My best recent pix

A friend of ours submitted 20 photos to the Artists Wanted contest, which inspired me to select 20 or so of my recent pix & post them to Picasa.
You can see the results at:
My Best Recent Pix
The number grew to around 30 as I remembered the recent Solano Stroll held annually here in Albany, CA (Solano Ave extends from Albany up into neighboring Berkeley.
I would love to hear which ones each of you think are the best. Thanks!
Our photographer friend is Larry Pratt - his submitted photos are at:
Lawrence Pratt pix at Artists Wanted
Please vote for his submissions!
Larry
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Beijing & Shanghai

Note: I wrote the following late the same night we got back from China on January 5th, 2011 after spending the Christmas holidays in Beijing and Shanghai, my first visit to China - I will follow up with separate postings with photos of each city. And so, my first reaction to a fabulous 11 days in China...

Thursday, Jan. 6, 2011, 12:14 a.m.: quick note before we crash – We’ve been up for something like 30 hours and altho we feel pretty chipper now I suspect tomorrow will be a different story. The short version is that we had a terrific time and I was even more impressed with Beijing and Shanghai than I expected, and I expected plenty.

Lingling and Ouwen flew to Beijing a few days before I arrived in Beijing on Dec. 26, 2010. We then spent 5 days together in Beijing and took the overnight train to Shanghai where we spent another 5 days. The best part was meeting and spending a lot of time with Lingling’s Mom in Beijing (we stayed at her flat) and her aunt, uncle (aunt’s husband), Little Uncle (mother’s youngest brother), and cousin’s family (husband, wife, and incredibly cute little 4-year-old ham – she’s clearly headed for the stage).

Beijing is the city of antiquity with more ancient temples, gates, palaces, pavilions, and towers than you can count, not to mention the ancient hutong: medieval alleyways bustling with people doing all sorts of daily things. Coming out of the subway and setting eyes on Tiananmen Square, fronted by the gateway to the Forbidden City with the huge, iconic portrait of Mao, was absolutely breathtaking. I think I actually gasped. Cold as the Arctic, especially the day we spent in the howling wind on the top of Longevity Hill in the Summer Palace, not to mention the chill day in the Forbidden City. Some days it got down to –8 C, about 17 F.

Shanghai is 1920s and 30s, especially the Bund (the stately colonial buildings on the west side of the Huangpu River, centered by the famous Peace Hotel), the atmospheric streets of the French Concession with its characteristic shikumen (Shanghai’s answer to the hutong), and the absolutely wild and crazy Pudong New Area across the Huangpu River from the Bund with a couple of buildings among the world’s tallest and the spaceship Oriental Pearl Tower. We were wowed during the daytime, but you should see it at night with of the Bund bathed all in gold light facing off the kaleidoscopic neon colors of Pudong. This was the second time I literally gasped out loud. But then there is also the Old Town, with the Yu Gardens dating to the 1560s, surrounded by a bustling bazaar with the same pagoda rooflines, full of street vendors and little restaurants and teahouses. And we got to the site of the Shanghai World Expo, which closed in October but several pavilions were spared the wrecking ball, including the monumental China Pavilion which we were able to tour. As was Hillary Clinton, we were utterly amazed by a painting from the Song Dynasty (11th-12th centuries) that has somehow been enlarged to fill a whole room and animated, so that the ancient street life has come to life, with people playing chess, drinking, and dancing in the teahouses, a camel caravan from the Silk Road proceeding through town and passing through a gate, kids playing in the countryside, a man driving an ox cart through a street, men trying to ease a crosswise boat under a bridge against the current, etc. It also shifted from day to night and back to dawn again. Absolutely enthralling.

Lingling grew up on Huaihai Lu (Road), the heart of the French Concession southwest of the Bund, in one of the typical row houses on an alley in the interior of a block. Our last evening, her aunt and uncles treated us to a table-full of exotic eats, including the best stinky tofu I’ve had yet (I actually had seconds and thirds!), and a bowl-full of absolutely delectable spring rolls her little uncle had spent 4 hours that afternoon making in my honor. I was really touched by all the attention and how warmly I was welcomed by all her relatives.

We took several thousand pictures (as usual). As it happened, my hours of trying to learn Mandarin paid off – I was actually able to speak whole coherent sentences to anyone who would listen, and they appeared to understand me. As the days went on, I was more and more able to read the signage in Chinese characters. I’m sure my efforts were of great amusement to my victims, but they truly seemed to appreciate the effort. I had to repeat several phrases over and over, especially at dinner at someone’s house or in a restaurant: “hen hao” (very good), “wo xihuan” (I like it!), and “xiexie” (thank you!).

