. A woman takes off from her home and husband on an flight west in her station wagon. On the road she meets a young man nicknamed Killer who has sustained a brain injury from football that makes him meek and obedient to her capricious commands. She finds herself angry at having to take responsibility for protecting him from the dangers they encounter on the road, but ultimately her flirtation with a violent cop results in his death.  Folks have compared this to Huck Finn, Easy Rider and Of Mice and Men.  Making a woman the protagonist who hits the road with a young man as the "innocent" sidekick is a twist on those stories. What the film gets right is her dilemma--feeling trapped in her marriage and pregnancy--and the way she flirts with the power of role reversal when she orders Killer around. She alternately takes a kind of maternal responsibility for him (rescuing him when his attempt to get a job with an ex-girlfriend's father ends up with him subjected to verbal abuse by his ex, rescuing him again when her attempt to get him a job at a grotesque animal zoo goes wrong and he ends up being robbed by the zoo owner after he lets all the animals loose) and attempts to leave him by the side of the road, fleeing from involvement. When the cop tries to rape her, he comes to her rescue but the violence he knows how to inflict as if they are on the football field provokes the cop's young daughter to shoot him with her father's gun (in spite of the verbal and physical abuse we'd just seen the cop inflict on her).  I liked the film well enough until the ending which I hated. But I guess if it's an American road film there has to be a gun and a senseless gun death.

The cast includes Shirley Knight, and the young James Caan and Robert Duvall. George Lucas was an was a young assistant, and he made a documentary called Filmmaker about the making of the film.

House of Gucci

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

Fantastic Fungi

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

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

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

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

Alanon sponsorhip

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

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

Daughters of the Dust

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

Trustee of the trust

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

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

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

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

The Conversation

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

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

Just read

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

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

Velvet Underground documentaries

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

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

SF Symphony rehearsal

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

 

We also recognized Mendelssohnn's Italian Symphony.

The French Dispatch

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

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

A Chinese Ghost Story

 Hong Kong producer Tsui Hark's A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) is the only kind of horror movie I can watch: high camp, a sympathetic ghost. One of many maiden ghost stories made into Asian films, it featured Leslie Cheung, Cantopop superstar and actor, who sang the theme song:

Street Dance of China (s1)

Watching Street Dance of China. It's all my brain can handle. I'm watching the first season with no English subs, and fast-forwarding through the talky parts. There are four team captains, all accomplished pop star dance performers. One is Tao who was part of EXO, if I am not mistaken. They start with individual auditions on a street set, with battles to make choices exciting; chosen dancers get a scarf. Then the action moves to a gym where they have to whittle the 100 chosen down to 50, with all four captains acting as judges. From time to time they have the rest of the dancers indicate their choice by putting a scarf around the neck of their preferred dancer. You get to know the dancers by their styles: b-boys, poppers, lockers, even some robot and waacking. There are several women, probably one in five. There is a style category they call "urban" which seems to be more lyrical and interpretive. One guy speaks English and is from the Kinjas crew; he seems kind of like a ringer. Once the big cut has been made, they divide them into ten teams of five and give them 24 hours to come up with a group choreography. Each team has a captain-choreographer, and they face off in a battle with another team. The losing team captain chooses another dancer to join a battle with ten dancers competing for two slots. I skipped over the long section where the four team captains assembled teams for a group choreography number. Now I'm half-way through the first season and I will get to see how they stage the next competition. I am tempted to jump into season three where there are subs, but I am enjoying the dance enough to stick with it for now. Here is a battle between two team captains, the super popular Wang Yibo and Jackson Wang. Both are terrific but Wang Yibo has great musicality:

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

 For the three weeks that my mother was in hospice care we spent a lot of time just waiting around. One of the only things I could do was watch The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. It was the right kind of distraction: beautiful costumes, jokes, New York cityscapes, snappy dialogue:

mi mamá se nos fue

Last Thursday my mother died. She succumbed to multifocal glioblastoma--multiple brain tumors from a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer. She had been showing signs of confusion and cognitive issues for a while but we thought it was the onset of dementia; she had even started taking Aricept, a medication for memory issues. It made her very sick and we were really worried about her because she had gastrointestinal issues, became very weak, and hardly ate at all for almost two weeks. We kept urging her to stop taking the medicine but she wanted to give it a try. It was so hard to watch her struggle.

