Trying to grind my way out of a pity party. Let me think of something good: oh, yeah, I'm successfully transferring auto-payments from one bank account to another! This feels like a big accomplishment in my uneventful life. I used to pay phone, PG&E, and rent from my old MN account while AmEx is paid from my Berkeley account. Since almost all of my autopay transactions for streaming services or charitable donations are on that AmEx card, and I've been doing almost all of my purchases there, I'm able to track my spending with my statement. My SSDI deposits have been going to the old account, and that was how I paid my rent. But all my retirement income is going to the new account, and it seemed silly to have these two things to keep track of. I hesitated to make these changes for so long because I was almost superstitiously afraid to try to change that SSDI deposit, in case something went wrong. 

It did take a few false starts because I started out using the wrong account number for the new account. Once I figured out what the correct number was (involving just a few hours of online research and phone calls) I was able to get the changes to work  properly. Today I saw that my rent was paid from the new account-yay! This means that I should have no more business transactions with the MN account by the end of March, and that my SSDI should also be moved by April. Once that is confirmed, I can close out the MN account and shift the balances over to CA. I'll still have a credit card there but I don't have to use it.

All of this was incredibly tedious to set up but it needed to be done. I'm grateful I can afford any of these things. I just listened to a podcast about what's going on in Texas after the freeze, and it's absolutely dire: folks with burst pipes that have ruined their homes, sleeping on a bus so they don't freeze,dealing with the aftermath of Covid, working three jobs to take care of their kids. I'm so fortunate.

I've been living in this place for five years now, and for the most part it has been good, up until it got sold to an absentee landlord and a management company that's an hour away by car. Yes, I have neighbors who screw up the garbage, don't clean up their dog crap, and make too much noise. But I looked at rental ads and was overcome by how dreary and expensive everything is. To get the kind of place I used to have in MN would cost me at least $4000 a month. To get a better one-bedroom would cost me at least $500 more a month and even that would not be for anything special.  I really hate the trend in layouts that have the kitchen in the living room, which is what so much new construction has.  I may have a shabby place, but at least the kitchen-dining area is separated from the living room by a wall. I may never close the door-screen, but it's there. If I ever want to get a better place, it would have to be a shared apartment, and I don't want to have to share. 

I wish my mom would talk about a back-up plan: if she isn't able to live alone any more, we could pool our resources and rent a two-bedroom apartment. She could sell her place. I could pay our shared expenses and do the cleaning; she could do the cooking. We'd each have to be able to close the door on a bedroom that had room for seating so we could have privacy and quiet while streaming or watching. It would be hard, but we could make it work. I think I would be able to tolerate a lot if we were in it together.

So, the noisy road work that has been going on for the last two weeks should be done this week, at least that is what I hope. They dug yet another trench this morning, and were out there yukking it up on their lunch break. Now we're back to grinding and whining machinery. It has made being stuck at home that much harder.

Funeral Parade of Roses

Watched Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) directed by Toshio Matsumoto for Monday's LGBTQ+ film group. I found a great discussion in this episode of The Magic Lantern podcast.

Mentioned in the podcast: 

-the film's first title card is a quote from Baudelaire;

-Kubrick cited this film as an influence on Clockwork Orange;

-Peter, the actor who plays Eddie, played the role of the Fool in Kurosawa's Ran;

-roses appear throughout. Bara means rose, but is also an epithet for a gay man that has been reclaimed, and is now a shorthand term for a type of gay manga.

-the eyelashes!

-the interviewees resist collapsing identity into the interviewer's narrow terms. We all wish there were more to the interviews;

-"gay bars have changed"  

-drugs, performance art, protests, riots, art, film-making, all in Shinjuku;

-street scenes, shot from rooftops and street-level, including some performance pieces, and Eddie and friends presenting as women and encountering harassment and fights with girl gangsters;

-a long flashback within a long flashback, the narrative circles back on itself a couple of times;

-Oedipus inverted;

-"All definitions of cinema are erased. All the doors are now open."

-gentle caricature of the group of artsy kids;

-Eddie putting on her make-up, such a great scene! but echoes the scene when she put on lipstick and was kissing the mirror, and was attacked by her mother;

-"dangerous deviant" or gay kid as killer is subsumed by the Oedipus plot--or is it?;

-Oedipus's crime was pride. What is Eddie's? Yes, she killed, but is she being punished for being gay?

-Leda's suicide, laying herself out as a bride;

-Gonda discovers the photo and kills himself;

-absurd cut to movie critic: "Sayonara, sayonara, sayonara!"

