Watched the first four episodes of a science fiction series, Severance, on Apple TV+, now I have to wait for the rest! Great production design, with a palette of blues, greens, grey and white for the corporate setting. What if you could have a procedure that would sever your memories such that you couldn't remember what you did at work, and your work self couldn't remember life on the outside? The corporation is mysterious and authoritarian, work is hell, and there is no escape. A great cast includes Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, Christopher Walken and stars Adam Scott. Scott is very famous for a whole load of movies and shows I have never seen with the exception of Big Little Lies. Maybe one of these days I'll watch Parks and Rec.
After finishing the last episode of Severance, we rolled into Swan Song, a film by Irish director Benjamin Cleary, who won an Oscar for his short film The Stutterer, starring two of the leads of Moonlight: Naomie Harris and Mahershala Ali. Terrific performances in a science fiction story about making a clone to save your family from grieving your death. The details of wearable tech and driverless cars, the Uniqlo wardrobe, the Vancouver coastal setting, lovely cinematography, all enhanced the performances, even if the story set aside the moral and ethical quandaries to focus on the sentimental. The closing song was Frank Ocean's cover of Moon River.
All of my browsing for overpriced apartments in Brooklyn has created a fair amount of anxiety. I can't really look seriously until April but I've been trying to get an idea of what is available in my price range, and there are a lot of crappy wildly over-priced apartments on the market. As an antidote I have watched season two of that French reality realty show, The Parisian Agency, in which very rich people allow us to tag along as they shop for luxury homes. The last episode included a tour of a large chateau that looks like the Disney castle. Then I got turned on to a British show called Escape to the Chateau in which a couple buy a 45-room chateau with a moat and renovate it themselves for their wedding event business. It's built on a medieval castle foundation but the main building dates from the 19th century. Some of the insulation is wattle and daub. There are bats, infestations of flies, crumbling stone, lead paint on all the windows, no heating or septic system or electricity. But he's an engineer and she's a designer, and they enlist local French tradesman and a bevy of expats as well to redo the stonework, plaster, and decorate with the odds and ends they find in the attic. They even DIY an elevator in one of the turrets. It's fascinating. Oh, and they have two small children. Luckily her parents are willing to move in with them to watch the kids because they work all day seven days a week for months. But first they get enough of it ready to hold their own wedding, and now in season two they successfully hold a wedding event. There's also a walled vegetable garden, seven outbuildings including an orangerie, and they keep chickens and pigs. They want to turn the moat into a fishing attraction. They have boundless imagination and energy, even if their taste is not mine. Apparently there are many Brits who have done the same.
I'd had this book in my stack for a long time: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2010). The book won the Pulitzer prize and has been made into a Ken Burns series. A very readable, elegant narrative of the story of our knowledge of cancer, the struggle to understand and treat it, the individual stories of suffering and recovery, the collective story of scientific research and discovery. My mother's cancer story floated above my experience of reading it.
Here's his TED Talk about shifting paradigms in medicine today:
And here's his conversation with CRISPR scientist Jennifer Doudna
Well, I'm not quite keeping up with my book-a-week goal. Book 5 was a mystery novel by Tana French, Broken Harbor. For book 6, I finished Alison Bechdel's second memoir, Are You My Mother? It took me a few weeks to get around to reading it after I finished the first one about her father. I had read it when it came out years ago, but I had forgotten it enough for it to feel new. It's as much about dreams, therapy, and her engagement with the ideas of psychoanalysis as it is about her relationship with her mother. How would I react if my daughter decided to write a graphic memoir of our family life? She could do it, and she's a brilliant story-teller. I imagine it would be both thrilling and intensely uncomfortable.