When she stopped taking the medication,  we hoped she would get better,  but two days later we showed up at her apartment and she was unable to stand up from her chair, unable to walk. She was cold and started having mild seizures, with spasms in her arms and legs. We called 911 and a crew of EMTs showed up to take her to the emergency room. Because of Covid, we weren't supposed to be able to go in with her, but her confusion was such that they allowed me to go in so somebody could talk to the doctor about her symptoms. They did a CAT scan to see if she had had a stroke and discovered some swelling in her brain. An MRI showed that she had multifocal glioblastoma: multiple tumors or lesions in her brain. By the end of the day, there was a diagnosis. It was as if she had been struck by lightning. Suddenly she was deathly ill and no longer able to walk. In the hospital they asked her questions for neurological evaluations and she wasn't even able to remember her name.

Because of her age and weakness, the doctors told us right away that she was not a candidate for surgery, chemo or radiation, and that her prognosis was dire. At first they said six months, but then when we spoke to the oncologists they said maybe two months. They admitted her to the hospital but it was basically a place for her to stay while we got my sister's home ready to receive her for hospice care.  We were able to visit her, one at a time, while she was in the hospital. She could communicate but was weak and confused. She couldn't feed herself so we helped her eat what she could. We scrambled to clear a room for her. We needed a space for a hospital bed. We thought she might be able to use a wheelchair so we asked for one to be delivered. As it turned out we never used it because we were unable to transfer her safely from her bed to the chair--in the end, she was too weak to help us move her, so we ended up sending it back. 

Hospice care through Medicare and Kaiser covered the cost of all the equipment we needed, but we still needed to find adult diapers, bed pads, wipes and gloves to change her. Because of Covid, medical supply stores had closed so we ended up driving quite a distance to find a store that had what we needed. We were focused on taking care of the logistics but we were also terrified and filled with grief. She was transported home on a Friday, and the hospice nurse came the next day to help us get oriented. There was a whole medication packet. We had to learn how to change her diaper, how to avoid bed sores, how to medicate her for seizures and pain. In the first days of hospice care, she was still able to talk but mostly she responded to questions--she no longer really volunteered anything or initiated conversation. We did tell her what her diagnosis was but she never really acknowledged it. We knew that she knew, but her ability to communicate deteriorated day by day, and she ate almost nothing. The hospice nurse told us she thought it would a matter of two or three weeks. Within a week she was unable to eat or drink, and her communication was in whispers we could hardly understand. We were able to say that we loved each other but soon even that was taken away from us. She started having seizures and agitation, so we gave her the meds the hospice had provided: halidol at first, then ativan for the seizures, morphine for pain. She retreated to a medicated state in which she was mostly asleep and only occasionally surfaced to squeeze our hand or smile. This was hard to see, but we were reminded that our goal was to make her as comfortable as possible since there was no hope of improvement or a cure. We could tell she could hear us but she said almost nothing. We learned how to change her, to keep her clean. The hospice team sent a wonderful home health aide who gave her baths in bed and washed her hair. The nurses came every other day to check on her and show us how to care for her in ways that minimized discomfort. Hospice is all about helping a person die with dignity and the least pain and discomfort possible. It was so hard when we had to stop giving her food or water because she would choke on it. She lost weight visibly yet her body continued to use her reserves to continue her life even as she sank deeper into a state of unconsciousness. Finally her breathing started to change, and she had apnea---periods where she didn't breathe at all. The last night, she began to struggle with her breathing and it became shallow and labored. Finally she drew her last breaths and slipped away from us. We had all said goodbye days before but the human body is persistent.

