Discoveries: Arts and Culture

 Jane Wales, CEO of World Affairs Council,  has been elected a VP of the Aspen Institute of which I am proud.  She held a talk tonight which I think you can watch on the World Affairs site in 24 hours. It was a conversation with Jeffrey E. Garten, Dean Emeritus, Yale School of Management and author, FROM SILK TO SILICON:   The Story of Globalization through Ten Extraordinary Lives and  Jane Wales, World Affairs and Global Philanthropy Forum; and VP of The Aspen Institute. The book promotes the idea that "globalization has always been with us, and not at the initiative of governments but individuals who transformed transport and trade. Garten served in the Nixon, Ford, Carter and Clinton administrations.  Jane served in the Clinton administration.  What was the gist? .  Garten says we are in for a dark period in the next few years.  Hate crimes are mounting in schools across the nation; polarization of black and white, etc...and if the presid...

Cindy Cox , a composer at UCB who is interested in post tonal language and new technologies spoke.  She is composing a piece about a Mayan myth.   She commented on the "hybridity" of the opera, and asserted that this production is a Western opera, which it is.  She sees Bright Sheng having a vivid musical language, with colorful instrumentation.  He has a Eurocentric approach and is engaged in text and material; he has to demonstrate metaphysics or "purity" of music, but in the last act the music is fast and dissonant, indicating that love and fate are meant to be corrupted.  All that is true from observation this evening...one might expect something more exotic like Puccini's Turnadot , but this is something different... Shelia Melvin gave a great history of opera in China, just what we needed. In 1852 there were 2 performances per day for five months and then the troupe would move to NYC.   In the 1870's , in California, 80 percent of the opera was G...

Here is Libby Larsen(b. 1950) " Black Birds, Red hills - A Portrait of Six Paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe (2005). Based on six paintings.   Pedernal Hills, Black Rock, Red Hills and Sky, A Black Bird with Snow-Covered Red hills, Looking (coda). Trio Brilliante in the Berkeley Chamber Performances series, at the Berkeley City Club, performed her composition.   Trio Brilliant e includes Tom Rose on the clarinet, and Emily Onderdonk on the viola, and Betty Woo on the piano. Pedernal Hills Black Rock Red Hills and Sky: Excerpts from Larsen's notes;  "Georgia O'Keefe found the flow of time and color in music inspiring to her work as a painter.  "Black Birds, Red Hills is inspired by six O'Keefe paintings, each exploring the flow of time and color on her beloved red hills of New Mexico...The first, third and fourth movements reflect the "V shape" of the hills just outside O'Keefe's window.  She describes the shape as th...

Patti Smith is very cool.  She was so authentic.  Some of her more profound revelations:  She admired Sebald, especially his poem on "Nature", but she is not influenced by him.  She says she is more influenced by Breton and his "Nagier" with the photos by Man Ray. Alan Ginsberg helped her get back on her feet, as she was absent 1979-1995 due to loss of her husband.  She toured with Bob Dylan and she chose "Dark Eyes" for her to sing.  She always dresses in t shirt and dungarees, but they went out and bought her a dress...you can see the performance in a poor cell phone video on utube. She and Lenny  play a song for Pearlman who told her she should have a rock and roll band and who had a beautiful mind, who lives in Montreal.  They are going to his memorial tomorrow. This man taught a course linking "Heavy Metal and Benjamin Britten." She didn't like poetry readings; she thought they were boring so she added music to the readings. Sh...

Patti Smith is very cool.  She was so authentic.  Some of her more profound revelations:  She admired Sebald, especially his poem on "Nature", but she is not influenced by him.  She says she is more influenced by Breton and his "Nagier" with the photos by Man Ray. Alan Ginsberg helped her get back on her feet, as she was absent 1979-1995 due to loss of her husband.  She toured with Bob Dylan and she chose "Dark Eyes" for her to sing.  She always dresses in t shirt and dungarees, but they went out and bought her a dress...you can see the performance in a poor cell phone video on utube. She and Lenny  play a song for Pearlman who told her she should have a rock and roll band and who had a beautiful mind, who lives in Montreal.  They are going to his memorial tomorrow. This man taught a course linking "Heavy Metal and Benjamin Britten." She didn't like poetry readings; she thought they were boring so she added music to the readings. Sh...

Sophie Volpe spoke and informed us the "The Stone Phenonmenon" has many seuqels and "supplements'...that there has been much reenvisioning which takes place even in interstitial chapters.  In 1792-1835 there were a dozen operative treatments. Cites 1944 film. Judith Zeitlin   Bao Yu androgynous....has same sex relationships before love of girls.   Manet.  People only tune in to watch drama.  Auden:  People do not sing when they are sensible." Liminal stage refers to male world.  Adolescence.  Pasion.  vs. Amy Tan bringing in acrobats, musicians from China, et. Stan Lai: Chinese OPera.  300 dialects  Local operas.  Operas not composed.  2 systems.  Already made melodie.  All collected tunes... Arrangement. Spoken Drama was also introduced from the West to China. Chinese govt support opera and companites to make new opera. .  Image idea. White Deer Plain premiere.  Showcase city....governme...

