ACA

I bunched these works under the name “ACA.”

As in Obamacare?

Yes. The Affordable Care Act. But more than half of these works are set before that act became law.

Let me guess: Not much has changed.

Correct. There are 50 years between Frederick Wiseman’s “Hospital” and the docuseries “Lenox Hill.” The hospital as an institution has not evolved in half a century. What I like about “Lenox Hill” is that they discuss the business of running a hospital. Talent attracts surgeons who will do procedures that will generate income for the hospital system. Caring in a capitalist society is a business, whether you’re a safety net hospital such as Metropolitan Hospital or a fancy community hospital such as Lenox Hill. So Richard Widmark’s Chief of Surgery character in “Coma” can feel justified in his shady scheme.

(d. Frederick Wiseman, 1970)

(2020)

Do you think Paddy Chayefsky saw Frederick Wiseman’s “Hospital” and then wrote “The Hospital”?

They’re set in the same hospital. Most likely yes. As much as I love Chayefsky (a fellow DeWitt Clinton High School graduate), “The Hospital” has not aged well.

Because of the hospital murders?

A message with a blunt scalpel: Hospitals kill because they don’t care. I enjoyed that. Also got a kick out of seeing Frances Sternhagen asking for insurance information from a patient in the emergency room. And Stockard Channing as an ER nurse. The main reason it hasn’t aged well is Diana Rigg’s character, Barbara. She’s an ex-nurse, a counterculture foil to George C. Scott’s Chief of Staff MD. She works out her daddy issues / institutional issues with him overnight.

(d. Arthur Hiller, 1971)

Not a good portrayal of nursing in the media.

Nor is Elizabeth Ashley’s nurse in “Coma.”

Well, she’s scary in person.

The nurses in “The Student Nurses” are more exemplary.

Isn’t that a soft core flick?

Yes. But they were drawn better than Chayefsky’s nurses. My nursing professor would’ve probably failed me if I admitted to liking “The Student Nurses.”

(d. Stephanie Rothman, 1970)

Tell me a moment when you were a student nurse. Did you fantasize about marrying a doctor?

No. “Grey’s Anatomy” had just premiered and our nursing professors demystified a lot of their storylines in class. As soon as we did clinicals, that demystified a lot of Hollywood Hospital. Believe it or not “The Student Nurses” really did remind me of being a student nurse. 

Where were their preceptors?

I know, they had no preceptors! They were student-nursing on their own! Independent learning. They were assigned to different clinical areas, the way we as student nurses were. But it shows you that nursing’s purview is wide. I think the movie is so insightful about that. The student assigned to community nursing  became part of a social justice endeavor. Nursing can go beyond the hospital.

That nurse falls for a radical in a poor community.

It’s a skin flick with a lot on its mind. Maybe because it was a skin flick that its director Stephanie Rothman managed to get away with a lot. Like talking about abortion honestly.

Could you imagine paying to go see this movie to get titillated and then bump into an abortion subplot?

You got a lot of sex before getting to that plot point. It showed you what an elective abortion was during that time.

If you knew a doctor who could come to your house ...

True. Abortion runs through this group of works. “Coma” has a therapeutic abortion in its plot. When the patient ends up in a coma, how you feel about her depends on whether you’re pro-choice or pro-life.

(d. Michael Crichton, 1978)

If one were pro-life, one would think she deserved to be hung in wires, like the comatose patients in the movie?

I must say that was a lot of OR manpower for a therapeutic abortion. 

It’s not that intense anymore. “Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always” walks you through the 3-day process. 2 days if you had an early appointment.

(d. Eliza Hittman, 2020)

I thought that would be a nail-biter like “4 Months, 3 weeks and 2 days,” but it’s not. And then I realized we are not 80s Romania yet. Abortion is still legal in this country, but access has become difficult. There’s no shady doctor in “Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always.” The obstacles are also not easy. 

The movie talks about the abortion procedure in a factual and non-judgmental way.

The most painful part of that movie was the questionnaire. Not the procedure.

A good questionnaire can mine the truth.

That scene is pure acting. Reminds me of some Acting I exercise when we were given the most ordinary words and act it as a scene.

If there’s a main theme that courses through these works it’s that of access. That’s what Obamacare was supposed to do, right?