For tonight, zai jian and wan an! (adios and good night, literally “again see” and “evening peace”).

Magna Carta & more at the Legion of Honor

On Saturday we visited the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco to see an original 1217 engrossment of the Magna Carta before the exhibit closed. It was really exciting to see this famous document in the flesh - confirming again how fortunate we are to live in the Bay Area.


This was one of several engrossments (official copies) on parchment provided by the king to the signatory nobles of the original document signed in 1215 by King John. It is in remarkable condition, written in beautiful chancery script with iron gall ink. A bit of it can be seen at the Legion website.


We were newly astonished by the permanent collection, including very famous medieval, Renaissance, & later paintings & sculpture. On display also was a 3rd century Roman mosaic discovered in Lod, Israel. Here Lingling is viewing the installation.


The animal images were exquisite.


Another expiring exhibit was Pulp Fashion- incredible full-size recreations in paper of clothing pictured in old paintings and photos from by-gone eras created by a Belgian artist, Isabelle de Borchgrave.


No photos were allowed, so this is a photo of greeting cards we bought in the giftshop.

More info on the museum at the Legion website.

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Location:Albany, CA, United States

Vera Cruz & Sarita Montiel

I rented Vera Cruz (1954) from Netflix precisely because I knew my favorite Spanish chanteuse and actress, Sarita Montiel, had a role in it alongside Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster. I liked the movie surprisingly well - the color is good, it was filmed entirely in Mexico with gorgeous scenery, Gary Cooper looks great, and Burt is pretty funny with his very toothy grin. And Sarita...Sarita is breathtaking and I knew again why I've always liked her so much.


The first LP I ever bought, while I was an under-graduate at Georgetown University in the early '60s, was on a whim at a record store while I was out wandering in Washington, DC, one day, I forget why. But there she was, breathtaking for the first time, on the cover of the soundtrack for her latest movie, La Reina del Chantecler. I had to buy the album for the cover alone, who cares what the music was like. But the music was alternately bouncy, funny, soulful, and sexy, and I've loved her music every since. My roommate, Keith McKeown, was from San Francisco and of course his fave was Edith Piaf. We had an ongoing debate about who was better, Sarita or Edie. And Sarita even sings in French on Reina del Chantecler. A couple of years later when I spent my junior year at the University of Madrid, I finally got to see the movie. I must say I was underwhelmed, but my captivation with her and her music was undiminished. I still have the album (somewhere) but nothing to play it on and it took me quite a bit of Googling to find an image of the original album. Recently I bought several of her albums on CD, including La Violetera, La Bella Lola, El Ultimo Cuple, and the 2-CD set Todas las Noches a las Once.

But I digress. Vera Cruz holds up rather well after 55 years. I give it a B+ - B for the movie and + because Sara is in it. The movie still above shows Gary Cooper, Sarita, Denise Darcel (who plays the shifty countess), and Burt Lancaster obviously having a good time. There was pretty good chemistry between Cooper and La Sara, and she really played up the part of the Mexican chili pepper. I was fascinated to learn that Sara was born in Campo de Criptana, "un lugar de la Mancha" where Don Quijote fought the famous battle with the windmills.


The photo at left shows Sarita in her heyday. She is still around and going strong at 81. I'm not sure when the picture below was taken, but you get the idea...

Flower Drum Song

One scene in The Flower Drum Song by C. Y. Lee, the 1957 novel on which the Broadway play and movie were loosely based, is set in a basement teahouse in San Francisco's Chinatown. Last Saturday while Lingling and Ouwen were having an upscale lunch at Postrio near Union Square (end-of-year luncheon with Lingling's Chinese American International School), I was happily eating Singapore chow fun in a basement teahouse on Sacramento Street in Chinatown that I like to think was the one in the book. I asked the waitress how long it had been there, and she said, "1920."

My revived Flower Drum Song odyssey began with a notice in the San Jose Mercury News last October that the American Musical Theatre of San Jose was going to put on a revival of Flower Drum Song with a new book by David Henry Hwang. Lingling and Ouwen weren't too enthused but I persuaded them to go with me anyway. I enjoyed the heck out of it, though I must say that Hwang's "improvements" didn't really change much except introduce a stronger emphasis on fleeing Mao's Communist China, insert a Beijing Opera theme, and make an unfortunate reference to bound feet, which made Lingling and Ouwen howl - they said bound feet hadn't been common in China for decades before the 1950s when Flower Drum Song was supposed to take place. For my taste, it was still very colorful, all the Rogers and Hammerstein music was intact (including the politically incorrect but still fun "I Enjoy Being a Girl"), and the cast was good - I, understandably, really enjoyed Emily Hsu as the sexy Linda Low (she also played Linda Low in the Broadway revival).