My brother flew in from the East Coast, and my daughter was also able to be with us for four days. Friends visited, sent cards and flowers, offered help and support. Each day was structured around her medication and changing schedule. We were so grateful that she did not suffer and that her last days were peaceful. The process was at once extraordinarily long and very short. From the time we took her to the ER until she left us, only three weeks went by.   Everyone said they were glad that she was able to leave surrounded by her children and grandchildren, and we are also glad that could be so.  We will face the aftermath together but just right now, we are desolate.

Misterios de Lisboa

 I had never seen anything by prolific Chilean director Raúl Ruiz so I watched Misterios de Lisboa, a four and a half hour film based on a nineteenth-century Portuguese novel. It is set during the time of Napoleon and is a chain of stories about paternity, love and betrayal among the nobility. A good chunk of the dialogue was in French, which felt transparent compared to my very limited understanding of the Portuguese. Each segment was connected to the next by a character whose story was told as a flashback; indeed, the entire film is a series of acts of storytelling. Since I have been binge-watching series, it didn't feel like a long movie but like a short series. All of the men were very beautiful. Léa Seydoux has an appearance as a minor character. I should try to hunt down his film based on Proust's Le temps retrouvé.

Diego Rivera mural at SFMOMA

 The huge Diego Rivera mural that has been at City College for all these years has been moved to the SFMOMA for three years. It's free to go and see it and I plan to go soon. Meanwhile, I watched a lecture by Will Maynez about its history and conservation, and discovered this web site which has keys to explanations of the figures on each of its panels, and links to a lot of other information, including curriculum plans and a very recent NBC documentary about the process of moving this massive piece of art. Because of the pandemic I missed the huge Frida Kahlo show that was held at the De Young Museum last year--broke my heart!--but apparently a big Rivera painting show is slated for SFMOMA next year.  

Here is a similar talk Will Maynez did for the SF Public Library just prior to this project of conservatorship and moving of the mural:

Uncle Vanya

 Theater class was on Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. My mother is a fan of this Russian production. I find Checkhov grim and sad despite all the dark humor.

Turn: Washington's Spies

I just finished season four (the last season) of a show that was on AMC and is now on Netflix, Turn: Washington's Spies. It's about real events in the Revolutionary War, and a real spy ring that gathered intelligence for the Continental Army under George Washington. As detailed in this blog, the show does take liberties with events and characters--one of the spies is a woman names Anna Strong who is depicted as having been the lover of Abraham Woodhull, her childhood friend and one of the spies, and later she is the love interest of the British Major in charge of the town Setauket on Long Island. In real life, she was happily married and the mother of children, and not involved in any romances while she carried out her spying activities. And the ranger captain Simcoe, who is portrayed as a sociopath, was apparently not at all the bloodthirsty villain he is in the series. The true storyline that culminates in the events of season three is the story of Benedict Arnold's treachery in collaboration with British spymaster John André, who was captured and hanged when he was caught aiding Arnold's defection.

I've been enjoying the show and this list of topics on the spycurious blog provide lots of info on costumes as well as historical context.

Shang Chi and the Ten Rings

My Asian/Asian-American cinema meet-up group decided to see Shang Chi and the Ten Rings at the theater with dinner to follow. It was a change from the zoom meetings we'd been having for the past year. I only knew two of the eight people who showed up, and sat at the dinner table with them and another person they knew while the other four shared a different table. We went to a fancy udon restaurant in Japantown; I'm not the biggest fan of udon but my dish was good and I enjoyed the experience. I was able to take the bus back from Geary and Fillmore, just a block away, so it all worked out well. Favorite parts of the movie: the relationship with Akwafina's character Katie and our hero, and the whole fight sequence on the 1 California bus. Someone is going to make a video about how true the bus's route was. I wish I could go back and just watch to see if they respected the geography of the city. I also enjoyed Meng'er Zhang as Shang Chi's sister with the "bad bitch bob."

