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.