Helen Frankenthaler painted this painting inspired by her visit to the caves in Altimera, Spain.  The numbers 273 refer to Motherwell's apartment as they were lovers at the time... So here is the painting and one by Rothko, which always draws me in,  in the current BAMPFA show, BERKELEY EYE.  These beckoned to me this past evening, when I went to PFA's showing of an Austrian film, in anticipation of their Austrian Film Series this fall, "In the Museum", about art and its spectators, in this instance, museum goers, but also a museum guard and a Canadian woman come to see a childhood friend who has asked her to come, as she is hospitalized and dying. The Brueghel room is particiularily interesting, as the "museum lecturer" talks about W.H. Auden's poems about Brueghel and how devoted he was to portraying humanity...and the vernacular life of peasants...showing how distracted they were by the major events, such as The Crucifixion.

The next section is : BLACK, WHITE , Gray. Minimalism and emphasis on art's relationship to the body through a quiet assertive presence.   My favorite here is Eva Hesse Eva Hesse Test Studies  Miro Angels  Rothko India 

re my favorite, along with the Carracci and the Rembrandt, and the Durer.  Durer was one of my papers in learning about prints in my Museum Studies Masters degree. Durer  Caracci  Rembrandt  The second section curated is: NATURE  Here the Bierstadt of Yosemite which is one of the first paintings the Berkeley art museum acquired, is a favorite, as is the Cezanne .  The James Ensor is the painting I would take home. I like the depiction of the white swallows in Kubo Shunman's painting. Cezanne  White Swallows  Ensor  The next section is HUMAN NATURE.  Poet Billy Collins(not my favorite) is quoted:  "I dont' think people read poetry because they're interested in the poet.  I think they read poetry because they're interested in themselves."  Perhaps those people who read Billy Collins; all the poets I read, I read, because I am interested in their lives and what they ...

Yanaihara Isaku was 38 years old at the beginning of his stay in Paris. A recommendation of Jean Wahl had allowed him to get a scholarship from CNRS. In his homeland, he taught philosophy at the University of Osaka; he wrote and meditated about Rouault, Kierkegaard, Sartre and Camus which he translated  The Myth of Sisyphus  . After the parenthesis of a trip to Greece and Italy, he had agreed to pose for the artist he met at an exhibition for autumn 1955. This decision  transformed his life. Immediate consequence, she brought him to extend his stay in France: Alberto had always need new work days to specify what the disconcerted and frightened from his friend's face.  "Your face ... I see everything tiny and terribly huge ... I must paint the two together. "  Yanaihara had planned to leave for a trip to Egypt before joining Japan. His departure was constantly postponed: Giacometti desperate to complete the portraits he had...

ill post... I left this post in draft.  I had just returned from Myanmar and saw my first elephant with an invory tusk ; astonishing!  I was up close to the elephants in their preserve at the sacred site of Bordubur....they move so gracefully and have so much dignity, for an animal that weighs tons!   Returned to AAM in SF to sese this exhibition....perhaps I will say more but it is now six months later, so will publish now.  From the Indian collection at the Asian Art Museum in SF. 

Not Lawrence of Arabia, which was a favorite of my husband's; I do not know how many times we watched that on a rainy evening in Bucks County! A recently divorced American business man is sent off to Saudi Arabia and has some surprizes awaiting him, the least being that the King is not there...and during this period, he has a stroke, and meets a woman doctor...who takes care of him, and operates on his precancerous lump on his back, which suddenly appears...etc...an entertaining movie.  The book did better in the market.  But if you want some insights into Saudi Arabian culture and an American's "education", watch it.  I was pleasantly surprized that I actually enjoyed it!  The son of the king, as usual, was educated in the USA.  The Chinese are also deal making?  Guess who gets the deal???!!  .

The article begins, "I love the POORLY educated," Donald Trump said during a victory speech in February....It is interesting that he chooses "poorly" educated...those who have not received a good education, in order to be able to be enabled, empowered, to know their rights, to make comparisons, to read, to listen smartly and make up their own minds.  Of course, he has fertile ground for planting the seeds he wants in their minds: racism, fear of the foreigner, fear of our borderers, the Mexicans( so far has he attacked the Canadians)....he tells people in coal mining towns that shut down in th 1950's that he is going to open them and see they have employment again; is he introducing fracking to them? Is he stock raving mad?  He says he knows how to win:  set up false hopes in "poorly educated" minds...in minds without hope...in minds who cannot see that Donald Trump only wants office to buy America,  -- look his daughter has already bought up Donna Ka...