This is just the first half of the fight, before the guy with the sword-arm shows up and it turns into a bus scene from Speed:

  

I became extremely fond of Simu Liu from Kim's Convenience, and I am really enjoying seeing him be interviewed with the cast for the film:

Ibsen's Ghosts

For theater class we are reading Ibsen's 1881 play Ghosts, a terrible story of social hypocrisy, secrets and lies. A wife once tried to flee her philandering husband but was persuaded to return by a pastor in the name of duty. From that decision stems a life of lies. She calls herself a coward for not having the courage to leave or to ever tell her son of his father's behavior. Off stage we have the completion of an orphanage in the husband's name. The pastor, back to be her business partner in this venture, persuades her not to insure it because this might bring him criticism. She also had helped cover up her husband's illegitimate child, Regine, whose mother was a maid in the household who then left to marry a local carpenter. Now her son Oswald has returned, and is trying to seduce his half-sister Regine. He reveals his illness, probably syphilis, and it is suggested that he inherited from his father (medically this would only have been possible if the father infected the mother who passed it on to her baby). The pastor accidentally burns down the orphanage building but gets the carpenter to agree to cover it up. In the end Oswald tells his mother that he wants a woman--if not Regine, then her--to help him end his life when his illness becomes too debilitating. The end of the play is left open on the question of whether or not his mother will carry out his wish for euthanasia. The action of the play is all dialogue of revelations and choices made in the name of morality but clearly vitiated by double standards and hypocrisy. The sins of the father are visited on the child, the ghosts of rigid beliefs return even after people sacrifice happiness in the name of duty. The play scandalized in its day, and our discussion about choices for staging the production were about how to convey the rhythm of Ibsen's series of revelations.

L'Agence

The English title for the French show L'Agence is "Parisian Agency: Exclusive Properties." It's a reality TV show about a family that deals in super-luxurious real estate from Paris. They live in an Art Deco house that belonged to André Malraux. Olivier and Sandrine Kretz have four sons; the youngest is still in school but the other three all work for the family business from home. We get to see the interiors of some fabulous properties, ranging from a castle outside Paris to a variety of swanky apartments with terraces, views of "monuments" like the Eiffel Tower, and dressing rooms as big as the bedroom, called "le dressing." We meet some of their clients, but also get to see them hold a wedding for son Martin and Eve the mother of their two children, a surprise 60th birthday party for Olivier, a kite-surfing expedition, and their reactions to the news the Martin and Eve have decided to go live for a year in Lisbon so that Eve can pursue a project as an architect. The show is as much about the family itself as about their business. I enjoyed the guided tours of the luxury homes, and hearing French. It remains to be seen if they will film another season, but I gather the show was a hit in France.

Succession

 I just finished watching Succession. It was grim and funny.  One of the funniest scenes is about the butter. My family was in the restaurant business and this is, in fact, a version of something I heard:

and then there is cousin Greg:

Sweet Magnolias

Just watched the first season of Sweet Magnolias on Netflix, a small-town romance based on the novels of prolific romance author Sherryl Woods. Three best friends, their marriages, children, romance and small-town shenanigans. Complete fluff but competently executed with a cliff-hanger season ending. I like the young actors. The principal cast includes a lot of talent; the actress who plays Dana Sue was the star of Drop Dead Diva, a show I enjoyed years ago. I don't know what Lifetime or Hallmarks shows are like, but this had a little bit of a Gilmore Girls vibe.

The Merchant of Venice

 In the next installment of this directing for the theater course with Carey Perloff, we read The Merchant of Venice. She directed a production in Canada with a woman (Seana McKenna) cast as Shylock, so today she told us about how she researched the play, made her casting choices, and how the language of the play was informed by that choice. Unfortunately I couldn't find any film clips of that show, but this interview with Jeremy Irons, Al Pacino and director Michael Radford talks about their process for the movie version with Charlie Rose. Jeremy Irons is very invested in denying the homo-eroticism of the Antonio-Bassanio relationship. Al Pacino is very eloquent on his process.