For the last month or so I've found that I don't want to get out of bed. I end up staying in bed until 10, listening to podcasts because I need to distract myself. I actually wake up around 5 or 7 or whenever to go to the bathroom and don't fall back asleep but just sort of doze. Today I set an alarm for 9 and managed to get out of bed at 9:30. That's an improvement. I don't usually have anywhere to go or anything I need to do at those hours so I've just been noping it up. Nope, I don't want to move. It has been suggested to me that this might be one of the side effects of grief. I haven't been lying there feeling sad in a conscious way, so it's hard to know if this morning inertia is from grief or just good old fashioned depression. Or both, as the case may be. What I want to do is to try to get up earlier and try going back to some of my morning habits that I have abandoned: writing morning pages, looking at my Alanon readings for prompts and doing some writing about them, doing yoga with YouTube yoga teacher Adriene. So today I didn't quite make it up at 9 but I did get up a half hour earlier. I didn't write or do yoga, but I did get up and have breakfast and got out of the house for my 11:30 appointment. I'm going to try hard not to beat up on myself about how I don't like this behavior and I'm having such a hard time changing it. I read some things about how to break bad habits. I managed to break the bad habit of biting my nails a few years ago, a lifelong source of shame and frustration. So I know I can do it. The other activity I want to undertake is to get rid of all the stuff I do not want to move to Brooklyn in a few months. It's amazing how much clutter I've accumulated since I left Minnesota with almost nothing. I'm tempted to do the same as then--just jettison everything except what I can fit in a few suitcases. If it weren't for the framed art that I want to keep and the very fancy reclining armchair I love, I would just get on the plane and go. But I'm going to have to move a smallish amount of stuff and it will probably cost a fortune.
I am up to season five of the cop show Bosch on Amazon Prime. It is very anchored in its LA setting, and it's bringing back memories of the little trips I did there before the pandemic. I took one where I went to Pasadena and visited some museums, took the streetcar to downtown, did some very touristy things. The last one I stayed near the LACMA and did a lot of walking. I ate in Koreatown, walked through neighborhoods of bungalows, explored the farmer's market zone. And then there was the brief trip to see BTS! All in all, I did pretty well with my LA tourism for being on foot and public transportation.
The show stars Titus Welliver, who I had seen on Deadwood, and two of the more charismatic actors from The Wire: Lance Reddick plays another chief of police and Jamie Hector (Marlo) is Bosch's homicide detective partner. I was surprised at how the show murdered key characters (son of the police chief, Bosch's FBI agent ex-wife).
The character is named after the artist. Here's a very detailed look at his work:
Next art excursion was to SFMOMA with a friend who has a membership. I prepared myself for an arduous day because she wanted to stay from opening to late afternoon. But we managed to strike a nice balance between engaging with the art, taking breaks for lunch and coffee, and long chats. We ended up eating a a Chinese place Henry's Hunan, around the corner. The food was not good: green beans were woody, pork spareribs were too salty and dry. The onion pancake was short on onion and just a fried piece of dough with little flavor. I won't go back there. But later we sat on the terrace of the museum cafe and had a coffee, and watched the birds that frequent that little urban oasis. Highlights of the day: Kim Whanki painting, Agnes Martin room, Leah Rosenberg mural.
And this weekend I want to go to the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) to see the Afro-futurism show before it closes, and to get a preview of the Edith Heath show. My daughter gave me a Heath ceramics vase for Christmas--I would love to get a set of dishes some day but they are just too expensive. The only question is whether I should go on Saturday when there is also music in the garden or go on Sunday to give myself a day between my Friday excursion and my next art date. It makes sense to go on Saturday, and to also take advantage of the Off The Grid food trucks that will be there. I should go, get lunch and enjoy music in the garden, then see the show. I can come back for the Heath show later if I get too tired. I am trying to be realistic about my museum stamina. I'm good for one in-depth exhibition, not two.
Reading: still making my way through The Emperor of Maladies by Siddhartha Mukerjee. (2010). Next up: Alison Bechdel's memoir Are You My Mother?
Watching: finished kdrama Bulgasal (not as good as it started out to be) and started a new one, Tracer, but the subs are really poor so I'm having to wait for better fan subs and they are only up to episode 3 so far. I tried watching with the bad subs but they consistently get the wrong pronouns so it's anyone's guess who is doing what to whom. My Korean is not good enough to listen AND read bad subs at the same time, and not good enough to follow a drama about tax evasion without subs. Have to say that it is actually making tax evasion dramatic and emotional, so it's worth the wait.
