Discoveries: Arts and Culture

I have been thinking of Rachel Hadas and was so grateful to find a new poem from her in the New Yorker, today...it was like visiting an old friend. Rachel and I knew each other in Princeton; she used to return to visit her advisor, Edmund Keeley, for her dissertation on Robert Frost and the Greek Poets.  She is a great admirer of James Merrill's work, and counted him as a friend and mentor.   Rachel lived in Greece for a period of her life.  The space sounds like Vermont in this poem. The poem is so lyrical and perfect in its couplets. I love her poem.  It makes me want to write, again, to find a poetic voice, a poet's words. A Poultice Tumeric, rosemary: blend with run. Winter is fading, spring will come, snow will melt, and leaves set in. Rosemary, turmeric: shake in gin. Tumeric, bourbon, rosemary: a blue-green bruise leaks toward my eye (a week ago I bumped my head). I swab and bathe it.  The bruise will fade faster with this concoction rec...

Brilliant to see Esther Jacobson again...she has created two UNESCO sites in Mongolia, in the NW region where she has been working, marking  archaic rock sites and ritual sites...and came in second place for geographic mapping, next to the National Geographic Society...for the year's award. She has two new books out, the one on the cultural aspects of the rock sites and complexes.  She showed how an early style the artisan used a rock and struck out a crude figure, directly impressed by the experience of a particular animal.  Then she showed how in the Bronze Age the lines became definite, vivid, and it is thought the artist had access to a tool which he pushed with a rock. She remarks that she found, she thinks, the same hand in two different locations, in the same time period.  I ask her the question:  how did the people "interact" with the rocks, the visual form.  I reiterate that it was an oral tradition, since there was not a written text.  I a...

Read book review by Adam Kirsch, "What Makes Goethe Great?" Read under " The Talk of the Town" , Dept of Hoopla, Kitchen Sink, about Chief curator of painting and sculpture, Anne Temkin's hosting of the recent Marcel Duchamp's 100th anniversary, on January 15 at the MOMA. Anne was known to me when she was a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, during Anne De Honcourt's role as Award winning director, who told a story about being bounced upon the knee of Marcel Duchamp, as her father, Rene de Harncourt was the first? director of the MOMA.  Philadelphia has an incredible legacy with Duchamp which has been celebrated from time to time.  . January 18.  John Ashbery, "Dangerous Asylum."  Like the last line:  "Off you go then".  Conveys his sense of humor..? Read Adam Gopnik's "Henry James's Memoirs".  Something to be said for authors writing their own memoirs, which differs from their autobiographies, and fro...

The focus was on the concert I will hear this afternoon, or Olivier Messiaen's " Des Canyons aux etoiles..."    1:15---2:15 pm  Artist talk with David Robertson, conductor, St Louis Symphony, and Deborah O'Grady, photographer, moderated by Performances director Matias Tanopolsky. 2:30-3:40 pm  "Des Canyons aux etoiles -- "The Natural World, Immensity and Wonder". Sabrina Klein, Cal Performances Director of Artistic Literacy explores art and the natural world with Margaretta Lovell, History of Art, UCB; Kathryn Barush, Art History Graduate School of Theology of Santa Clara University, and renowned choreographer Anna Halprin. 3:50 -5:00 pm  "The National Parks: Kindred Connections of the Natural World and Creativity".  A conversation on the cultural connections between access to nature and creativity environmentalist Ken Brower, Will Rogers Director of the Trust for Public Land, Caryl Hart, Director of Sonoma COuntry Regional Parks, and...

What was divine for me:  Philharmonia Baroque and this concert with the foremost piano forte player in the world, or the young and passionate and brilliant Kristian Bezuidenhout.   First we heard Symphony no. 27 in G Major, and then Kristian played the Concerto for Fortepiano No. 23 in A. Major after which, if we could listen to anything more, we were sent off with the Symphony no. 39 in E. Flat Major. Born in South Africa, he was first educated in Australia and then at the Eastman School of music and now lives in London. At 21 he won the prestigious first international prize in the Beruges Fortepiano Competition.  Charming style...won me over, and improved my mood! The piece played was completed while Mozart was composing "The Marriage of Figaro" and is known for "being perfect in its proportions, formal clarity and range of expression."  That certainly sounds like what I heard.     The year is 1785-86.  I favor the 18th century; it seems more aliv...