Kanlaon: 2012 New Year Resolutions

New Year’s Resolution # 1:  Never fear putting aside a “classic” in favor of “light reading.”  She’s already implemented this one, bypassing Tom Wolfe’s wordy Bonfire of the Vanities (about New York 80s investment bankers, yucch.  Self much prefers repeat viewing of “Margin Call” when she feels the need for a banker fix.  At least, she can stare at Zach Quinto’s hairy forearms) in favor of an impossibly romantic confection by James Collins, Beginner’s Greek.

New Year’s Resolution # 2:  Go for spa treatments as often as one can.  It is worth getting pampered, even if it means pushing plastic to the limit.  This one self will begin implementing next week, when she tries something called “Body Lush.”  Has no idea what that involves, but it’s a couple of hours.  When she signed up, at first she thought she heard “Body Lash.”  So she asked the receptionist if that meant being gently whipped with willow branches (har, har, har).  Receptionist froze, stared at self.  Then it turned out the word was “Lush”, as in “Lush Skin.”  Oh.  “Oxygen infusion,” the receptionist said.  Okey dokey!

And, just take a look at the white van self and her Indian host, Mrinalini, will be using to tool around the following towns in India:  Kasauli, Baikunth Resort, Bir, Chandigarh, Bikaner, Nagaur, Udaipur, Mumbai!  The visa application process is a bear, and yesterday self decided to have her passport pictures re-taken ($13.50 for 2) because she didn’t want to look like a madwoman to the officer at Indian immigration.  But she is quite pleased with the van.

It is worth it, to take a break from wiping up after the Incontinent Ancient One, for two weeks.  She is even sparing the husband, for she’s paying through the nose for a kennel with 24-hour vet.  Which brings self to New Year’s Resolution # 3:  Never hesitate to pay others to do a job that requires bending or cleaning up.  When one gets to be a certain age, “do-it-yourself” should remain strictly in the realm of the virtual.

BTW, Mrinalini tells self that the cost of hiring a driver for two weeks around India is something like $200?  Why is self still in Redwood City, with the ever-present stress of photo enforcement ???  Someone, by the way, lifted the beautiful gold wreath that she bought from Costco back in November.  It was son who first noticed it missing.  Self is quite crestfallen to have to accede to husband’s dictum:  Anything in the front yard that can be stolen, will be stolen.  Therefore, put nothing nice in the front yard.  Let it get overgrown with weeds.  Never paint the trellis.  Make it seem as if an eccentric old couple live at xxxx H______ Street.  If the neighbors mutter, smile back sweetly.  Indicate stooped back.  Better yet, put index finger of either hand to head, rotate.

New Year’s Resolution # 4:  Try and watch at least one dance performance in 2012.  The hub professes to find them “boring.”  Dance is not boring.  Think “Pilobolus.”  Think Baryshnikov in his prime.  Think, for heaven’s sake, Matthew Bourne at the Brooklyn Academy of Music!  Self will explore Batsheva Dance Company (from Israel, coming to Yerba Buena Center in late February)

New Year’s Resolution # 5:  Find a way to insert the “B” word as often as possible, into any conversation, no matter how un-related to the topic at hand.  For instance:  When are you going to have that story ready?  Bacolod!  When are you going to fix the gutters?  Bacolod!  How much longer are you going to keep traveling around the world?  Bacolod!  When do you think The Ancient One will breathe her last?  Bacolod!  See, dear blog readers?  It’s easy as pie!

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

R.I.P., John Buchanan

Until self picked up the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday, she had never heard of him.  But his death was announced on p. 1, and self’s attention was aroused when she read that he was the director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Last year, for the first time ever, self became a member of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.  Her membership was to expire in December.  Self didn’t have to think twice: she renewed.

