Discoveries: Arts and Culture

This is the view from my terrace and from the front of the house.  Aren't I lucky to have found such a wonderful view!    Do I need to go to HK, Maui, anywhere?  I am right here...with a beautiful world in my view...just what I want and need.             

I enjoyed this production.  Emily has a wonderful way of contemporanizing Shakespeare and the classics without losing the essential nature of the work.   There is a café in the backdrop of the set, out of which emerges the narrator.  I taught this work in my Classical Literature Course for graduate students at Nanjing University. This was an edgy contemporary rendering.

Basho’s Child // Beside the Fuji River/ there is a lost child crying/ dead for three hundred years/and who knows how many more/since the evening in autumn/when her mother carried her/out to the water noise/that would cover the sound of her crying/and then walked back into the silence/and the child cried all night/and into the frosty daylight/when the men who discovered her/stood over her like shadows/their hands talking but only/to each other until one of them/at last bent to put something on the leaves beside her/ before they all went away/with the sound of her drying/following him and following the words he would write about her / wherever the words might go THE SHADOW OF SIRIUS WS MERWIN 2009   p 70      

Met Susan and Clark at City Lights Bookshop, and then went to a small old fashioned Italian restaurant which was excellent!  Enjoyed wine and pasta, and then went to Clark's reading. He did a marathon reading of about 90 minutes, in two sets, like playing music.  He read unpublished work.  Bill Berkson and various friends from UC Berkeley attended, along with young poets and others.  Clark reads well; it was very enjoyable. See his American Text Sound Pieces and the album with Thurston "Comes Through in the Call Hold"  on ITunes.  Very cool!   

The three little ladies and their mother.  Isabelle is going as Laura Ingalls Wilder!  She is in the center between her little sister, Samantha and her older sister going as a hockey player(not quite so original).  

Enjoyed the open house of the artists who are members of the Hilltop club; Marlene Walters had nice oils of cats and fruits such as figs, and expressed satisfaction with her membership, encouraging me to consider.  Also talked at length with David Lance Goines, St Hieronymus Press, Inc, who has done the posters for Chez Panisse for years, and has a new book of those illustrations, which first printing is already sold out.  He continues a friendship with Alice Waters with whom he had an early relationship, in her starting up her California fusion cuisine, which is now widespread in other venues.    The club house was festively decorated for Christmas and it is certainly a welcoming group of people, mostly artists. Entry way red ribbon in palm A nutcracker standing guard...at doorway A traditional tree on stage!

WS Merwin is 86 years old, having been born on September 30.  He is exactly 20 years older than I.  We met when I was in my early 30's, though I knew his poetry and now own every book he translated as well as every edition of his poetry collection.  The early books he signed to me.  I gave two lectures on his work, one about the architecture of his poems and in his poems, doors and windows, and spaces...and the other about his search for the "lost camellia" of John Bartram, which was sponsored by NEH, The Swedish Heritage Museum, and the John Bartram Society of Philadelphia.  This lecture looked at WS Merwin as  poet interested in the Naturalists, and anticipating his ecological commitment to his palm garden which species he is interested in conserving. Going Only humans believe there is a word for goodbye we have one in every language one of the first words we learn it is made out of greeting but they are going away the raised hand waving ...

Pleased to discover Asia Foundation.  Met Judy Wilbur, Asia Foundation Trustee. Fellowship honors her late husband.  She says they travelled for business to SE Asia and continue to do so, for import export business.  We walked out together and talked briefly.  We  heard an archaeologist from Mynamar, who obtained his Masters degree at University of Pennsylvania, and was here under a grant for research to authenticate the objects in the Asian Art Museum from Mynamar.  Gentle-man and thorough and meticulous in his  clerical research on the temples in Puyi, I Burma and their counterpart, Dvaravati in Thailand....Puyi is a candidate for World Heritage monuments.   Nyunt Han, had received the Brayton Wilbur, Jr. fellowship in Asian Art. He has been affiliated with the Ministry of Culture for more than 30 years, and visited the US in 2011 to view Burmese art at the Northern Illinois University.    Was cordially gree...

