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.