In the last year alone (2011), self saw great exhibits at both the Palace of the Legion of Honor and at the de Young.  At the Legion of Honor, she was introduced to the art of Isabelle de Borchgrave in an exhibit called “Pulp Fashion.”  de Borchgrave fabricates the most ravishing costumes out of paper.  And not just any costumes, mind you:  hers are inspired by paintings by Goya and Rubens and many other classic painters.  In addition, self saw an exhibit on Dutch and Flemish masterworks (“Masters of Light:  Dutch Painters in Utrecht During the Golden Age”) that gave her a new appreciation for the sky, and an exhibit on the French impressionist Camille Pissarro (Particularly moving were the paintings of his beloved daughter, Camille, who becomes noticeably thinner and hollow-eyed with each passing year.  In the last portrait, she lies in bed, a shadow of her former self.  She passed away at nine).  She also saw part of a Roman street, excavated near Lod, Israel, and transported to the Legion of Honor (Self overheard someone wondering aloud how they had done it; she was able to help because she had read, somewhere, that the street was “rolled up” and transported by ship).

Then, the de Young exhibits:  In the summer, self saw a powerful and moving exhibit on the Olmecs (strange, mysterious people, whose massive sculptured heads once lined a broad avenue along which conquered peoples were made to walk.  The heads were so huge that even gazing at just one was overwhelming.  Imagine a whole avenue of these things, elevated?  Atop columns?  Prisoners must have been quaking with fear).  That was followed by the Picasso exhibit, to which she managed to bring son.  He wanted to see the “Balenciaga and Spain” exhibit (Son is always surprising self, these days), in another section of the de Young, and it was there that self learned that Balenciaga was the creator of “the little black dress,” the epitome of the modern woman.

Self really wanted to bring son to the “Masters of Venice:  Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power” exhibit, showing now at the de Young, but son was only here for a week, and there was no time.

So, self feels that she does owe a big debt to the man who organized all these exhibits, John Buchanan, who died of cancer, last Friday (Dec. 30).  He was 58.  Here’s more from the article:

• “I’m a populist, and I’m not afraid to say it,” he told The Chronicle soon after accepting the San Francisco job.
• During his six years at the Fine Arts Museums, comprising the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park and the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park, Mr. Buchanan presided over impressive growth in attendance and a 70 percent increase in membership.  Combined attendance at the Fine Arts Museums in 2010 ranked fourth among museums in the United States and 16th in the world.  The 2010 “Birth of Impressionism:  Masterpieces From the Musée de Orsay” brought the de Young more than 4,600 visitors daily.
• Just when the world economic crisis began to crimp people’s plans to travel to destination museums abroad, Mr. Buchanan’s initiatives brought countless great artworks close to home.
• Mr. Buchanan came to San Francisco after almost 12 years as director of Oregon’s Portland Art Museum.  Its transformation under his leadership gave him a rainmaker’s reputation in the world of arts administration.
• In Portland, Mr. Buchanan oversaw extensive museum reconstruction and expansion, a spate of acquisitions and a fivefold increase in the institution’s endowment.
• He was born in Nashville in 1953.  His parents were “a school administrator and a utility company manager.”  He received a bachelor’s degree in English at Sewanee, the University of the South, then a master’s in art history from Vanderbilt.
• The family requests that donations in Mr. Buchanan’s memory be made to the Director’s Discretionary Fund at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, (415) 750-3687, or in support of the research of Dr. Andrew Ko (research fund B2098) at UCSF Medical Center, (415) 502-1899.

The article was written by Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker.

BTW, right now and up to Feb. 19, Bernini’s Medusa is on exhibit at the Legion of Honor.  Here’s what the museum website says about it:

Believed to date from around 1638 – 1648, this extraordinary work takes its subject from classical mythology, as cited in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  It shows the beautiful Medusa, one of the Gorgon sisters, caught in the terrible process of transformation into a monster.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Studying the “Nice” Rejection

Being a writer, self has quite a thin skin.  Each rejection feels like a judgement (“They don’t like me!  They really don’t like me!”)

She’s had super-quick rejections.  One came about five minutes after she paid her $3 on-line submission fee (She’s decided not to reveal names of these super-quick rejectors.  Blog readers will just have to do their own research.  It is good for the soul)

The one from Prairie Schooner cut deep because two good friends had been published in a recent issue, so self figured … WRONG!  Since that time of humiliation, PS’s rejections to self now come in more stately fashion:  never less than a month.  Success!