Access to abortion in “The Student Nurses,” “Coma,” and “Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always.”

Also access to care.

Metropolitan Hospital is still around, thank God. There are two moments in Wiseman’s “Hospital” that stand out. The doctor calls New York Hospital (now New York Presbyterian - Cornell) and complains about sending a patient from there to Metropolitan’s ER. The implication is that the patient was probably not a desirable patient financially for them. The other moment is when a psychiatrist phones for help to prevent a gay hustler from ending up in an institution.

Access to the top, in the case of “The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir.”

The author of that book, Michel Harper, writes about being passed for a promotion because she’s black and a woman. Her experiences as an emergency medicine MD are similar to the scenes in the emergency room in “Lenox Hill.”

(2020)

Tell me a moment when you were breaking.

Breaking as in crying? Like that neurologist in “Lenox Hill”? A night when my patient died surrounded by his family and I cried with them. I cried some more in the staff bathroom. Then I received my new admission later that night. He was a patient I had taken care of before and lost his vision because of his worsening disease. He didn’t see me cry because he was blind. But I went to the bathroom again and cried some more.

What was the beauty in that?

Michele Harper likens it to kintsugi after you piece yourself back together. You don't have access inside me - You can’t see it, but I’m mended with gold, silver, and platinum inside.

House of Women

What do you think about when a house is full of women?

That it’s a brothel? Isn’t there some old law somewhere that a certain number of women under one roof is considered a brothel?

I think that’s a myth. But if you were a woman, where would you rather live? A women-only boardinghouse, a sorority house, or a brothel?

Is the boarding house like the one in “Stage Door”?

No Ginger Rogers. No calla lilies. But Kathleen Freeman would be in it!

If it’s “The Ladies Man” boarding house, then yes.

You would want to live in a dollhouse?

Like a Barbie Doll.

One of the best movie sets ever created. 

Too bad it’s a Jerry Lewis movie. 

Starring Jerry Lewis. Directed, produced, and written by Jerry Lewis. After watching it, I still don’t understand what the French see in Jerry Lewis. I don’t care what Cahiers du Cinema says. And that set, as gorgeous as it is, screams misogyny. It conceives the ladies in the house as nothing more than living dolls. It’s definitely a doll house I would like to own.

What do you expect? It’s from the 60s. Peak “Mad Men” era.

The female characterizations are as flat as paper dolls.

It’s a dork’s dream. To be the only man in a house full of women and be fawned over.

But he was great in Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy.”

And as a telethon host.

Can’t say I was an avid annual viewer of that. I guess I like more restraint when it comes to comic acting. He was always mugging for the camera in “The Ladies Man.”

 

You wouldn’t live in a sorority house?

No. It’s usually featured in a horror movie or a skin flick. Sometimes both.

Tell me a moment when you had a black Christmas.

I associate a black Christmas with death. Just like the movie “Black Christmas.” Not serial killer deaths. But I’d say Christmas was black after my brother died. Isn’t that always the case when a family member dies? The first holiday after they’re gone seems like a black holiday.

It’s going to be a black Christmas for many the way COVID-19 cases are rising.

The movie reminded me about “Silent Night, Deadly Night.” I remember seeing that in the movie house when I was in first grade. My mother’s friend brought me to see it. I think it was after a Christmas party.

That must have scarred you as a child. Watching Santa Claus killing people.

I don’t think it destroyed Christmas for me. Sunday school in Bible Baptist Church already burst that Santa Claus bubble for me. I like movies that blend genres.

Is “Black Saturday” a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie?

Depends on the mood you’re in. Like “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”

Do you care that Olivia Hussey’s character is the final girl?

Considering her acting ability, no. But I guess audiences at the time will care about the character depending how they feel about abortion.

My question was - are they graduate students? Because Olivia Hussey, Andrea Martin, and Margot Kidder do not look like  undergraduates.

What I found more chilling was whenever the camera switches to the killer’s POV. Yes, like “Peeping Tom,” but somehow more disturbing because as an audience member you’re filling in motives which the movie leaves unresolved.

Total B movie. Which one would you be in the sorority house?

I’d like to think I would be the final girl. The survivor. But we don’t know if she survives.