 

La cocinera de Castamar

La cocinera de Castamar is sort of Upstairs Downstairs meets Bridgerton in Bourbon Spain under Felipe V. Not as good as Versailles. Overall it is charming, but there are lots of little issues of plausibility or continuity that kept me from really enjoying it. The romance between the Duque de Castamar and his cocinera doesn't generate a lot of heat, in part because she mostly has to stay in the kitchen so we're not given a lot of interactions between the two to explain how he is so smitten with her that he is ready to renounce his wealth and titles.  He's supposed to be the king's right-hand man but he spends a lot of time in his carriage going back and forth to court. When he finds out that his mayordomo has been spying on him for the queen, he just lets it slide. The grand estate is an easy walk to a tavern filled with ruffians so that the conniving maid Beatriz can skip out of work and conspire with El Zurdo without any consequences at work. When the evil marqués outs the gay characters, he does it with hand-drawn folletos that must have been printed somehow, but how so fast? How did various characters conceal pistols until the opportune moment?  How did the kitchen prepare food for the staff as well as for the masters?  People recover from their wounds in no time at all. Apparently a little soup with sherry is just the trick to stop a miscarriage. Any time we see a shot of the courtyard that same guy is feeding the chickens. The ending was hasty. In spite of these crabby complaints, I did enjoy the Spanish (the dub is horrific) and watched the whole thing. The series is based on a novel that was a bestseller, and has been a great success in Spain.

The White Lotus

 I wasn't sure if I wanted to watch   The White Lotus, a show about people behaving badly, but it's a project by Mike White, who also did the series Enlightened with Laura Dern that I thought was so good because it was so excruciatingly real in its depiction of people's self-delusion. The White Lotus turned out to be very similar in the way it showed how each character played out a role as they seemed to believe themselves to be good people, even as they also did or said despicable things. The hotel guests are treated as if their every whim is to be indulged, and none of them displays any kind of self-awareness around their position in this transaction.  The staff need the jobs and are correspondingly willing to be exploited: a woman who is about to give birth  goes into labor but doesn't want to leave her first day on the job even after her water breaks; the young Hawaiian man, Kai, knows his family was ripped off when the land was taken for the hotel but he needs a job and allows himself to be persuaded to steal as a kind of pseudo-reparations act; the spa director Belinda knows the score about rich white ladies but still allows herself to be deluded into thinking that THIS one is going to invest in her business instead of just using her as an emotional crutch; general manager Armond is seething with rage but is in charge of making sure everyone who works for him wears their kabuki mask, until his double-booking mistake turns into a feud with the worst entitled man-boy and he falls off the wagon. Paula, the guest of the Mossbacher family and the only person of color among the guests, does see the colonialist dimension but isn't able to free herself from her role as rich girl's friend. Her act of rebellion in urging Kai to steal from the family, goes horribly wrong and she does nothing to help him. This NPR review by Linda Holmes does a great job of laying out how each of the characters--and especially Rachel, Tanya, and Paula-- comes under the show's scrutiny. Tiny acts of freedom are swallowed up by a system that overwhelms. Rachel knows Shane is horrible but she chooses to stay with him, to be the trophy wife and avoid the risks of trying to live up to her own ideals; Tanya makes a connection with Greg because each of them is honest about their biggest defect--she's crazy and he's dying, but she also leaves Belinda high and dry after claiming she was going to invest in her business; Paula, the guest of the Mossbacher family, does see the colonialist dimension but isn't able to free herself from her role as rich girl's friend. Her act of rebellion in urging Kai to steal from the family, goes horribly wrong and she does nothing to help him. An act of rebellion that will probably go nowhere is when the 16-year old Quinn runs away before boarding the plane in a kind of reverse Home Alone move. He has no money, no phone, and has been shown to be oblivious to his own privilege even as he suffers the bullying of his awful older sister Olivia. We want him to extricate himself from his screwed-up family but he's probably going to get his new buddies in trouble if he turns to them for help. The acting, music,  and costumes were terrific. Natasha Rothwell, whom I'd seen in Issa Rae's show Insecure, is great. It has apparently been renewed for a second season that will be somewhere other than Hawaii.