-it's a full-body film!

 

 

The White Tiger

Up for discussion tonight: The White Tiger (dir. Ramin Bahrani-2021). It's based on the 2008 novel by Aravind Adiga (which won the 40th Man Booker Prize), and the director, Iranian-American Ramin Bahrani, is a good friend of Adiga. It turns out that I have read his second novel, Last Man in Tower, recently--it is an equally gripping and dark (and darkly humorous) examination of Indian society through the story of real estate development.

The film's narrative is structured by the device of the protagonist, Balram (played by Adarsh Gourav), writing a letter to the visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, telling in voice-over how he came to be a successful entrepreneur despite his origins in an impoverished family from a small village. This works to explain things to the viewer as well, thus incorporating the outsider's view into the story. Balram says the future of India is with China instead of "the white man."

 Promised a scholarship as a boy when he showed his ability to read in English, he was forced out of school into work at a tea shop by his grandmother. Desperate to escape the fate of being controlled by his family, he convinces her to give him money to learn to drive so he can become the "second driver" for the village landlord, the Stork. We see how the landlord reinforces his extortionate collection of villagers' earnings with brutality and insults; his son the Mongoose is his thuggish strongman. His American-educated son is back in India with his NRI wife Pinky (Priyanka Chopra). Balram fast-talks his way into the job which entails cleaning the mansion as well as being on call for driving. But he has a uniform and sends money back to his family, as he'd promised. At first he sees loyalty and hustle as the path to getting ahead, but then he gets rid of the first driver by threatening to reveal that he's secretly a Muslim. His view of the social relations of Indian servants is that of the rooster coop: the rooster can see the fate of his fellows but doesn't rebel.   Once he realizes that he will never be able to break out of his servitude, he begins to cheat and skim, like everyone else. Balram is willing to use dirty means to make sure he is safe and can move up. Master and servant.

While Adosh and Pinky act as if they are willing to set aside some of the more brutish aspects of caste society, when Pinky hits a child while driving drunk, the family sets Balram up as the scapegoat, threatening his family if he doesn't go along and sign away his life. Even though they fix things so that Balram is not charged, they threaten him (and his family) if he were ever to talk. And when Balram's family send a child for him to take care of, and announce their plans to marry him off or else, he comes up with a plan. He kills Adosh and steals the money he had been toting around to bribe officials in a red bag, using it to move away with his nephew and to bribe his way to a monopoly for his chauffeur service. "What he does is monstrous, but you understand it" says Oliver Stone in an interview with the director.

The end of the film shows him taking care of a similar accident by paying off the family and giving work to their other son. The last shot is of his group of drivers staring back into the camera. What happens when tradition, caste, and a corrupt political class choke off dignity and ambition? The film shows the character's ruthlessness with cynicism.

Many reviews make the inevitable contrast with Slumdog Millionaire, and there are lots of comparisons to Parasite. 

Here's an interview with director Ramin Bahrani. I'd like to track down his other films.

All the President's Men

 After watching Alan J. Pakula's Klute (1971), I wanted to see the other two films in his "paranoia trilogy": The Parallax View (1974) and All The President's Men (1976).  After watching a documentary on Watergate itself, I found this great conversation with Woodward, Bernstein, and Robert Redford about how the ATPM came to be made; it turns out that Redford approached them even before the Watergate hearings, and before they had even written the book because he was fascinated about them as characters and about their process. His interest helped them write the book (1974), and his role as producer was key to getting the film made, just a few years after the events. Watching it today, it seems unbelievable that so much of the story came to light and that the institutions of investigation actually worked as well as they did.

BTS on MTV Unplugged

BTS did a five-song set on MTV Unplugged, way too short! I especially loved their cover of Coldplay's "Fix You." They started the set with Telepathy :

  

Blue and Grey

 

Life Goes On

Dynamite:

Bacurau

 I overcame my squeamishness enough to watch Bacurau before the Monday night Cinema Club chat group. I really didn't want to subject myself to nightmare fodder but I was also curious as to how one might understand this film in relations to the whole "antropofagía" discourse. I told our host that I'd talk a little about this for the group and I looked up some articles in Portuguese about it, because it is definitely in dialogue with it.  I am also fascinated by its use of music. 