I would be Margot Kidder’s character, the boozy sorority sister.

Too bad Andrea Martin didn’t have a solo number …

But she had a fabulous death scene.

If you were a courtesan in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s “Flowers of Shanghai,” which flower would you be? Crimson, Pearl, Emerald, Jasmin, and Jade?

All of them.

Whoever Tony Leung is with. For a movie set in 19th-century Shanghai, I was surprised how fiercely feminist those women are.

I loved all of them. They understood economics more than the men did.

Because it’s a matter of survival for them. All of them had some agency in their fates. I thought they would be tragic opium-addled figures. And they weren’t. Totally went against my expectations. I'm a delicate flower, so I wouldn't survive in that Shanghai.

And so beautiful to look at.

That camera hovering like an opium haze. Courtesy of Mark Lee Ping-Bing. Even more beautiful with the restored print.

Makes me want to see the restored “In the Mood for Love,” which he did with Christopher Doyle.

Now, can we restore other movies shot by Mark Lee Ping-Bing?

"The Vertical Ray of the Sun!"

“Millenium Mambo” and “Three Times”

***

WORKS

THE LADIES MAN (1961, dir. Jerry Lewis)

BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974, dir. Bob Clark)

FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI (1998, dir. Hou Hsiao-Hsien)

Unicorn Lit

Do unicorns poop rainbows?

Isn’t that a Philip K. Dick novel?

I don’t think so.

What “Blade Runner” is based on?

It’s based on “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

Then why is there a unicorn in the movie?

An ingredient to make replicants more human. To dream is human. To dream of mythic creatures even more so. 

Hmm. But are those implanted memories? Or things he has seen? “A moment that will be lost in time, like tears in the rain?” 

A scene I had never seen until recently.

You’ve never seen “Blade Runner”?!

No. But I did see “Blade Runner 2049.”

And you call yourself a film buff?

Exactly what my brother said.

It’s a very famous scene. 

Number 42 on AFI’s “100 Years … 100 Movie Quotes.” I admit to some lacunae in my cinephilia. I have thought a lot about that quote and why it’s moving.

Tell me why it’s moving to you.

I wasn’t thinking much about Rutger Hauer’s Roy Blatty as a replicant nearing human qualities … but as a repository of knowledge. 

Are memories the same as knowledge? What he witnessed, stored in memory, is the same as books or footage, I think … For him to die and lose all that is like the burning of the library in Alexandria.

It’s just like losing a server.

Which really pissed you off when it happened because you lost all the photos you saved in it.

You mean all the porn you saved in it …

That, too.

Then it made me think of dementia. Every day losing moments like tears in the rain. Then it made me think of Cartesian duality. How we say they are not the same person as they were anymore after dementia. Same body, different mind? Or was it the mind all along, so the body becomes different when the mind becomes demented?

Do demented people dream of unicorns?

I don’t know. Probably not. I think demented people try to hang on to as much reality as possible - to demonstrate what’s real as much as possible so they can prove to others that they are not demented.

They don’t want to speak of unicorns because they don’t want to be deemed as kooks. But we’re surrounded by unicorns now.

Kind of trippy to watch “Blade Runner” in 2020 since it is set in 2019. 

Very little of its technology came true but it predicted we will be dreaming of unicorns.

A steep rise in the use of the word unicorn since 2000.

Unicorn startups. Swingers looking for unicorns. Unicorns everywhere. A unicorn selling Squatty Potty. Unicorn poop cookies. 

The unicorn as queer icon. Tattooed on Amrou Al-Kadhi’s chest.

AKA Glamrou!

I found them nakedly honest in “Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between.” 

A product of good therapy.

So soul baring. They would need a therapist to piece themselves after that.

Tell me a moment in your life when you were a unicorn.

I felt like a unicorn as a 16 year old freshman in college. I was that rare thing among my friends. Being young. My queerness was not what made me a unicorn. But the paradox of being a unicorn is that what makes you special is what makes you feel acutely different from others. I don’t think the longing to be treated as someone ordinary ever goes away.

How many unicorns will it take to not be a unicorn anymore?

If I go to Therapy, all of us cease to be unicorns because we are in the company of unicorns?

Exactly. Gays in a gay bar cease to be unicorns.