Valeria soundtrack: Rigoberta Bandini

The Spanish series Valeria's second season is up on Netflix. I watched the first one some time last year, but watched it again because I had forgotten most of it. It's romance fluff set in Madrid with great costumes and production design. It makes liberal use of a soundtrack of both English and Spanish songs to comment on the action. The end of the second season featured a song by the catalana artist Rigoberta Bandini, "Perra," that really caught my attention. It turns out that they had used another of her songs as well, "In Spain We Call It Soledad." Immediate flechazo, I had to go look for her songs on Spotify and Youtube. She has only put out singles so far, not an album yet, but that may be because she is very busy as a writer/voiceover actor/director all-around-creative-person. I sent the songs to my daughter and it turns out she had already heard them, and recommended her videos to me as well.

Here's a mini-concert:

 

The song "Perra" is great, and so is the video:

The Five Thousand and One Nights by Penelope Lively

The Five Thousand and One Nights by Penelope Lively is a book of short stories I read today on BART and the 38R Geary bus. Reading on that bus is serious business because the street from Union Square to Van Ness is cratered and the bus shakes as if it's going to fall apart. Lively is really good with a character in a situation and a place: a control freak woman and her husband stop to pick up a hitchhiker in the rain and it all goes horribly wrong; the mom from hell writes a Christmas letter and reveals all the awful ways she torments and humiliates her entire family; old loves get reacquainted at a wedding; a slimy creep hits on his ex-wife and she puts him in his place; a woman works the night shift and takes care of her family during the day, and a last minute school project blows her careful juggling act all to hell; after five thousand nights, Scheherazade and the Sultan have a fiction telling contest where she's telling plots of British women's writers and he's narrating action adventure stories and each of them is bored by the other. She's very efficient and often quite funny. I think I'd like to read her memoirs.

Electra by Sophocles

 I'm sitting in on a course on directing for the theater that my mother is taking through the Fromm Institute, a continuing education outfit in SF. The teacher is a Carey Perloff, writer, director and former artistic director at the American Conservatory Theater in SF from 1992 to 2018 (ACT); she has worked in Canada, France, Finland, Great Britain as well as the U.S. She staged plays by Pinter, Stoppard and did the first staging of Angels in America outside New York, as well as directing a huge number of plays, ancient and modern, at ACT and elsewhere. 

The class is on zoom, which is why I can attend, and has been a marvelous introduction to the work and process of directing a play. Last week was an intense overview of that process, and this week we read Sophocles' Electra and learned about ancient Greek theater production and the kinds of artistic choices a contemporary director might make in staging the play. Next week we'll talk about The Merchant of Venice, which I know I read years ago, so I'll have a chance to read it again. She is a passionate and effective lecturer. I'm thrilled to be able to sit in on this course.

Here's a very brief preview clip of the ACT production of Electra, with Olympia Dukakis as the leader of the Chorus:

 

And here is a clip of Carey Perloff explaining the play:  

I admire her accomplishments as the artistic director of ACT while being a mother of two small children. She came to the company when it was almost bankrupt, homeless after the 1989 earthquake, and in need of a complete overhaul. In her first seasons her productions aroused opposition: the Duchess of Malfi was too violent and obscene; Dario Fo's play made the Catholic Church mad; people didn't like her productions of classical Greek theater; her color-blind casting got some people riled up. She was surprised at how conservative the theater audience was. As a young woman, she didn't enjoy automatic support. She had to do incredible fund-raising. She was successful and rebuilt ACT. 

Across the Great Divide

 Kate Wolf's  "Across the Great Divide" is a song that used to be the theme music for a radio show back in the eighties, probably on KPFA when I was living in Berkeley. I truly love her voice.