The film  opens with a Caetano Veloso song, "Nao Identificado," performed by Gal Costa:

and ends with a song by Geraldo Vandré, "Requiem para Matranga":

I was disappointed in the discussion, or lack of discussion. I'm expecting too much of the group. I am glad I learned as much as I did by preparing for this session, but the gang was being stingy with their input.

Klute

I saw Klute in the mid '70s, (not when it came out in 1971 because I was still in junior high then) and found it disturbing and fascinating. Before this rewatch, I barely remembered any of it beyond Jane Fonda crying and dripping snot, and the sense that this went far beyond the usual portrayals of prostitution. 

I found it gripping, although not as viscerally compelling as the first time because I'm not the naive person I was then, and because the small laptop just doesn't do justice to the amazing cinematography that is such a powerful part of this film.

Gordon Willis' cinematography is so well described here by Mark Harris:

"Enveloping Bree in a blackness that always seems on the verge of devouring her completely, Willis makes her the constant center of our attention by implicitly threatening to obliterate her. In an early scene in which Bree opens up to Klute about her past, Willis fills the frame with Klute’s back, a mass of undifferentiated black that turns Bree into a small light in danger of being snuffed out by everything around her. Willis could transform Bree’s apartment from a comfortable place to nestle at night into a warren of ominous shadows. Unsparingly (but never misogynistically), he isolates Bree, cuts her in half, shrinks her—and the more he does, the more we lean in to the screen, determined to hold on to her, to try to see her."

I agree with those who think that the neo-noir detective thriller plot takes a backseat to the character study of Bree Daniel.  Klute was a big hit for director Alan J. Pakula. Jane Fonda won an Oscar, and Donald Sutherland is a great partner for her amazing performance. Roy Scheider is also perfect in his smaller role as a sleazy pimp, and Jean Stapleton is terrific in her scenes as Mr. Goldfarb's protective secretary. Round-up of interviews: here.

The score by Michael Small is very effective. The aura of paranoia and the moody score made me want to re-watch The Conversation.

The costume design by New Yorker Ann Roth is thoroughly analyzed by Amy Fine Collins, here in this short film on the Criterion site, and is also reviewed by Christopher Laverty, of the Clothes on Film blog :

The short film Klute in New York details the New York locations, from the seedy decaying Hell's Kitchen location of Bree's studio apartment to the skyscraper with views of the World Trade Center towers under construction.

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge

I watched my first Bollywood film yesterday, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge or DDLJ, for the Red Lantern group. Our host, who is from India, said it would be a good starter film if you'd never watched any Bollywood before, because it was one of the most popular movies from the nineties, having run continuously in a Mumbai movie theater for 25 years. Everyone knows the songs, almost everyone has seen the film, and it was a big boost to the career of one of its stars, Shah Rukh Khan, who went on to become one of India's most globally famous actors. The film's characters include NRI (non-resident Indians) or Indians residing abroad, and their conflicting relations to tradition.

Despite a few moments in which characters lament the constraints gender roles place on their lives, the movie strongly upholds the idea that women are the property of men and must be governed by their will.  Apparently, at the time the movie was made, the usual Bollywood trope was that the rebellious pair of lovers would elope, but this movie breaks with that trope by having the man (Raj) seek the woman's father's permission, going so far as to showing him leave when he does not get it. At the very last minute the father changes his mind and the daughter (Simran) has to run to catch the departing train with Raj hanging out the door--a scene that is supposed to read as romantic but that does nothing to contest patriarchal authority to dispose of women.

The opening sequences that introduce the two main characters contrast their gendered roles: she is reciting a poem in which she imagines her future lover, while he is playing sports, swimming, riding a motorcycle, literally racing an airplane as it takes off, just a ball of testosterone. 

Simran is played by the beautiful Kajol (who remains a big superstar as well0 and is a young woman who has grown up in London but whose family expects her to maintain her "Indianness." And she does, sort of, but the two daughters switch off the pop music when dad comes home and put on more acceptable music, with the mother's complicity. She begs to be allowed to travel around Europe on a Eurail pass with her girlfriends for a month, and the father agrees but the friends are a lot racier than she is. She is Westernized but still conservative and obedient to her father's dictate that she go back to India and marry a man she has never seen.

We're supposed to find Raj charming, but the first half of the movie shows him as a spoiled, disrespectful, lazy, sexual harasser whose idea of a joke is to let Simran believe he has raped her while she was drunk--and getting her forgiveness by saying "I'm not a scum, I'm Hindustani" and that respects her honor.