So true. They turn into narwhals when the work lights are turned on at 3 a.m.

Or white rhinoceroses.

Rhinoceri.

Probably what Ctesias mistook as unicorns. 

Or Unibulls.

Like the pens?

No. More real than unicorns. This biologist from Maine, Franklin Dove, surgically experimented on a calf to make two horns into one.  

That’s messed up.

Unibulls or more real than unicorns.

Stop messing with my head. I feel like Susannah York in “Images.”

Well, she got messed up by unicorns.

That’s a messed up children’s book.

Like what age group is that book supposed to be for?

“In Search of Unicorns.” That’s the title of the book.

Her inspiration are the “The Lady and Unicorn” tapestries from the Musee de Cluny. So it feels like she’s leaning into the sexual symbolism associated with unicorns. Like Tracy Chevalier did in “The Lady and the Unicorn.”

“In Search of Unicorns.” Well, search no more - she could go to Therapy. 

More like medieval Christianity symbolism. Purity, virginity-

Yes. Phallic. So she could still go to Therapy.

Do you think her head was messed up because she kept wanting to ride the unicorn? Even though it wasn’t her husband’s unicorn?

So her psyche was fractured by being horny? And she has to kill the slutty self. Possibly. 

I admired it more this time. I appreciated the music more and how effective the lo-fi tricks were. Simply achieved by doors and lighting.

And creepy narration of that children’s book.

I’m sure you can find that in a bookstore in Brooklyn.

It should be in a gift shop at the Musee de Cluny.

Yes, next to an origami unicorn.

NY High City

Witnessed from last week,
Three different occasions,
The following scenes:

Amusing commute:
High school girls high on "gummies."
Loud curses and smacks.

Sidewalk. Homeless man,
Flying high, unbelts, looks for
Bedbugs in his crotch.

Bridge and tunnel teens
Out to score Oxycontins.
Pre-party ritual.

The Year that Was

Pausing to reflect on the year that was before looking ahead.

Some of the highlights of the past year:

Homemade bhelpuri: The first winter in 5 years not spent in India. The polar vortex visited and after the 15th snowfall, I regretted not going there. This consoled me. 2015 will remedy this homesick feeling. 

Fire Island Pines: This is why our book club is better than yours. Can't ask for a better way to spend an afternoon with a group of friends and more often catch up on our lives, and then talk about the book. My favorite book club pick this year: Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried." The first chapter can stand alone as a masterful short story. The woman in the wine store talked to me about it when I was picking up my contribution to bring to the gathering. 

Closure: My fellow nurses / co-workers ate our feelings. It was the first time I attended a patient's memorial service. It seemed fitting to be one of the first persons to provide him care and see him at the end. I reflected on how much his death affected me. To see his family and friends recognize me after months of not being in the oncology unit anymore felt so gratifying. If I have doubts about how much difference I make in the patients I see, I just think of this day.

Difficult to top this one. All productions I see at the Metropolitan Opera House will be measured against this. 

Waded my feet for the first time at the Jersey Shore. A brief summer jaunt, serenaded by Johnny Mathis. 

My combat gear. This is how I start my day before I leave my desk. 2014 saw me complete my first year as a full fledged nurse practitioner. Lots of ups and downs. Different kinds of stress than before. These are my essentials. When I have them all on me, I'm ready to go.

Just when I thought my day was going bad, a former patient's family member sees me and gifts me a bottle of champagne on the spot as a thank you for his father's care. I live for surprises like these. Hoping for more of these in 2015.

The penultimate ride from Disneyland before heading home to New York. (The last one was from Big Thunder Mountain, of course.) May all my days be full of adventure and joy like this. 

A Birthday

I saw a dead body on my birthday. It’s not unusual in my line of work. But I wasn’t at work.

The body was in a subway car. The train was parked at the station, all doors open. From afar, the body looked like a large crumpled black garbage bag. There were two other fellow commuters who surrounded it. Maybe it was a passenger who passed out. I went to see if I could help. The man was pale, eyes closed, his glasses askew. It seemed he had slid off his seat. A black umbrella was on the seat next to him. It appeared he had a heart attack. But that’s for the medical examiner to determine.