American Factory

A 2019 documentary film that was awarded an Oscar, in 2020, American Factory tells about the re-opening of an automotive glass plant in Dayton, Ohio under Chinese ownership. When the plant closed, thousands of workers lost their jobs. The coming of a Chinese investor to open Fuyao Glass America was seen as an opportunity to return to meaningful work for many of the laid-off workers. But they were paid less than half of what they had been making before, and safety standards were not observed. When unionization efforts began, the company paid a million dollars to a "union avoidance" consulting firm, fired pro-union employees, and forced workers to attend multiple anti-union sessions. The film is good at following people around as they work, participate in corporate meetings and events, and tell us about what the jobs mean to them; the approach is very much of the "show, don't tell" version of documentary film-making. Some interviews with Chinese supervisors are included, but most of the information about working conditions in China is presented briefly without much context for their struggles, and next to nothing is said about their status as Chinese workers in the U.S.--they were apparently paid half of what their American co-workers were making. The Chinese managers speak openly about how American workers are slow, and talk about trying to manage them as if they are recalcitrant animals. To be fair, there are Americans--a lawyer, anti-union consultants, and a manager--who take the same stance. The film records a nationalistic rhetoric at times, but the tactics employed by the owners and management are the same as in any American-owned company.   It's a fairly polite movie given its topic, but it's possible to read between the lines about the need for global solidarity in the face of transnational capitalism. Barack and Michelle Obama's Netflix production company supported the film. The film is not available legally in China, but has been seen by enough people to spark vigorous conversations on social media about working conditions in both countries.

Word of Honor

 Just finished watching 36 episodes of Word of Honor, a Chinese drama that was extremely popular this spring. It's part of the wuxia genre, and also a BL romance that managed to get past the censors. So much of it went over my head, such as the use of poetry in the dialogue, but it had a lot of complex characters in the secondary characters as well as the OTP. This review (in two parts) gives some background on the production and the genre. There's so much that the translations cannot even begin to convey. Here's an explanation of the multiple meanings of the characters' names:

What We Wore: An Offbeat Social History of Women's Clothing, 1950-1980

 Ellen Melinkoff is the author of What We Wore: An Offbeat Social History of Women's Clothing, 1950-1980, published in 1984.  This was the perfect book for reading on BART, going to and from my mother's place in SF. She recounts in detail the way women in the U.S. dressed in those three decades: what we wore, how the fashion industry both dictated trends and responded to women's consumption patterns. She notes the styles, the fabrics, the undergarments and accessories worn by different groups of women, talks about the style icons that set the trends (like Jackie Kennedy or Audrey Hepburn), and the important role of peer influence, and changing relations to gender roles. The book covers the fifties, sixties and seventies but doesn't get to the trends of the eighties except to note the wider range of choices. I was too young for the fifties but we still have a few photos of my mother wearing the knock-off Chanel suit she sewed for herself, with white gloves and a Jackie Kennedy pillbox hat. She sewed a lot of our clothes when we were young, but as soon as our family could afford it she started buying our wardrobes in stores.  I was in Junior High in the early seventies when we were not allowed to wear pants to school until I was in ninth grade. I don't remember having to kneel on the floor so the length of my skirt could be checked, but I heard stories about it. When we were finally allowed to wear pants to school, we would only do it if our friends were doing it too. I remember a favorite skirt that was blue and green houndstooth, which I wore with a grey sweatshirt. I also remember a brown pleather jumper that was a favorite, and a suede poncho with a zipper and embroidered flowers that was a very special item. In high school, in the mid-seventies, we could wear pants but only hippies wore jeans and were regarded with scorn by the majority; we wore color coordinated outfits, mini-skirts with matching underwear, pastel sweaters. There were micro-trends: a particular long hooded cardigan sweater in three different colors was the dominant fashion item one season. I remember wearing raspberry-colored  hotpants that were in a mini overall style. I think I had suede boots with fringe that I wore with them. We also wore ridiculous wooden platform shoes. I had a pair that were denim with rhinestones on them. When I went off to college I found that my hip urban high school wardrobe (elephant pants and big platform shoes) did not fit in either with the sorority preppie styles or the more relaxed, denim-oriented campus style. I now wore cords, painters' pants, an Indian-print wrap-around skirt. We shopped in thrift stores. I started grad school in 1980 and observed the fashion trends from the sidelines because I didn't have the money for new clothes but also didn't really need a wardrobe for work that was any different from student fashions because I was a teaching assistant and rode my bike or walked everywhere; comfort was all. I never wore make-up. I remember realizing that I was unfit for a corporate job because I would not be able to tolerate wearing pantyhose. When it was finally time to apply for a tenure-track position in the late eighties, I wore a plaid blazer over a black pencil skirt that were probably hand-me-downs from my mother. I remember struggling with how I was supposed to dress once I got the professor job. I made a vow that I would not wear anything with a stain or that was ripped. Whatever I wore was too California for my new Minnesota gig, and I had to invest in  winter coats, boots and all the necessary gloves and mittens for my new climate. The last chapter of the book is an overview of the college issues of various fashion magazines, which we studied like a textbook.

