Discoveries: Arts and Culture

This was fabulous!  Great theater.  The Berkeley Rep is innovative.  I cried and laughed and then cried and laughed; no better representation of good acting and a well directed production by Richard ET White.  An Americanization of the play, "The Cherry Orchard" by Chekov.  Hardly an American short story writer does not acknowledge Chekov as the ultimate short story writer. Raymond Carver, included.  Hemingway.  Fitzgerald and their contemporary versions.   There was no one that was stellar.  I think the audience sympathized with Sonia.  It worked, and that is what is important.  The nostalgia and the update of the feelings of loss of another time in history, a more comfortable and perhaps more human time, is well conveyed.   See:  www.berkeley.rep.org  

One of the warm welcomes to UC Berkeley was the return of the master teacher art historian, James Cahill, one of the "founders" of Chinese Art History study in the West.  I met him in 1987 in Shanghai, at Fudan University, when there was a total of 150 foreigners in the city.  He was giving a series of lectures and collecting, and shared some of his finds with me over tea, in his neighboring guest house apartment.  Anyway, then through the years I heard him lecture in Princeton, at the Institute for Advanced Studies, when I met his wife and tiny little boys.  One of those sons came to the opening of the "Meiren" exhibition at the BAM.  I met his daughter, Sarah, who is a music celebrity at UCB, and directs a concert series for the museum.  Thin, red haired and intelligent in appearance, in a long skirt and sweater, she accompanied her father, who was in fine form for the reception, but bed ridden for the inaugral lecture on Sunday. I have since watche...

Berkeley Chamber Performances Music at the Julia Morgan Berkeley City Club ... a club member  enjoys swimming in the Julia Morgan designed pool.  Holly  describes the club as a real oasis, and I agree with her.  Her mother was from Rhodesia(now Tanzania), and used to have pleasure in saying that she (her other)  she was a true "African American"! Holly missed the chance to take the trip they had planned to Tanzania together, as her mother developed Alzheimers.  She spoke Swahili and taught it when she was in her last days confined to a care center.   Holly's father was a surgeon, and she went to UCB for her degree and has been here ever since.  She is adopted. I told her that is a movie:  "Admission".  She found her mother, but she was dead, and her fellow brothers were not interested in a relationship as they are fundamentalists, and did not want to acknowledge her.  I think her action, to know her own identity, was cou...

  What a pleasure to listen to Michael Tilson Thomas conduct a series of short pieces, including Copland's "Music from the film "Our Town " (Thornton Wilder) and Delius, who composed pieces in Florida " On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring (1912).  The program also included Sibelius, "Valse Triste (1903) and Rachmaninov " Vocalise, Opus 34, no. 14 ", ending with " Cortege de Bacchus, from Sylvia (1876) .  MTT says that he plans to record these short pieces of which he is fond.    The amazing moment was the Piano Concerto No. 3 in C. Minor Opus 37(1803) Beethoven played by Emmanuel Ax  .  I have never heard it played so brilliantly, fingered so exquisitely, and it appeared that MMT felt the same, as he turned and simply gazed at Emmanuel Ax , at one point, with clear admiration.   He, along with Yo Yo Ma, has achieved a stellar position in his playing. Truly transcendent.   Photo shows MTT in rehearsal.  ...

Found this book in the library sale for $1 and nearly read it in one sitting, finishing it last evening...a compelling artful telling of a young woman wanting to sell her soul to the devil for a year of freedom, and managing to do so...in the form of a man who plays her grandfather her guardian, for her and she has her year...and then what follows:  betrayal, the discovery(as in Jane Eyre, there is a wife!) and then when Rosamond will not obey her captor, he puts her in a mental asylum, from which she escapes to a nunnery, where the Father Ignatius befriends her, and more. The rest of the novel, she is pursued by the lover, who is determined to have her, but she resists on moral principles, and will not relent...a portrait in the beginning of the novel will reappear in the final chapter, artfully tying together the tangled threads of this novel of deceptions, of betrayals, and yet, what redeems it, is love; even the Satanic character grows to understand the meaning of love, but no...