Asia Society rep, Wendi Norris, Gallery Owner, Bruce Pickering, VP Asia Society, Left to Right   The Asia Society of Northern California held its Christmas or holiday event at a gallery on Jesse Street, right near the Academy of Art, and the Palace Hotel, showcasing an Indian artist, Ranu  Mukajuree, in "Apparitions" -- The artist  has just won a poster contest for Market Street, so her work will be seen on a two mile strip.   Asia Society Executive Director  Bruce Pickering and I exchanged greetings. Sherry the educational curator at the Berkeley Art Museum was enjoying the reception and exhibition.  Nice introduction to Wendi Norris and her gallery, which is associated with the project in NYC of which Leeza Ahmady is the director or the ACA.  Nice festive evening. THe show is on from November 14-December 21.  The exhibition features " a vibrant array of innovative textiles prints, paintings, collage and a hybrid film, focus...

One of the Butterflies The trouble with pleasure is the timing it can overtake me without warning and be gone before I know it is here it can stand facing me unrecognized while I am remembering somewhere else in another age or someone not seen  for years and never to be seen again in this world and it seems that I cherish only now a joy I was not aware of when it was here although it remains out of reach and will not be caught or named or called back and if I could make it stay as I want to it would turn into pain. ----W.S. Merwin, . The broadside which I took for him to sign from Peter Kock's press  associated with the Codex Foundation in Berkeley held the following poem, "Good Night" which when Merwin  told me it was for his old black dog...I replied to  him I always teach my students it is only a poem if there are at least three levels of meaning, to which he replied, "The Arabs have four meanings in each poem." Good Night Sleep softl...

From the Start Who did I think was listening when I wrote down the words in pencil at the beginning words for singing to music I did not know and people I did not know would read them and stand to sing them already knowing them while they sing they have no names -W.S. Merwin "The laughing  Thrush" O nameless joy of the morning tumbling upward note by note out of the night and the hush of the dark valley and out of whatever has not been there song unquestioning and unbounded yes this is the place and the one time in the whole of before and after with all of memory waking into it and the lost visages that hover around the edge of sleep constant and clear and the words that lately have fallen silent to surface among the phrases of some future if there is a future here is where they all sing the first daylight whether or not there is anyone listening   

When I was at the reception for WS Merwin and the documentary film "Even though the Whole World is burning, produced by William Coles, and directed by Stefan Schaefer, ostensibly, about his life, mostly from archival work, and with his current wife and stepson's interviews, along with curiously, in some sense, Harold Bloom! ...people asked what  were my favorite poems.  For a person who carries his poems with me wherever I go they are many...so I will start with one that I love:  I have always loved the story of the Chinese princess carried to the court of the Tibetans. .  The Nomad Flute You that sang to me once sing to me now let me hear your long lifted note survive with me the star is fading I can think father than that but I forget do you hear me do you still hear me does your air remember you o breath of morning night song morning song I have with me all that I do not now I have lost none of it but I know better now than to ask you whe...

Amy Tan spoke at the Norse Theater in the Arts and Lectures Series.   She is in conversation with Roy Eisenhardt.   A delight as always; Amy Tan  has such an unaffected delivery.   She says "coincidence" has played a large role in her inspirations for her novels.  She is searching for her identity; she does not want to forget people and events in her life.  She likes to preserve the method of Memory and the Moment.  She has been reading Walt Whitman and likes his search for "the Self".  She captures memory through a photo of her grandmother sitting on her desk and from her mother's stories. Rachmaninov's third concerto, the first movement in D is her favorite and  and she plays it every moring, before she starts to write.  She repeats one moment continually until she is through a passage in her novel...when she sits down to write, she knows where she is, when she turns on the music. She is concerned more with e...

         WS Merwin and the actor who will read his poem, which last line is title of film. The poem, Rainfall, read by actor, Hector Elizondo The reception was held in the Seabury auditorium, on the terrace, where the film was shown to a full house.  Access to Merwin was very limited by his wife and by the director of his conservancy, Karen Bouris.  The sponsors of the reception which allowed all profits to benefit the Conservancy was the FIM group.  Financial and Investment Management Group, Ltd located in Kahului on Hana Highway.  I met Korena Burgio, a young woman who grew up on Maui, and has joined their team. Introduction to the film provided by John Burnham Schwartz who said Merwin became his stepfather when he was 15.  He subsequently met Jane Kramer's daughter in Paris, and married her.  He appears in interview in the film.  The author of five novels, The Commoner, and Resevation Road, his journali...