In the second half of the movie, when Simran's family goes back to India for her arranged marriage, our lovers have to hide their relationship as engagement and wedding preparations advance. Raj tries to ingratiate himself with the family in order to win Simran's father's approval. Simran wants to elope, her mother wants them to elope because she wants Simran to have the freedom she never had (her speech about this is a blunt moment when the film foregrounds its contradictions), but Raj is still holding out for a resolution that will allow their love match to also be accepted by the family. When the father finds out that they know each other already (from a photo of the two together that blows out a window and lands at his feet), he is enraged by Raj's duplicity. Simran's unpleasant fiancee and his gun-toting friends set upon Raj and beat him bloody, but Raj wins the fight against the gang in the most wacky fight scene I've ever seen in a movie. Maybe this fight follows Bollywood fight conventions, I couldn't say.

The film presents notions of Indianness from its opening sequence of the father feeding the pigeons in London while lamenting how he still feels foreign living there, in obedience to his role as provider. His goal has been to keep his family Indian, and he believes he has been successful with is obedient daughter. He is furious with Raj's behavior when Raj and his friends try to buy beer from his shop when he is closing up--and with good reason. Raj lies to him then grabs the beer and throws money at him while running away laughing. The father's fury is specifically about how Raj is a typical westernized Indian in his bad behavior. By contrast, Raj's wealthy father brags about the family tradition of  failing at school as they stand looking at family portraits in their mansion, and indulgently gives him a month's vacation before he is to start working at the family business because he wants his son to enjoy what he did not.

Later,  Raj wins Simran (after his horrible joke) when he says he knows how important honor is to an Indian woman and that he would never harm that. When the action returns to India there is a lot of discussion about Raj's family's relation to the homeland. The final fight scene is where Raj asserts his manhood and thereby proves to her father that he will love Simran the most, which is how he justifies his last-second change of heart when he gives his daughter to Raj. Ultimately the conflicts between the tradition of arranged marriage and the love match are resolved by the father's acceptance that Raj is enough of an Indian man to be acceptable.

****

In our discussion we talked about: the nineties as a period of globalization for India and the ways this film represented aspirations for an affluent class; how it promoted Stroh beer and a kind of mindless capitalism; gender expectations and how the film's version of NRI life was a kind of fantasy. 

Shinjuku Boys and Dream Girls

Following up on last night's discussion of Queer Japan, I watched the documentary Shinjuku Boys (1995, Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams) which presents the lives of  three FTM transgender people who work at a onabe host club in Shinjuku. It's a lovely film whose subjects speak candidly about their lives and work. Longinotto also directed Dream Girls, a documentary on the Takarazuka Revue School, an all-female musical theater company where women play both male and female roles.

Queer Japan

For another Meet-Up film discussion group, I watched the documentary film Queer Japan (dir. Graham Kolbeins 2019).

It gives very broad and rich survey of today's LGBTQ world in Japan, featuring interviews with at least three dozen people, representing a variety of experiences and identities.  It is somewhat less satisfying in terms of contextualizing the particularities of same-sex relations in Japan, or connecting today's queer practices to existing cross-dressing dramatic traditions like kabuki or takarazuka, or to the history of same-sex practices among samurai and monks, but I really enjoyed it and learned a lot.

Here's an interview with the director Kolbeins and producer Anne Isshi:

The Japanese language itself organizes gender through speech practices in a highly complex fashion, that is both dynamic and evolving. Negotiating the many subject pronouns and how they indicate nuances of gendered speech is a challenge to Japanese language-learners.  Gendered speech patterns exist on a spectrum from feminine extreme patterns to a masculine extreme, in  pronoun use, vocabulary, intonation, and sentence endings. These are not rigid rules for how all men and women should speak; instead they can be understood as situations and ideas about how men and women can speak, and be positioned in relation to ideas about gender (as well as age, degree of familiarity, formality, relative social status, etc).

Our group wrestled with the fact that the film is made from a Western perspective for a primarily non-Japanese audience, and most of us have relatively little experience with Japanese language and culture, so it is difficult to recognize how much we are missing. Since the film interviewed people about how they name their experiences and identities, we saw how some terms are adaptations of English terms, but when Japanese terms were used, we couldn't see from the subtitles what we were missing in translations. This article gives a thorough overview of Japanese gender and sexuality terms, and gives an idea of how they do and don't map onto foreign ideas.

Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles

 Yotam Ottolenghi (whose cooksbooks are as notable for their design as for their recipes) got invited to do an event at the Met for their Versailles show in 2018, and he recruited some amazing pastry chefs  (Dominique Ansel, Ghaya Oliveira, Dinara Kasko, Sam Bompas and Harry Parr, Janice Wong) to create elaborate displays and desserts.  The documentary Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles (directed by Laura Gabbert) gives us just a glimpse of the logistical challenges involved in realizing the ambitions of each chef: a pump for a "whirlpool of booze" that doesn't work; a batter that starts to curdle; wheeling the half-assembled displays from the kitchen to the galleries, setting off a fire alarm on the way. 

There's some attention to the role of Versailles as center of power and how it displayed to the world France's new technologies and aesthetics, but the film isn't interested in a corresponding inquiry into the role the New York culture industry plays with its gala events. The only tastings we get are of recipes Ottolenghi is testing at his home base in London. But the stories of how each team manages to pull off their culinary experiences are delightful.

The Dig

 The Dig is a movie about the excavations at Sutton Hoo, and a gentle period piece with Ralph Fiennes, Carey Mulligan, and Lily James. I listened to dozens of  episodes of the History of English podcast, complete with  recitations of Anglo-Saxon poetry, so it was fun to see the story about the dig that uncovered so much Anglo-Saxon material culture. 

Here's a documentary about the objects that are now in the British Museum:

Reading: Zadie Smith essays

Reading in progress: Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith. Seventeen essays are grouped in five sections: Reading, Being, Seeing (on film), Feeling, Remembering. I started reading the book straight through, but ended up jumping to the middle to read her essay on her writing process.

"That Crafty Feeling" is a lecture she gave when asked to speak "on some aspect of your craft" and it's funny as hell.  When I was working on my one and only book (not a novel), I was definitely in her "Micro Manager" category: endlessly rewriting the first chapter, finishing the last half of the book in a few months.

Himalaya: l'enfance d'un chef. (1999)

 Tonight for the Red Lantern cinema chat group, we will be talking about Himalaya, a film made by Eric Valli in Nepal in 1999.  The soundtrack, by Bruno Coulais, is wonderful.

Reading all the books: a project

I have so many unread books, I have run out of room for them. This was never a problem in my place in Minnesota where I had space for lots of bookshelves at home, and an entire office with floor-to-ceiling shelves for all my books for work. When I moved I got rid of almost all of them. It was a huge project; I sold as many as I could, donated more to graduate students, put a lot in the Little Free Library boxes near my house, and carted off the rest to Good Will. I only saved 9 boxes that I shipped to California when I moved.

Now I live in a small apartment with small bookshelves, and all of them are full. I've been using the library a lot, and I'm ruthless in giving away books as I read them; very few make the cut for permanent lodging.  Right now, in addition to the unread books on my shelves, there are at least 50 or more books stacked on my living room table.  I've decided to adopt a strict one-in, one-out policy I can't bring home any new books until I've read something from the book pile and returned it to one of the Little Free Library boxes that are the destinations of my daily walks. 

One in: just yesterday, I brought home is Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States (2014) by Felipe Fernández Armesto.
He's an engaging writer who is able to bring precise scholarship to big picture essays. I used some of his work in my classes, and I am sure I'll enjoy this book.

 One out: my most recent read, which I thoroughly enjoyed, is a memoir with recipes called Cakewalk by Kate Moses.

Before I return it to circulation, I want to choose one of her recipes to try. I don't have a mixer so my baking style is a little limited, but I'm sure I can make some of her brownies!

Next up: Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays.

Lucía

 Tonight for the Criterion Cinema Chat group, we will be discussion the 1968 Cuban film Lucía, directed by Humberto Solás.

Some ideas I hope can spark discussion: 

• How do the three segments work together, not just as separate stories? The struggle for freedom across 100 years, continuity in the name, a progression in female protagonism.
• Foundational fiction/national romance as a structuring trope of 19th century Latin American literature. Difference from 20th century novels where 3 women represent 3 different choices for the male subject because here we see the issue of women as (potential) protagonists. women are objects of struggle, the terrain of struggle but also becoming actors in the struggle, if still enmeshed in love/marriage plot.
• the scenes of violence and woman's action
•  first Lucia: rape/betrayal/revenge, warfare, ends with madwoman. Lucía is from the creole plantation-owning class, her lover is  the spy-betrayer. At stake are the categories of "Spaniard" vs "Cuban." She is not directly involved in the political struggle, although she has sympathy for the fate of the woman who is raped. The man she loves claims to be both Cuban and Spaniard and also to be outside politics, turns out to be already married and a spy who uses her, manipulating her spinster desire, to get to the hide-out of her brother and the mambises. Her revenge is to kill him in the town square. The interactions with the raped nun/betrayed novia: a split female subject.
  