My interest stimulated, I ordered the 1961 movie version on Netflix and then ordered the C. Y. Lee novel in a beautiful new edition with a very interesting introduction by David Henry Hwang and a fresh author's note by the author. Hwang explained his own renewed interest in the musical and his efforts to locate Lee, whom he found in the nouveau Chinatown in Los Angeles's Monterey Park suburb.

I watched the first half of the movie, was a bit disappointed, read a bit of the book, including Hwang's introduction and C. Y. Lee's tantalizing note, then had to put it aside while I struggled through a three-month Mandarin II class at UC-Berkeley Extension. Then one evening a few days ago I watched the rest of the movie and loved it, and watched the fascinating bonus shorts featuring Hwang, Lee, Nancy Kwan, and others. Lee, very spry in his mid-80s, recounted how he came to write the book and how it became a Broadway musical and then a movie. In the movie, the showstopper for me and my other favorite song is the "Grant Avenue" sequence. Nancy Kwan is sensational in this and in the "I Enjoy Being a Girl" mirror segment. Lingling, Ouwen, and I spend a lot of time in San Francisco Chinatown, and walking down Grant Avenue that song always pops into my head. It stands for San Francisco for me the way "On your left, Washington Square, right in the heart of Greenwich Village" from the Wonderful Town song, "Christopher Street," means everything Manhattan for me.

I immediately resumed reading the book, starting over from page 1. The cover is particularly interesting, as it is a painting by Hector Garrido "based upon his painting done for the original Dell paperback edition." I found the book quite different from the play and movie, simultaneously charming, gritty, realistic, and very moving. Most of the characters from the movie and musical are present but in a somewhat different context and embedded in quite a different story line.

I could see why Rogers and Hammerstein concocted a more colorful and romantic story line than the book to wrap their music around, and for their purposes I have no complaints. In the book, May Li doesn't appear until the middle and is feistier and cheekier than Myoshi Umeki's portrayal. Linda Low, called Linda Tung in the book, has a more confused and sinister persona than in the film, and Helen (Chao) is a truly tragic figure in the book. The movie's conflict between traditional and modern culture embodied in Old Master Wang and his eldest son, Wang Ta, is even more vividly explored in the book, and the final scenes had me tearing up.

I love immersing myself in these cultural artifacts dating back to my high school days. The movie came out the last year I was in high school, about the same time as we all sat around listening to the Broadway cast recording of Camelot and watching such movies as It Started in Naples. In this golden age of Netflix, iTunes, iPods, and the wonders of the Internet, it is possible to recreate all those sights and sounds like never before.

Olympics in Beijing

I was blown away by the opening ceremony of the Olympics last night then stayed up into the wee hours watching the beginning of the U.S. women's soccer match against Japan. I finally turned it off after a spectacular goal by Karli Lloyd for the U.S. team, knowing that our VCR was grinding away recording it.

Today after picking up Lingling's Sing Tao Saturday magazine at the Pacific East Mall down the block, I watched the end of the U.S. women's volleyball team's successful match against Japan, then the 3 U.S. female fencers taking all three medals. Since I missed the first 20 minutes of the NBC broadcast last night, I rewound the tape and began watching. I couldn't stop watching - it's playing behind me as I write this, with Zhang Yimou's production absolutely mesmerizing. Impressive last night, it is hypnotic today when I can appreciate more deliberately what Zhang has contrived. All the guys under the moving blocks just came out smiling broadly and waving, reminiscent of the opening gambit with the 2,008 drummers in perfect coordination drumming on magnificent drums, the 2,500-year-old prototype of which was discovered in a tomb near Shanghai only three years ago. They were told to smile so as to be less intimidating in this country of 1.3 billion, but I gotta say that those two thousand drummers in exact unison was unnerving, if not specifically threatening. Interesting that director Zhang Yimou cooked up the perfect combination of harmony, power, poetry, enormity, and smiling individual faces of people all seemingly at peace in the ancient culture in which they are living.