I do believe that, as it was stated today, the Berkeley Rep has to be one of the best university theaters in the country.    This production is inventive and original, employing the interplay of a pianist and her music, and her narrative of her mother's life.  It is Krystalnacht in Vienna, the same that Lili Kahlaer of Princeton escaped, first to London, and then to NYC and then to Princeton...having been paid for, as was Einstein, by someone like in the Spielberg movie. Curious that 11/9 started the holocaust, and 9/11 started America's...national crisis through its first attack on its borders.  Compelling to hear these survivor's stories as her parents were both killed in Auschwitz, one of the worst death camps but she and her two sisters were reunited in London. I have always been so drawn to these stories, to these people; I somehow think still that my mother was an Alsace Jew. She looked Jewish, perhaps even acted so.  I don't know...a myste...

What a delightful evening!  It is wonderful to see Harriet Fulbright again; she is now in her 80s and still regal and does not miss a tack in her questions and answers, which refrain was that she wished that many more people could be fulbrighters and in that way, expand its vision and impact even more.  She emphasized how much of a good force for peace and understanding it remains, as people, after being on a fulbright think differently when they return to their professions.  Her husband died in 1995; that must have been about the same year as we had the reception for the North American campaign for the business SAID school at Oxford at the UN, where she and her husband were honored, and which Henry Kissinger and his wife attended. It was quite the occasion.  Mr. Fulbright had been a Rhoades Scholar and that inspired him when he was in public office to create an international exchange that would change the way people think.   The Chair of the Graduate...

Ute Frevert was an impressive lecturer, who had been Professor German History at Yale Univeresity from 2003-2007.  Her research interests include social and cultural history of modern times, gender history, and political history. Some of her best known work examines the history of womem and gender relations in modern Germany.  She is an honorary professor at the Free University in Berlin and was awarded the prestigious Leibnitz Prize in 1998.  She presented this lecture in the Townsend Center for the Humanities, as pat of the Townsend Working Groups in German History and History of the Emotions. Trust breeds trust.  Trust secures social cohesion.  An issue of maintaining trust vs. betraying trust.   Trust is voluntary a kind of gift.  Asks for reciprocity.   I trust you as long as you believe and act in terms of my self interest.  Trust is based on some form of knowledge and past experience.  Monarchs who trust people w...

Attended the exhibition and viewing for a couple of hours and the symposia with Jay Xu museum director providing an introduction.  Here are a few pieces from the main collection of Korean art.       

A Dutch born artist has taken up art and has created kimonos, from in part, recycled coffee filters, which twenty people save for her....including the mayor of Berkeley, who lives on her street.  Her son has married a Thai physical therapist and lives with her in a stilt house in her village; she is off to see her.  The other offspring, a daughter has married a Swede. She lives alone in Berkeley and documents her art making.  She has an upcoming exhibition at a gallery in the Presidio district.   Use of coffee filters. 20 people including the mayor of Berkeley who lives on her street give her coffee filters. They wash and dry them for her. Kimonos made of coffee cup filters, with interiors of various documents from the life. Room divider made of balls constructed from scraps of paper

  We enjoyed a visit with this talented young artist, Recheng .  Her website is:  http://rechengtsang.com   She admires E Hesse, and James Turrel, the former visible in her work.  An artist who lives on the Berkeley/Oakland border, she has carved out a career in porcelain sculpture, having studied at UC Berkeley and then obtaining her masters at Univ of Washington Seattle, and then returning to Japan to study with masters, there.  She has been pursuing her art over ten years, but nearly five were spent in child birthing and child care. Her children are now of an age where she can resume her own creative work in her studio which is on the top floor of her home. example of porcelain on art canvas in her living room Created as part of project in residency in the Netherlands The pursuit of beauty and the creation of art is as necessary to life as is the eating of food, sleep, and a shelter, perhaps, moreso!  The afternoon was delightfu...