• second Lucia: machine gun battles in the city, strike, ends with her pregnant, maybe suicidal. This Lucía is from a bourgeois family, with her frivolous bitter mother in the country home, choices of the conventional family vs. love; she leaves her class and family to be with the revolutionary. Goes to work in tobacco factory, takes part in the strike. Aldo and his friend represent the two options after Machado is thrown out. Aldo chooses to continue the struggle, as would many Cubans, against Batista (orgy). Alone and pregnant, whither the future? Here the woman is a participant although still not making the choices (with the machine guns), but will she survive? jump in the water?
  
• third Lucia:  national change linked to woman as citizen-worker. After the revolution, this Lucía is the peasant worker. Love and marriage consummated but now the man keeps her a prisoner, is like an anti-revolutionary gusano, interferes with the literacy campaign. The reading scene where she is encouraged to leave him. She refuses to obey, writes "I am not a slave," goes to work, fights back. All the women unite to prevent the husband from attacking her. The futile struggle at the end.
• child at the end, a revolutionary consciousness from the future? also hokey, jarring.
  

cinema chat groups

I joined the conversation of the cinema discussion group last night about King of Peking (2017), a film made by Sam Voutas in China. He's Australian but spent some formative years in China, and made a Chinese-language film set in Beijing of the '90s.  We had also been talking about the Iranian-American director Ana Lily Amirpour's film A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and the way film's are positioned in relation to a country and its film-making. What difference does it make to how a film is experienced when we locate it as "Iranian" or "Chinese"? Does it make sense to talk about Amirpour's film as a diaspora (or "post diaspora") film? What does King of Peking "get right" about a Beijing that exists mostly in memory? This conversation is certainly relevant to the Cuban films we're watching for the Criterion Chat group. I will watch Lucia this weekend for our Monday discussion.

While I was poking around looking for reviews, I found this list of "100 films to watch to help you understand China"  from the site radiichina. 

This could be a project!

 

Berkeley Bowl pilgrimages

In the last year of pandemic isolation, my one and only excursion in contact with other people has been my weekly grocery shopping excursion to Berkeley Bowl, aka The Temple of Produce. It has been here since 1977, when I was an undergraduate, and was originally in a former bowling alley, hence the name. You can get everything there, but the main attraction is the huge produce section which has just about every variety of fruit and vegetable you can imagine.

 I live walking distance away, but for the past several months my sister has been driving over from Daly City. We get to see each other, and and I don't have to schlep heavy bags back from the store now that I don't have a car any more. 

I feel comfortable shopping there because they are observing the most sensible hygiene and social distancing measures: they only let a certain amount of people into the store at a time; they wipe down the carts between use; there are markings on the floor to regulate how people line up to check out so that everyone stays a good distance away from each other; masks are mandatory and for a long time they provided gloves at the entrance. If we bring our own bags, we put our stuff into the cart and take it outside to bag on tables, to prevent cross-contamination and bottlenecks.  In the early months, there were often long lines (although they moved quickly) to get in, but we haven't had to wait in a line for months now. I can get almost everything I need there. The only thing  haven't been able to find lately is compact flourescent lightbulbs so I'll have to go to Ace Hardware for those.

Here's a demo of a recipe for lemonade using the shiso leaf, from the wonderful Berkeley Bowl Cookbook:

hey

Took the blog off private, just to see what it feels like. I'm not sure I'll be using it the way I did before, but rereading my posts is giving me lots of feelings and sparking curiosity: where did everybody go? all those bloggers I used to read regularly who also stopped blogging in the last few years--did we all end up on Twitter? who has a podcast? a YouTube channel? did everyone else delete Facebook the way I did? Time for a little exploration.

A question: why does my neighbor down the street blast music from speakers on his porch? Last night, I finally walked down the block and asked him to turn it down, and he apologized and turned it down, but here he is back on it again today.

I have been rewatching seasons 1-2 of Mozart in the Jungle because I want to watch seasons 3-4, and I needed to remember what happened. I'm enjoying it again. It makes me want to go to New York, Mexico City, Havana...and to listen to all the music they feature. I also want to finish it and cancel my Amazon Prime subscription before the free trial is over because I'm trying to be principled and boycott Amazon although I rejoined it to get some BTS-related deal or other.