I was reminded of the Mad Style archive of essays by Tom and Lorenzo on the costume design for Mad Men. I found this great YouTube channel of an LA vintage store entrepreneur, Doris Raymond called The Way We Wore, and I plan to explore it at my leisure.

Here's a YouTube essay on color in the fifties from The Ultimate Fashion History channel, another find, in which we learn about "saturated pastels" and other color palettes of the mid-century:

My Man Godfrey

 Criterion is having a Carole Lombard special this month, so I decided to watch My Man Godfrey (1936). I'd heard the title often but knew nothing about the film. Billed as a "screwball comedy," it's a gently satirical farce that has something to say about class during the Depression. William Powell plays Godfrey, a character whom we first meet as a hobo living in a dump but who turns out to be a Boston Brahmin fallen on hard times. Carole Lombard is the air-headed socialite who gives him a job as the family butler and then falls for him. Her wacky family puts Godfrey through his paces as he does his best to be a good butler in the face of the mom's alcoholic ditziness, the dad's brusque straight-man struggles to be heard, and the older sister's sinister plots to get Godfrey fired because he has stood up to her shenanigans. A favorite character is the "protégé" Carlo, the musician hanger-on who munches on hors d'oeuvres, strikes poses against the window, and obediently acts like an ape when commanded by his lady boss. Godfrey is sexually harassed by Irene who acts like a spoiled child throughout. We're supposed to find her charming but I didn't like how stupid she is made out to be. Four out of five stars for the annoyance factor. The costumes are splendid, the script and acting are great--it's a lot of fun, but I can't put it among my favorites because of how infantile Irene is. Carole Lombard had been briefly married to Powell before the movie was made; he apparently insisted that they cast her when he was offered the role. She died in a plane crash along with her mother and her husband Clark Gable's best friend while returning from a war bonds tour.

Podcast: The Plot Thickens (TMC) season two

The TMC channel has a podcast called The Plot Thickens. The first series of episodes was about director Peter Bogdanavich, a director who was very famous but whose work I've never seen.  He is also a writer and film historian. A lot of the episodes used taped conversations with him, and material from taped interviews he did with a variety of famous directors. What emerges is a portrait  that is very indulgent of his egotism and bad behavior with women. The second series of episodes is called The Devil's Candy, and is an in-depth story about the making of the film The Bonfire of the Vanities by Brian DePalma. A film critic, Judie Salamon, was given the opportunity to shadow the cast and crew for a year in order to write a book about the film-making process. She revisits her taped interviews and book notes for the podcast, and includes some follow-up material. It covers the process from green-lighting the picture through casting, location scouting, costume design, extras wrangling, how to shoot a five-minute tracking shot with a Steadycam, star insecurities and behavior (Tom Hanks is apparently a universally beloved human being), the post-production process, responses from critics and fans. The source material, the novel, is satirical and mean-spirited as well as entertaining. I remember reading the book and mostly being struck by how well it conveyed oral New York speech.