I've spoken to Lingling and Ouwen by phone several times in the last couple of weeks, and as excited as she has been about the impending Olympics, her reporting has been mixed. Frustration at the pollution, the traffic jams, the extremely tight security mixed with anticipation and perhaps a little apprehension that China could pull this off. She even mentioned wishing she could post something to this blog. A family friend managed to procure a single ticket to an opening ceremony rehearsal last Monday evening (you have to have connections), and Lingling insisted Ouwen attend with her cousin. Ouwen gave it 3 out of 5 stars (we've seen way too many movies) and seemed ambivalent about the fact that is was all about Chinese culture and history - I guess he thought it should be more international. I assured him that was the usual approach. Yesterday after work I talked to them after they watched the real thing on TV the night before, which was Friday night China time (8-8-08 at 8:08 p.m. - eight [ba] is a lucky number in China). They seemed both impressed and perplexed at how it would be seen outside of China. Lingling thought Zhang Yimou went too far over the top. Many Chinese think he's gotten too commercial with films like House of Flying Daggers, Hero, and Curse of the Golden Flower. They like his older, more classical films like To Live, Raise the Red Lantern, and Red Sorghum, but I confess I prefer the new Zhang Yimou, including what he hath wrought at the Beijing Olympics.

Well, now I must find out what happened with that middle-of-the-night soccer game!

Update: Good news! The U.S. women's soccer team did beat Japan 1-zip, so now they're 1-1 after losing to Norway. I believe the U.S. men's basketball team plays China and Yao Ming tomorrow (Sun.) morning in real time (Sun. night Beijing time). That should be very interesting. Yao looked tired during the opening ceremonies but perked up when the cute little kid who survived the Sichuan earthquake and then rescued two of his friends showed up waving a couple of flags. Yao picked him up and carried him part of the way.

Richard Lester's 3 Musketeers ('73), 4 Musketeers ('74)

I don't know why I expected the Richard Lester versions of the 3 Mosquitoes to be serious (released in 1973 and 1974 as The 3 Musketeers and  The 4 Musketeers). Silly me, but I was shocked when I started to watch the first movie and saw that the plot was just a clothesline to hang pratfalls on. About 40 minutes into it, I shut it off, ripped the DVD out of the machine, and swore I couldn't watch anymore.

But then I started reading reviews on Netflix and MRQE, and with a couple of exceptions that sounded like my reaction, most of the reviewers got the joke and loved it, calling it the best version of the story ever. So a day later I put the DVDs back in the player and gave it another try.

It was all pratfalls at first with zero character development and joltingly austere Spanish locations including the Cathedral of Toledo and a bunch of Moorish architecture supposed to be Paris and the French countryside, but I confess it eventually started growing on me, especially in the second movie. At first I thought Faye Dunaway terribly miscast as Milady de Winter, but then her sexy, ethereal beauty kicked in and I decided she was perfect for the part. Contrary to the 1966 BBC version (see review below), I could believe that Dunaway could seduce any man that crossed her path.

Same with Charlton Heston as Cardinal Richelieu - possibly at his most handsome and regal and with an underplayed sense of humor. Christopher Lee was perfect as Count de Rochefort. Raquel Welch played Constance Bonacieux as a busty ditz, quite unlike the way she was played in the BBC production, but it works and she is one of the lights of this production. Michael York is no Jeremy Brett, but he was serviceable as D'Artagnan, Richard Chamberlain was a hoot as the dandified Aramis prancing around in his finery, and Oliver Reed and Frank Finlay were fine as Athos and Porthos. I didn't like Geraldine Chaplin as Queen Anne of Austria but it wasn't too big a part.

I wondered how Lester and producer Ilya Salkind would handle the violent second half of the story and was mildly surprised that they played it as written, bloodshed and all. Main characters begin dropping like flies in The 4 Musketeers as in the book. Ultimately the BBC production followed the book more religiously and took the proceedings more seriously, but the Lester version is far more colorful, often laugh-out-loud amusing (as when D'Artagnan and Rochefort attempt a swordfight on a frozen river), boasts weightier actors, especially the much more convincing female leads, and captures the look of the times much better, even if France is made to look like Spain, which it doesn't.

In a very interesting "making of" feature on the DVD set, Salkind allowed as how his intention was to play up the comedy of Dumas's original work. Well, the original Three Musketeers wasn't all that funny, and I don't think comedy was Dumas pere's intention, but I suppose Salkind/Lester's "Monty Python Meets the 3 Mosqueteros" works in any case.

If you're interested, there is a very nicely packaged 2-DVD set available on Amazon containing both movies released as The Complete Musketeers.