With Yom Kippur this weekend, my memory travelled back to Lili Kahler and her respect for Hannah Arendt.  Like the Italian journalist, Fallaci, HA  played an important role with respect to the Nazi trials, in that The New Yorker asked her to let them publish the chapters from her book on the Eichmann trials.   Readers are enraged by the fact that she reveals that Jewish leaders were complicit with the Nazi extermination of the Jews to the death camps.  She, herself, was held in a "detention camp" in France, when Hitler invaded France.   We are reminded of her philosophical authoring of a book on totalitarianism, and her being a student of Heidigger.  He taught her to think, which was her goal.  His words become her own:  thinking makes us human, and gives us choice.  She finds Eichmann a "mediocre" man, one who abdicated choice and thought, and therefore, "did his job" in extermination of the Jews.  He was, in her view, a...

Balkan spirituality was communicated by this pioneering performance artist, who used the body to express and experience pain, starting with a red star representing the Soviet domination of her home Serbia, as a child.  Death and pain is something she lived with, as a child; her grandmother always prepared the dress in which she would be buried, and it would change each year with the fashion.   She says all Balkan people live with death and dying as a part of life.  As for nudity, she says Americans have a problem with it, but she does not, and her performances find less constraints when performed in Europe. .  "We come into the life, naked".  She revealed that a turning point has come to her after 40 years, that she now believes the body has a life of its own, and is not controlled by the mind; this illumination has recharged her energies.  She denies being masochistic.  She now knows it is not necessary to experience pain, or inflict pain u...

Attended lunch at World Affairs Council, in San Francisco, for Italian Consul General. Mauro Battocchi.  A retired journalist for the Chronicle asked him several questions, one being where to read more about Italy, and Mauro  Battocchi recommended the NYT.    He says, as I heard in China, from the Ministery of Finance, on CNN, that Italy is supported by close to 60% private wealth. 70% of its citizens own their homes. Banks and corporates have low debt.  However, the "fixed job" for life is disappearing.  The idea of "staying in your territory for the rest of your life" is disappearing.   The new prime minister is the youngest in history, only 47 years old, and Italy is restructuring itself to be more liberalized and economically sound.  It is a conservative country; people tend to stay in their home towns, and are loyal to their regions.  Whereas Italy has more than 50% of its capital in private wealth, America has 42per...

People keep asking me what I am reading.  Difficult question.  Power and Wealth by Orville Schell, when I get a chance... highly intelligent, but requires rapt attention, and I have not gotten beyond the first two chapters which I heard before listening to him talking about the book and its inception, at WAFC, SF.  I am reading articles on Korean Buddhism, for my lecture course, namely those on the "Pensive Buddah". I read a short story in Harpers magazine, which I really liked: by Lydia Davis, who won the 2012 Man Booker International Prize.   I do not know her work, but Farrar Straus and Giroux is publishing "Can' and Won't" which sounds intriguing in 2014  The title is " The Two Davises and the Rug ".   I just love its illogical logic, and how it shows the mind in activity in interactive with identity and relationship. As I have a "rug culture" period, especially in Istanbul, and on my Fulbright in Central Asia, and Azerbaijan with...

I spent a delightful hour or so at First Thursday, revisiting The Scott Nichols photography gallery which has stunning works, including the current celebration of George Tice, "A Photographer's Photographer" from September 5-November 16, 2013.  Reception will take place September 26: 5:30-7:30 pm and the lst Annual Fotovision lecture at UC Berkeley School of Journalism, Friday, September 27, 6:30-8:30 pm.   www.scottnicholsgallery.com "The Kora Dialogues" a series of paintings created by Ricardo Mazal, whom the Maeght Foundation in France has collected, can be found at the Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery   Mt Kalish became source material for the third part of his trilogy at the suggestion of a friend who had made the famous pilgrimage and he made his own personal trek, or Kora, a circumambution around Kalish in June, July 2009.   He started his journey with his wife, at a Buddhist monastery at the base, famous for "sky burials".   S...