I just love the New Yorker and could really identify with Lauren Collins' Love in Translation , which is about living with a french spouse and learning french.  I will definitely read this book. So many wonderful cultural observations about differences of expression and perspective....review on p. 52-59 gives a preview...of her book to be published in the fall.  Along with Jhumpa Lahair's love of Italian, and a new book about Latin, it appears authors are following suit and thinking speaking about translation and intercultural languages has a market. I also read Jay McINerney's "Bright Precious Days'.  He is a fine editor and was extremely well connected, but I have never gotten much vibration from his writing, and now this memoir like piece. I read his piece in Town and Country this month, on wines and this new book. He definitely has the budget to buy some stellar vintages... Jana Prikryl is totally new to me.  She is an editor of the NYT Book Review as I ga...

Lu Shan Falls  I have stood in this very position.... I have stood in this spot I stood beneath this falls....what a climb!  A quiet moment with the trees  The resilient bamboo The ever lasting  Lotus...

A charming summer read. Having been  a great fan of " The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and " the Book of Laughter and Forgetting", I was delighted to see a new novella by Milan Kundera.  I thought the best thing about Chezoslavakia opening, was that we got Kundera's work in translation! There is also " The Joke" and " Life is elsewhere" This is as the Washington Post correspondent says, " An entertaining divertissement, a lightly comic fiction blending Gallic theorizing(Kant, Hegel) and Russian Style Absurdity."   Yes, those were his influences...the charm is that he does the unexpected...when you think you know, he reverses it...and therein is the humor and wit. We know what is what, but we play the game. The greatest revelation is one Robert Frost made: the poetry and significance in life is in the every day; open your eyes and see it!  Witness it.  Kundera  weaves Stalin and a story of hunters and his men, including Krus...

Now I pick up my new edition of ARAMCO WORLD and there is an article in the July/August issue about this portrait by Charles Wilson Peale which has been reinstalled in the new whole reinstallation of the American wing in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  I also visited the newly reinstalled American wing in the Baltimore Museum of Art. This portrait is of Yarrow Mamout, a freedman who bought property on a street where Secretary of State John Kerry makes his home and where John and Jackie Kennedy lived.  That is Dent Street in Georgetown.  There were only two houses there when Mamout, a Muslim bought his property.  Charles Wilson Peale was in Washington DC in 1819 to paint President James Monroe's portrait. He had heard of the elderly Mamout, whom "local lore wrongly touted as more than a hundred years old" and sought him out to learn the secret of his longevity.  He recorded the meeting in his diary and penned Mamout's obituary. . For more details see:  A...

I attended the following sessions: Session 1-J.  From New Jersey to San Francisco: William Carlos WIlliams, August Kleinzahler and Thom Gunn.  Organized by the William Carlos WIlliams Society. Session 2 C  Raymond Carver Studies II: International Carver in Literature and FIlm.  Organized by the International Raymond Carver Society.  This brought me up to date on Tess Gallagher and the estate and its activities in films and books. ' Reading Raymond Carver in China , by Tian Lin, Xiangtan University, PRC, was particularily revealing, as RC is still not known in China; when I taught his short story, "Cathedral", I realized it was a strategic error, and omitted it from requirements for the students...they had no knowledge of the religious symbolism and hence it meant little to them.  Tian Lin says there is a popular readership and Carver is read among the writers of China, but he is not known in the universities or schools.  In contrast, in India, "T ...

The first session at the Magnes Museum I attended was : Confronting the Past: Time and Memory in Contemporary Fiction.  Jean-Philippe Blondel, who has a best selling novel that takes place on a commuter train(which he used to ride every day) where two people sit next to each other and realize they once dated and broke up; neither speaks to the other(in French fashion) but the novel documents their internal narrative as they reflect on what took place, what they were like then, how they have changed...and how they feel about each other, now.  The result is that they do not want to pursue anything with one another!   The session was sponsored by the Pro Suecia Foundation, Norway House, the French American Cultural Society and the Consulate General of France in SF. Pedro Carmona-Alvarez, Jonas Karlsson, and Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold, whose book I bought; she was reading her book on a square in a public place, and then got a call from and actress at the National Theat...

Katrina Dodsen, who just won the PEN Translation Prize for the short stories of Clarice Lispecter, has also completed her dissertation on Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil.  Simultaneously, a book has been published by UVA by Bethany Hicok, drawing on archival sources of unpublished travel writings and exploring the impact of Brazil on Bishop's life and art.in   Elizabeth Bishop's Brazil .  Bishop arrived in Brazil at age 40 and remained for nearly two decades.   It details her life with Brazilian aristocrat and architect Lota de Macedo Soares and with Brazil and discusses little known translationsof famous poets such as Carlos Drummond de Andrade(1902-1987)  which film we saw in this series for the Auteur, Author part of the Berkeley Book Festival. "D"Amor Natural" by Heddy Honigmann(Netherlands/Brazil) (1996) was discussed by Katrina Dodson, Idra NoveyDebut novel, Ways to Disappear is about a translator's search for a missing Brazilian author) and Berkeley ...