Discoveries: Arts and Culture

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...

Famous for all the photographers who have shot this coastline, it is a stunning experience to walk this beach.  It is a stunning experience to walk this beach.  We ate at a picnic table on one of the cliffs, our picnic basket full of swordfish on wheat bread sandwiches and munched on carrots and apples, with lemon water.  Enjoyed watching the seals swimming and crying out  on their island, and marveled at all the fall red color of the iceplant, the orange and golds  on  the boulders. We observed the black comorants on their gray outcropping rocks, as they landed in safety. A speedboat raced  into the harbor.  We walked along the path where the earthquake fault is located; Susan told me how the lobbyists  defeated the plan(protesting for 9 years) for a nuclear reactor going in this very spot where there is a pond  Can anyone  imagine, how this beauty could have been lost!  The ocean is rea...

Margareta looks at 16th c Renai ssance highly fashionable and cultivated women.  She focusses on a Titian, of an anonymous noblewoman, which was done as a commission for the Duke of Urbino, who wanted a portrait of a beautiful woman in a blue dress.  The model is probably a prostitute, as Titian liked to use prostitutes.  However, it does not mean that the portrait is of a prostitute.  She has the crescent eyebrows, the alabaster skin, the rounded chin, and the pearl earrings, symbolic of chastity and purity.   Her gaze is beyond the viewer, representing "purity" .. The lace border near her bustline shows refinement and elegance, not again, as enticement.   The portrait is Prescriptive.  Tintoretto did a portrait of "Franco" a famous courtesan in Venice, with her nipple peeking out through her bodice, which is a signal of her status.   Tintoretto's  son makes a portrait of a woman who uncovers her breast, a gesture tha...

Professor Margaret Francesca Rosenthal, USC, Prof of Italian, Comp Lit and English, and Judith Zeitlin, Prof of Ch Lit at the University of Chicago, gave presentations about courtesan culture in Renaissance, Italy, and Qing Dynasty China, respectively.  Judith  Zeitlin took the approach of Music being visible in the paintings, literally and figuratively, and started her preamble as she termed it, with the panels representing the musicians  She called her presentation, "Flesh , Silk, Bamboo: Picturing Song and Beautiful women in Late Imperial Visual Culture ."  She cites Rose Tremain's "Music and Silence", in which a king houses an orchestra in his wine cellar, so the concerts can filter up to his dining room, and entertain his guests. She notes that "this disembodied music" was an anomoly then but we take it for granted today, when it is the opposite -- the presence of musicians is an exception.  She sets up the theme of "listening to music wi...

The Philharmonia Baroque has instructed me in how much I love this period's music.  The lecturer before the concert says that Baroque is always attempting to provide a happy ending to a piece, so it does not follow history. He also pointed out that music composed in Milan preferred strings as opposed to wind. Venice was known for brass and winds.   Pergolesi (1710-1736) died when he was 26; like Mozart, who lived into his 30's, both wrote music which is youthful and full of melody and passion.  Pergolesi was educated at the Conservancy in Milan. The first piece played was from " l'Olimpiade , which was about two brothers, mistaken identity, a sports competition, and a love object.  The overture hoped to get the audience's attention. Then, Handel (1685-1759) was played, with a duet and and aria from Rodelinda and a duet and aria from Guilio Cesare , sung by Carolyn Sampson, who sings with passion and melodically,  and David Dan...

Hummingbirds are twittering in the willows.  The sunset is a spectacle here. This view is so appreciated.  I found the print book  by Tom Killion called TAMALPAIS WALKING Poetry History and Prints, that I had discovered at the California Club library, with the richeness of Gary Snyder's poetry.     The hummingbirds are still chirping away...I cannot see them, as they like nestling in the bamboos. There was a wonderful poem in the New Yorker this week, about a woman gaining an ecstasy from watching the hummingbirds; I could appreciate Elisabeth Danson's sentiment in " At the Bungalow ".  One line..." its quick purposeful flight mesmerizes her, catches an inward chord, an inflammable wick."  Then, her fantasizing begins...  

The Fraenkel Gallery. 4th Fl.  Richard Learoyd,'s "The Outside World ".  This Englishman's stunning photo images are like grand painted canvasses of his beloved trees, birds, and in this show, a young Irish woman, Agnes.  These images absolutely are breathtaking, monumental, and authentic.  Having seen so much  facile digital images, these are astonishing in their breadth and depth and requiring  gazing inward into a tree's bloom, rook's nest in a community, magpies a study in black and white on a high wire.   I walked through with an art consultant, as the director led us on a gracefully conducted tour.  She asked for insights into  one image of a noble house, with daughter standing proud, with her parents in recessive space, with ivy grown over ancient stone,  and when I responded, she commented, "you must be a writer"...These images invite more than a passing gaze, but meditation and time.  Included is a photo of t...

Miya Ando:  Tides and Phases of the Moon .  October 3-November 23  Heavy Metal. Full autumn moon To my gate comes rising Crested tide- -Basho Miya has a studio in Brooklyn.  She is a descendant of Bizen sword makers and Buddhist priesets, and was raised between a temple in Okayma, Japan and the Santa Cruz mountains. From her handout: " She combines traditional techniques of her ancestry with her own innovations in modern industrial technology.  The foundation of her  practice is the transformation of surfaces -- creating ephemeral meditative paintings with subtle gradations of color from the highly rigorous and demanding cultivation of heavy metals...  She produces light reflecting gradients on her metal paintings by applying heat, sandpaper, grinders, acid and patinas, irrevocably altering the material's chemical properties. " " The heart of my artwork is expressing harmony between contradictory things, interconnectivity and transformati...

Margaret Atwood appeared here in San Francisco for her new book   in the Arts and Lecture series It was good to see her again.   Margaret Atwood on the stage at Arts and Lectures in SF Most recently I have read her Penelopiad , a take on the wife of Oddysseus as he returns home, contemporanizing it and employing her wit in the story being told by Penelope.   I also finished "Writing with Intention " which is a catalogue of book reviews and interviews published through the years.  I read her book based on the Christmas Carol, "The Shadow Side of Wealth" about debt as it is treated in literature, a long essay which was delivered as a series of essays.   The only book of poems of hers which I had with me was "The Door ", which has a CD of her reading each poem.  Of poetry, she says, it is another " state of being' ; no, it does not "inform " her fiction.   She started writing as a poet, as there were no...