Also watched: first season of Bosch, a police show with Titus
Welliver and the guy who played Marol in The Wire, also the guy who
placed Cedric Daniels in yet another police chief role. I'm ready for
the second season.
In the queue: the next episode of The Gilded
Age. No surprises as to plot for anyone who has read Henry James or
Edith Wharton, but what a sumptuous spectacle
Excitedly watching: the men's figure skating singles short program. Lots of drama as the fan favorite and two-time gold medalist Yuzuru Hanyo popped a quad and is now in 8th place while Nathan Chen leads over the other two Japanese competitors, who I liked more than him: Shoma Uno (in third place) and Yuma Kagiyama (in second). Also skating a fabulous program but without the quads of other competitors was Jason Brown. He was far and away my favorite as to interpretation of the music and the exciting choreography but I don't know enough about skating to tell whether his step sequence or jumps or spins were more technically difficult that the others. According to many fans, the new scoring system rewards jumps over the technicalities of the rest of the skating elements, and while he is technically superior in many aspects of his skating, you have to do quads now to win the biggest competitions. Yuzuru Hanyu was very poetic in his program, but I preferred the energy of Kagiyama in his. The free skate program will be held tomorrow, and I'm able to watch it live without commentary on peacock, although I still have such a hard time navigating the stupid menu. I should be glad it's included in my Comcast service and be grateful. In other figure skating news, the medal ceremony for the team competition, which the Russians won, has been postponed due to "legal issues" and rumors are that they were caught doping again. It may even be that the fifteen-year-old competitor who is the first woman to hit all those quads in competition is the victim of crooked coaching. The Russians had already been penalized for doping by being forced to compete as the ROC--Russian Olympic Committee. The drama is being commented on live over on reddit. What a shame if the team is penalized because of one competitor's violation.
Here is a sweet and thoughtful piece about Jason Brown's path to achieving a balance in his state of mind. His joy in his performance was wonderful to see!
Today's arts excursion was to the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco to see the Leonard Cohen show by Candice Breitz. It has two parts: in the first room you see a group of men in yarmulkes who are singing the backing vocals for Leonard Cohen's album I'm Your Man (1988). From an adjacent room, you can hear the rumble of men's voices singing Leonard's part. After hanging out in the chorus room to remind me that I know all the songs on this album, I went into the other room where one is surrounded by the video images of older men, all in their sixties and seventies, each singing with passion and emotion the songs from that album. The effect is of an acapella chorus. From the first room, one hears faintly the backing vocals. Each man moves as he sings in his own way, flutters his fingers, air drums, taps on a crutch, sways from side to side, whistles the instrumental parts. I stayed to hear the whole album's cycle of songs. Even through I had listened to it many times in the past, I heard the lyrics in a new way.
I first heard Leonard Cohen's music in 1967 when the song "Suzanne" became a big hit for Noel Harrison. I was nine. It was first released by Judy Collins in 1966, and we had the album it was on, too. Her cover of his song "Dress Rehearsal Rag" on the same record mesmerized me. It was filled with dark emotions that I was too young to understand but the lyrics were evocative anyway.
Since it is now the time of the Olympics figure skating competition, I though we should appreciate this work of genius: Canadian champion skater Gary Beacom skates to "I'm Your Man."
Today I got the news that a dear friend of the family died of brain cancer. He was only 51 and leaves behind his wife and two young children. He had had surgery twice, but the cancer returned. Apparently he felt unwell and died in fifteen minutes. He and his family had had the chance to be together, to tell each other how much they loved each other, to take a final trip together, and when he went he wasn't alone. But there's a big difference between my mother's death of brain cancer at the age of 88 and this dear man's interrupted journey with his family. My daughter has an uncle who is also dying, slowly, of a kind of brain cancer. He responded well to radiation and chemo for a fairly long time, as these things go, but it came back and now he is paralyzed and we are all waiting for his transition. His adult children are taking turns spending time with their mother and with him. My daughter also lost her grandfather on her father's side within a few months of her grandmother. It has been a relentless season of loss.
