Month: July 2015

by CJ Verburg

Book of the Week: surgeon/author Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. Have you read it? or heard of it? This is the only book I’ve ever seen with a 5-star rating at 3,000+ Amazon reviews (along with the slightly creepy distinction of #1 Best Seller in Death & Grief). 

As a doctor who’s treated dozens, maybe hundreds of patients, Gawande was struck by their take on mortality. Like the old joke: I know everybody has to die; I just didn’t think that applied to me. People would come into his office who’d just been diagnosed with cancer, or some other terminal disease, & they were in shock: How can this happen to me? What they wanted Dr. Gawande to do was make it go away. Give me back my life. Whatever it takes–surgery, radiation, chemo–I want my life back.

Two realizations disturbed him. First, although most of his patients said they wouldn’t want to go on if they stopped being themselves, if they wound up helpless in a hospital or a nursing home, that was in fact how most of their lives ended. Second, doctors collaborated in this outcome: “Medicine exists to fight death & disease. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually it wins.”

In Being Mortal, we follow Gawande as he explores the options for aging, the pros and cons of the many turning-point choices along life’s home stretch, and the urgency of recognizing and confronting those choices. Mortality is implausible, yet it is universal. This book is a helpful step out of the mindset I grew up with–“Hope I die before I get old!”–toward ending life with the most possible dignity and comfort.

Dignity and comfort are not options in many of the lives depicted by Anna Deveare Smith in her new theater piece Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education. It’s brilliant, and it’s playing at Berkeley Repertory Theatre through August 2, with live music by local jazz virtuoso Marcus Shelby.

Unlike most young actresses studying Shakespeare, Smith homed in on Hamlet’s observation that theater holds a mirror up to nature.  Her subject is violent, headline-grabbing social conflicts in the United States; her technique is to interview diverse participants and observers and weave their testimony into a play. The first clash she investigated was the so-called Crown Heights incident in 1991, sparked by a New York rabbi’s entourage running over an African-American child. Smith talked to outraged people on both sides and depicted each of them verbatim–not just their words but their accents and body language–in Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities.

Anna Deveare Smith has transformed what theater can do by transforming herself into the people she interviews. She levels the playing field: we can’t make our usual (often unconscious) snap judgments about each speaker based on gender, race, age, and appearance, because they all look like Anna Deveare Smith. Instead we’re obliged to watch and listen. I’ve had the good fortune to see every piece she’s done, from Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, about the Rodney King fracas, up through her current investigation of the school-to-prison pipeline that dooms way too many American children.

Notes from the Field struck me as gentler, as well as more participatory, than Smith’s previous pieces. With so much anger in the media and the streets over discrimination at every level of the justice system against people (especially males) of color, Smith offers us some exceptionally articulate, insightful, and heartbreaking angles on a subject which–like mortality–we ignore at our peril.

 

by CJ Verburg

OK, gotta go to London in September.

I thought I’d dodged the bullet when I seized the very last ticket to the National Theatre Live’s November San Francisco broadcast of Hamlet–an all-time all-star cast, with Benedict Cumberbatch as the prince, Anastasia Hille as Gertrude, and Ciaran Hinds as Claudius. (Who knew both Hinds and Hille have played Lady Macbeth?)

Now here comes Anthony Horowitz over the horizon with both barrels loaded.

London’s Menier Chocolate Factory will debut his new play Dinner with Saddam on Sept. 10:

“Saddam, fearful of assassination attempts, was known to move regularly from private home to private home. Even before the war, he declined to spend nights in one of his palaces.” USA Today, 20th April 2003

So what happens when Saddam Hussein turns up on your doorstep and announces he is staying for dinner?

And if that’s not enough, Horowitz has incorporated material by Ian Fleming into a new James Bond novel, Trigger Mortis, due out Sept. 5.  We’re promised “a thrilling tour de force” which “recreates the golden age of Bond, packed with speed, danger, strong women and fiendish villains.”

Rumor has it Pussy Galore (Goldfinger) will make a reappearance. That’s a relief. I just noticed a closed accordion gate yesterday on her sister’s jewelry shop in Chinatown, Jade Galore.

How soon can we expect the movie? Dare we hope for a cameo by Honor Blackman?–maybe sipping a poolside drink with Sean Connery?

Another pair who’d make a terrific Gertrude and Claudius.