I felt sorry for him. He died alone among strangers. Suddenly a sterile hospital felt like a less cold place to die. What bothered me was that I told this to at least two MTA employees walking by. Not one of them stopped to look inside the car. “There’s a dead man on the train” must not seem disturbing to hear out loud for them. Saying it out loud certainly felt unnatural. Maybe a dead body on a train is not unusual in their line of work.

Is this an omen for the year to come? What a way to contemplate one’s own mortality on one’s birthday. But as my wise mother said after I shared this story: when it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go.

A New Year

 

 

This year, I resolve to have no resolutions again.

 

Resolutions make New Year's Day into a day for reinvention, a do-over, or "Ctrl Alt Delete" Day. I'm not scoffing at the idea of striving to improve one's self. I have my share of self-help books. I suppose the idea is to reflect and resolve what is wrong with one's self. Too often, the resolutions I hear and read about are to be "a new me."  It's unrealistic and an easy set up for failure.

 

I don't remember making resolutions as a kid growing up in the Philippines. It's a Filipino trait to be fatalist. (It said so in my nursing textbook describing Filipino culture.) I take whatever the universe gives. When others wished me a "Happy and a Prosperous New Year" in the Philippines, I always felt they were really saying "I hope you get more good things than bad." Sounds passive. That I am not a master of my own fate. Maybe so. What's so bad about that?

 

A fatalist mentality has made me work with what I've got since I can't trade in this "me" for another. It has made me a proponent of self evolution, not reinvention. To learn and build every day, not just today.

 

Here's to more good things than bad in 2014!

Saints and Souls

All Saint's Day and All Souls' Day are observed holidays in the Philippines.
Besides having no school (it usually falls during a "semester" break), they're holidays where going to the cemetery is fun - especially at night.
I have a vivid memory of visiting my grandfather and uncle's graves on the night of All Saint's Day.
My grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins trekked to the cemetery together bringing candles and fruits to offer the dead.
I was frightened on the way there since it was nighttime and it was dark.
But upon entering the cemetery, the horror movie in my mind vanished.
The place was brighter than day from all the lit candles.
People were smiling, laughing, catching up with old friends - and I don't mean the dead ones - that it was like a big fiesta.
It is one of the reasons I miss the P.I.

I was watching the news last week.
They reported that the severe typhoon season caused some flooding in many cemeteries.
Some people worried that they wouldn't be able to visit their dead loved ones.
The newscaster joked that for those people who can't visit the cemetery, their dead loved ones will pay them a visit instead.

PINOYS KEEP ALL SAINTS' DAY TRADITION ALIVE

At the Barber's

Today at the barbershop ...
Thank God, I had my haircut before this kid.
He runs up to the barber's chair I just vacated.
The barber asks, "How do you want your hair cut?"
He replies, "I want it really short. We have lice in our school."

Seeing You in September

First day of the BERs.
Time flies.
And the rest will zip by.

First day of school.
Last year of this (ANP/GNP) program.
May I be immune from senioritis.

Balikbayan

Who is a balikbayan?
Not me, because I am not a box.
I qualify for the balikbayan bisa,
But on the immigration form to enter the Philippines,
I am compelled to check off “Tourist.”
Balikbayan seems meant for OFWs.
Besides, I didn’t have a balikbayan box.

More compelled by the scenes at the NAIA departure gate:
Of future balikbayans leaving for the first time.
The anticipation of their first airplane ride,
The feeling of escape.
(My friends refer to those who work overseas as “nakalabas” or “nakagawas”
As if they’ve managed to squeeze out of a cage).
One man called what seemed like everyone on his contacts to use up his cell “load,”
And cried after hanging up with his mother.
He had to go to the bathroom and collect himself.
This must be what my parents felt.

Upon arrival at JFK,
The immigration officer asked,
“What’s the purpose of your visit?”
He looks at my passport.
“What am I saying? You live here.”
He stamps it and lets me in – back into where I live.
I still look like I’m fresh off the boat.

Snowmaggedon

Snowstorm #8.

That Robert Frost comes to mind -
"I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice."

Fall Back

Nothing sadder than looking at the automated clock go from 02:59 to 02:00.
Not looking forward to changing the clocks in the patient rooms the rest of the night.