It takes me an hour to walk from my place to the Albany Twin theater over on Solano. Saturday I walked over to watch Almodóvar's latest, Madres paralelas and today I walked there again to watch Jockey and eat Korean food at Bowl'd. I had been craving japchae. It wasn't quite as good as I remembered. I should say I could tell the difference between what they served and what I made back when I made it myself. I could tell that they just sauced the noodles at the end and didn't stir-fry and sauce each ingredient separately. The recipe I followed is Maangchi's. Really delicious, a little labor intensive, though.
My goal is to cancel my Spotify Premium account without losing access to the playlists I've created. I found an app (SongShift) that helped me migrate my Spotify playlists over to Apple Music, and I also started shifting my podcast subscriptions to Apple Podcasts. I am very heavily Spotify dependent, so canceling my subscription will mean a big change in habits, but I'm on the verge of doing it. The main disruption will be that I will no longer have the "played" episodes of a podcast in the system so it will be hard for me to go back to the archive and not accidentally repeat, or to tell where I am in a podcast's history. And the podcasts will now live separately from the music on a different app. But these are minor quibbles, and I am ready to cancel my sub because I, like a couple of Canadian artists, am bummed that they are paying the big bucks to a podcaster who lives off Covid misinformation. They also pay the least to the artists of the streaming services. If I cancel my Spotify premium, I can still use the service with ads, but I'll lose my hulu sub. But will I really miss it? I have a queue of stuff I have not been motivated to watch and I haven't watched anything on it for ages. Maybe it's time to pull the plug. I'll give myself the weekend to finish migrating playlists and bookmarking podcasts and then I'll cancel. I'll go from $10/month to $15/month for Apple ONE which gives me both Apple TV and Apple Music. I'm already paying for Apple TV so it consolidates those subscriptions. But to be honest I haven't watched anything on Apple TV for quite a while either. Too many streaming services!
Today I went to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco where I renewed my membership at the premium level. This will get me reciprocity at a national network of museums and art galleries. I visited their exhibition Seeing Gender in Asian Art. The best part of the show was the video interviews of the young art interns. If I had been exposed to alternative conceptions of gender at their age, how might my life have been different? I ask myself.
I then visited the Korean galleries which have highlighted a series of tiger paintings in honor of the upcoming lunar new year of the Water Tiger. Korean tigers can be leopard spotted, and are often paired with magpies. The tiger has an important role in Korean mythology and folk art, including the origin story of Dangun. I love their expressions. The word for tiger in Korean is horangi. Five baby tigers were born last year to the tiger pair in the Seoul zoo.
Here is a wonderful performance of a song "Tiger is Coming!" by the group Leenalchi that I just love (and here is a lyrics translation)
I was tired by the time I got through those galleries so I strolled rather quickly by my favorite Chinese snuff boxes and Japanese ceramics and baskets; I've already seen them but will come back to see them again. The idea is to be able to pop in and out for short visits without feeling as if I have to plow through the entire collection in one visit just to get my money's worth. I'm good for about an hour and then I feel overwhelmed.
Next up: The Contemporary Jewish Museum's Leonard Cohen show, that is ending soon.
I should make multiple visits to the Oakland Museum of California, for their Afrofuturism show and the upcoming Edith Heath show.
The Berkeley Art Center is not far from my friend's house, so I could combine a visit to her with a stop for their show.
New to me is the Doug Adams gallery at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, with a show coming up that looks cool.
Also new to me is the Kala Institute, which has residencies and studios for artists as well as a gallery. It's down by the Berkeley Bowl West, on San Pablo.
The DeYoung and the Legion are included as well. I want to see the pastel show at the Legion before it leaves in February.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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