 

Thanks to author and blogger Kim Cox for showcasing CJ Verburg’s five-star noir cozy SILENT NIGHT VIOLENT NIGHT: a Cory Goodwin Mystery in her blog post of Thursday, July 9!

Kim is an author of Romantic Suspense, Mystery, Suspense, and Paranormal fiction. She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina with her chainsaw-artist husband, their West Highland White Terriers, Scooter and Harley, and a Yorkie mix, Candi. A mother and grandmother, Kim has published novels, short stories, and articles. To sign up for her newsletter and receive exclusive information, new releases, contests, giveaways, and free books, click here.

by CJ Verburg

Did you know San Francisco has more historical monuments and landmarks than Rome? (Pls RT)

Its strong Italian roots are one reason San Francisco’s North Beach is such a pleasure to explore. Known for its artists as well as its pasta, this northeastern corner of the city takes in a bit of the Financial District, Nob Hill, and Chinatown, half of Russian Hill, and most of Telegraph Hill and Fisherman’s Wharf. Stand in the middle of its main thoroughfare, Columbus Avenue, and (if you’re not hit by a giant white Google bus) you’ll see the Transamerica Pyramid at the south end, like the Arc de Triomphe. This distinctive spire replaced what was once the largest and most important building west of the Mississippi, the Montgomery Block (Montgomery between Washington and Clay), the city’s center of commerce in the 19th century.

A block north is the wonderful bronze-and-glass tower now owned by the neighborhood’s most famous filmmaker (Columbus & Kearny). High above the red awning of Cafe Zoetrope is what I like to think of as the Francis Ford Cupola. To see artifacts from The Godfather and other Coppola films, visit beautiful old Inglenook Vineyard (briefly renamed Niebaum-Coppola) in Napa County. Francis Ford Coppola is also the founder of North Beach Citizens, where homeless neighbors can get help with housing, food, clothes, even books and furniture.

The intersection of Columbus with Broadway is also where North Beach intersects with Grant Avenue and Chinatown. This is the densest part of the city in residents, tourists, and tourist attractions, from strip joints and comedy clubs to cathedrals. Restaurants include not just Italian and Chinese but Thai, Japanese, Basque, Istrian, and Irish/Indian, among others. It’s hard to find a bad one–they can’t afford the astronomical rent (see below). The Chinatown-North Beach border is most visible in the mural that covers a building on the corner of Broadway, Columbus, and Grant.  The Italian wrap-around side was recently restored; the Chinese side awaits funding. An aerial sculpture of flying books lights up at night to honor North Beach’s literary side.

Currently celebrating its 60th birthday is City Lights Books, cofounded by local poet and legend Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti has said he doesn’t think of himself as a Beat poet, but others tend to, if only because he’s the last man standing from the Ginsberg-Kerouac era.

Across the intersection, where the other neighborhood bookstore used to be, is the Beat Museum. Decades ago, when I worked a block down the hill at Canfield Press, this corner of Broadway was my bus stop, under a bright larger-than-life sign depicting another local legend, stripper Carol Doda. Now in her late 70s, Doda has a line of lingerie and occasionally makes personal reappearances. I hope she kept the sign.

A block farther, beside the Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi, is the Nuova Porziuncola. Former mayoral daughter and city supervisor Angela Alioto–now the National Director of the Knights of St. Francis–spearheaded the transformation of the erstwhile monks’ basketball court into a replica of the “tumbled down chapel in the woods” where a poor Umbrian wanderer became St. Francis of Assisi. (How did he get hold of all that marble and gilt?) She’s now working on the Poets’ Plaza, AKA Piazza St. Francis, proposed for the block of Vallejo St. in front of the Shrine.

A few more long, colorful blocks north is Washington Square Park. This is the neighborhood’s common, where Chinese tai chi exercisers dance around a boom-box every morning like graceful worshipers, homeless people and coffee-breakers share benches, and babies, dogs, pigeons, and techies frolic on the grass. In a grove of poplar trees stands a statue of that most San Franciscan founding father, Benjamin Franklin. The Mime Troupe still performs here every summer.

Looking north down Columbus, you can almost see to the end of the cable-car lines at North Point (Powell Street line: disembark here for CostPlus, Ross, and Trader Joe’s) and Aquatic Park (Hyde Street line: Fisherman’s Wharf and–ta da!–our own little North beach).