Discoveries: Arts and Culture

Caryl Churchill's play  is a very clever production. It addresses in 75 dialogues the impasse in human communication due to or in part because of digital communication, but not only this...the difference in languages in life styles in values in vocabulary and so on...it starts with a man and wife in bed, and he cannot sleep and finally he gets up and says, " I think I will go on facebook" ...as though that is a solution for what he needs or wants to communicate.   Another provocative meeting is between a homeless drug addicted population which is found by the BART station outside this theater, and it shows how that "crazy" conversation spins off another conversation and causes us to reevaluate it. I had a special discount seat for $40 in the very last row, of the balcony, center, with no one on either side of me for three seats each direction and had a perfect view!   The newly opened and restored Strand on Market, right across from Civic Center and the UN Pl...

This exhibition at the Legion of Honor Fine Arts Museum in SF was such a great pleasure to see.  It had been mounted in NYC and shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and will also appear at the Cincinnati Art Museum.  Jan Glier Reeder is responsible for the catalogue, HIGH STYLE, Masterworks from the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Elsa Schiaparelli (1930's-1940's) was, of course, my favorite and  the curator from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, distinguished Curator Dilys Blum, provided us a lecture, illuminating her life and art... The designs inspired by music including a belt with a music box in it and "pianos" as buttons on an elegant black suit stood out, but so did the gown with musical staffs...and notes playing and dancing across the silk.  Several of her dresses had been purchased by the Standard Oil heiress, Millicent Huttleston Rogers, famous for being an arbitrar of taste by introducing Western style to NYC fashi...

See :  Musical Events.  OUTSIDERS.  The Ojai Music Festival.  The New Yorker, July 6&13, 2015.  pp 88-89   for review.   Found out that Ojai is 65 miles So. of L.A>  The Indian guru Jiddu Krishnamurti and other s with the Theosophical Movement took up residence in Ojai.   Steven Schick, Director, and percussionist, brought some of the pieces to  the Ojai Festival at Berkeley, which it appears, is held each year.  Next year, Peter Sellars will conduct.   Schick teaches at UC San Diego, and leads the La Jolla Symphony and the SF Contemporary Music Players.   Some of the same pieces as in Ojai, were performed such as "Boulez's " Improvisations sur Mallarme"..." , as if Messian, Boulez 's bird loving teacher were providing commentary. (Shick placed Boulez's two Mallarme settings amid Ravel's "T rois Poems de Stephane Mallarm e", making the two composers seem like avatars of a single secretative spirit. " lThe sa...

What a splendid event!  It reminded me of our visit to Troy, the archaeological ruins...to stand on this place, immortalized by the Illiad, was incredible.  One of the tours with my mother in law a Greek archaeologist.   Berlioz, of course, emphasized the romantic aspects of Dido and Aeneas, which has grown to a mythical order, and is much beloved.   Two Acts are also devoted to Cassandra foretelling the tragic end of the Trojans....and the singing  was exceptional.  The sets were extraordinary and will go to Vienna, having come from London. Carthage Dido(Susan Graham)  and Aenaeus (Bryan Hempl) Cassandra (Anna Caterina Antonacci) The scenery shifts.... Carthage as an architectural model  machinations for the last scenario