Last week’s quick rejection was from West Branch.  They’re way over on the east coast, but geographic location doesn’t count anymore, since 80% of literary journals now use Submishmash.

Today, she heard back from Word Riot, four days after she sent them a piece.  This is a record.  From her lengthy research on Duotrope, Word Riot has among the fastest turn-around times of any literary journal.  Some people say, “hours.”  So, self sent in a crazy story, and waited to hear back that day.  Nothing.

On to the 31st, more peeking at Submishmash.  Nope, nothing yet.

New Year’s Day, nope!  Self’s heart fills with esperanza!

January 2 —  DAAAAARN!

Here you go, the letter that is probably the “less enthusiastic” version of the nice rejection.  Self wishes she had archived the earlier rejection so she could compare the two.  Is this just wishful thinking, or is there just a smidgen of encouragement in this letter?  Read:

Thank you for sending your work to Word Riot.  We’ve read it carefully.  Unfortunately, we didn’t feel it was quite right for us.  If you have something else you think is right for our magazine, please feel free to try us again in the future.

Sincerely,

Word Riot Editor xxxxx

It’s the “If you have something else” that really gets to self.  Of course she has something else.  She has tons of “something else”!  In fact, a whole filing cabinet full of “something elses”!

*     *     *     *     *

This story does have a happy ending.

In Fall 2012, Word Riot gave her one of her fastest acceptances ever.  In fact, within an hour.  For “A Dictionary of Devotions.”

Moral of the story:  Never give up.  And don’t take anything personally, self you wuss.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

1st Day of 2012: Gorgeous

Saw “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” at the downtown Century 20.  The day was gorgeous.  Self watered, six buckets in the backyard.  Both her bouiganvilleas, still baby-sized, even after so many years, seem to have been killed off, finally, by the last cold snap.

The movie was gorgeous to look at.  Self was not as overwhelmed by Oldman’s performance as reviewers have been.  She did think Colin Firth and Tom Hardy were outstanding.  Especially Tom Hardy.

With his rugged build and his faux blonde hair and his crooked lower teeth and his sometimes brutish mien, Hardy was still able to project a beating, human heart — in some ways, he was the perfect foil for George Smiley, who we know has a beating, human heart, but one that is overlaid or held in check by decades of British-bred reserve.  SPOILER ALERT!  Take the scene close to the end where Smiley comes home and realizes his wife has come back to him:  in that scene, Oldman is filmed entirely from behind, but there is an almost imperceptible slowing of his steps as he goes down a hallway, and then he rests a hand on the stair banister.  That gesture spoke more eloquently than his face or voice ever could,  and self ended up finding the scene tremendously dramatic, almost a primer on how to use understatement to project tension.

Tom Hardy’s Ricky Tarr, on the other hand, follows hunches, operates on the fly, and turns out, improbably, to be exactly the kind of spy the British intelligence service needed to get hard and reliable information, if only at that particular point in time.  Hardy is even required, at one point, to shed actual, human tears, and hey, he does manage to pull it off without looking silly or even the slightest bit un-manly.

Let’s see, what else about the movie?  It is set in the 1970s.  There must be some unspoken rule of thumb in British cinema/television that scenes set in the 1970s (as “period” as any World War II or Depression-era film, self supposes) must occur in murky shadows.  Somewhat reminiscent of the time-bending BBC detective series, “Life on Mars” (which, alas, had a most untimely demise)  Still, self loved the attention to detail, the porcelain English bulldogs behind “Control” (played by John Hurt) in his office, the huge cigarette lighters that look like they weigh about five lbs., the ugly suits, and most especially the crazy brown and orange diamond-pattern of the walls of the room where the top brass of “the Circus” held their regular meetings.

She kept fearing for the life of  George Smiley’s young assistant, Peter Guillam (who turns out to have a big secret of his own —  well played, Benedict Cumberbatch!  Self would like to take this opportunity to inform dear blog readers that Cumberbatch plays Sherlock Holmes in the recent BBC series, the one that is set in modern times, and he is absolutely right in that role).  Or for the life of Ricky Tarr (Tom Hardy’s character).  The movie unfurled slowly but surely.  Self was completely riveted, every moment, from first to last.