Thanks to Foster Goldman, I was able to find a way to join him at his artist, Diane Rosenblum's gallery, the Slate Gallery , for her reception, in a group show.  Diane and I visited and I looked through both of her publications; she has a wide range of credits.  I love her sky and cloud photographs, a motif, since Constable, brought through Modernism by Stieglitz, not forgetting the German Romantic treatment...and my summer in NEH exploring clouds in O Keefe, so Naturalism through Modernism, and then of course, it goes into Surrealism and forward...in any event, a longer topic than I want to explore today.   The scene is lively, with most people participating in the mall walk and food festivals, drink and Eritrean  and Ethiopian foods being highly popular, though I caught my bus, at the stop in front of the Commonwealth (Irish) pub which was well frequented and lively in watching a sporting contest - the Giants.  ?  Noted the neighborhood then bec...

At a World Affairs Council gathering in San Francisco, in  listening to the remarks of the Ambassador of South Korea to the US, on August 21, Ahn Ho-young, could not be more positive about South Korea's relationship with the USA, and their shared congruency in perceptions.  He stated only that S Korea" must be prepared" for any actions by North Korea in the future.    As a graduate of Georgetown University, he  endeared the audience by reminding them he had spoken to the about a decade ago as Secretary, when that ambassador had not been able to meet with them, and that he was delighted to return to San Francisco.  He was ambassador to the kingdom of BELGIUM and served as ambassador in the Korean Mission to the EU.  His background is in the financial sector: leader of Korean delegations to OECD, and WTO.  His ministry posts in Korea have included Director General of Multilaterial trade bureau and Deputy Minister for Trade.   The ev...

Visited again with Foster Goldman , at home, where we viewed new acquisitions, and he told me about his adventures with the exhibition in Vienna and in Berlin of the surreal piece which he in part carried on the plane and put in his luggage.  Its companion is in the MOMA, NYC and they will not let it travel in the 80 years it has been there; we know it as the "fur cup" by the same artist.  His luggage was lost, and then found, and the piece delivered safely to the museum, and it is now on display in Berlin.  The other news is that he has purchased two pieces from Vintage in Petaluma, that baroque porcelain, about which he has little information, but which he cherishes, and was the centerpiece with an orchid in it, on the table.  The new painting from the same source reminds him of a Wayne Thiebauld, was painted in Puerto Rico in the 1940s.  He has hired a young assistant whom I meet who is cataloguing his collection.   He is off to the Asia Week in NY...

    An invitation to visit Peter Koch in his wonderful studio printing office in Berkeley.  I came home with a broadside by W.S. Merwin, "Good Night" from SMALL ELEGIES, 2011.   Peter Koch also published Joseph Brodsky's WATERMARK, a special edition made with Robert Morgan's photo images,  organized by  his wife, Susan  in Venice. Watermark is available from Farrar, Strauss, Giroux.  I told Peter about the Memorial Room for Brodsky in St, Petersburg in the Anna Akhmatova Museum . I also reviewed a special edition for Rainmaker Editions, 2004 of Ismail Kadare's short story, with photo montages made by Peter Koch from postcards of his assistant, Marina, whose father had published them in Athens, in another era. I recall  the seminar I taught on Ismail Kadare  for the EU's Peace Education Reform program in summer 2005 and the compelling narratives of my students.    s

How to begin again. In my second week of return from two weeks on the East Coast and two months in China. Heard Orville Schell at WAFC www.worldaffairs.org talk about his new book Wealth and Power . Got it on Kindle and started to read as well as hear his view of how China got to today from yesterday thought the eyes of early Chinese scholars.  Orville is head  of the Asian Institute at Asia Society, NYC and writes in Berkeley on the weekends. He was in an official  delegation including Alice Waters and Yo Yo Ma to China this summer.   hear hi on a New Yorker   podcast.  Also viewed Larry Snider's photos:  "Cultural Encounters: Peru, India, Burma and Tibet.  He shows images from Labrang which I visited in 2012.  I attended a celebration of an antique Press, the Columbian Hand Press (1813)  at the Book Club of California    www.bccbooks.org which celebrates independent small presses and hand printed books. Georgi...