She also thinks it is pretty neat that we never know what Mrs. Smiley looks like, she appears as elusive to us as she must to her husband.

Colin Firth is of course still handsome.  Great casting there, too, by the way!

So, let’s see.  How does this movie compare to other movies self has seen recently? (For a year that was really lame —  movie-wise — 2011 really went out with a bang!)  Self thinks she liked “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” more than “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” or “Mission Impossible” or the Sherlock Holmes movie.  She’d put it about even with Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants.”  (She didn’t, alas, enjoy “My Week With Marilyn” all that much)

Perhaps it isn’t fair to compare this movie with the “Mission Impossible” movie, for this one is built on intellect and nuance, while that one was built on action and spectacle and a spate of can-you-top-this moments.  “Mission Impossible” was filled with impossibly beautiful (Paula Patton) or impossibly funny characters (Simon Pegg), while “Tinker, Tailor” was filled with (mostly) plain people (and we are all, in real life, extremely plain, dear blog readers) behaving in absolutely astounding and yet humanly heroic ways.  In its way, in its genre, “Mission Impossible” was as excellent a movie as “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” is.  Self thinks she needs a little of both, before she can consider a movie-watching season really totally satisfying.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Lost in the “Genre Ghetto”

Letter to the New York Times Book Review from a reader in Hollywood, California:

To the Editor:

Christopher Buckley refers to certain major works by Vonnegut as “sci-fi(esque).”  If Cat’s Cradle is “sci-fi(esque),” then Farewell, My Lovely is “mystery(esque)” and Shane is “western(esque).”  I had hoped we were long past the Canticle for Leibowitz days when publishers could persuade critics to treat science fiction with the respect granted to other forms of literature only by pretending it wasn’t science fiction.

Perhaps Buckley was trying to protect Vonnegut posthumously from the sci-fi label he’d avoided in life for fear of exactly that kind of “genre ghetto,” as Buckley puts it.  But surely in this century the secret life is no longer necessary.  The cat and the cradle are out of the bag, and it should be gladly and admiringly acknowledged that Kurt Vonnegut was a man of many parts —  including a writer of science fiction.

(Fab Skyline prof Liza Erpelo tells self that only outsiders refer to “science fiction” as “sci-fi.”  To insiders, it’s always science fiction.  Which suddenly reminds self that she’s seen Buckley before: at the now-on-hiatus Foothill Writers Conference)

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

The New York Times: “75 Things New Yorkers Talked About in 2011”

No, self is not going to list the 75 things.  Yes, there was the presence of a Kardashian (Also:  Anderson Cooper.  Also:  Meryl Streep).  But here are the items that truly interested self:

8.  Princess Beatrice’s fascinating headgear at the Royal Wedding (raised $131,000 for charity)

12.  Steve Jobs.  “Fittingly, many people learned of his death on their iPhones.”

15.  Ellen Barkin on Twitter.  “Never has unbridled profanity been so entertaining.”

18.  “Homeland”:  “Angela Chase grows up into a pill-popping, bipolar, line-crossing C.I.A. operative.  The most compelling character on television in 2011.”

24.  “Keith Olbermann leaves MSNBC to go to Current TV, is never heard from again.”

25.   “Zooey Deschanel:  adorable or irritating?  Discuss.”

51.   Planking

57.  “Michael Fassbender.  And not just because of the frontal nudity in Shame.”

74.  “The now officially annoying James Franco.”

(The “75 Things” was in the Thursday, 29 December 2011 issue)

A Poem for the New Year

The New Song

by W. S. Merwin

(encountered this evening, the last Saturday of 2011, in The New Yorker of 12 December 2011)

For some time I thought there was time
and that there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it the first time
but by this time I do not know
what I thought when I thought back then

there is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new song

* * * * *

I read that poem and I think, How true that is. How true.

Thank you, W. S. Merwin.

Stay tuned.