Discoveries: Arts and Culture

The John Steinbeck Center, Salinas, CA A great place for education in Steinbeck, who won the Noble, the Pulitzer and the Academy of Arts awards, and more in his life time.   The table where we sat...in the restaurant in the house.  The Steinbeck House, the home of his parents, his childhood. I was given a private tour.  

The girls originally slept in tents the first girls, some elite, serving as staff, and occupying the "Stuck ups" Phoebe Hearst the leading philanthropist of Asilomar   Designed by Julia Morgan as the "guest cottage"  which no longer exists, was originally owned by John Steinbeck's sister.  The arid beach walk...in the sand dunes...  Janet Roberts, on the boardwalk... our corridor in the "Stuck Ups".  My swim, late afternoon and morning. Lovely! Admiring the trees.... The Trees! 

I have wanted to purchase this book for some time, and finally it was deeply discounted.  Elizabeth Bishop, the poet's paintings were tracked and exhibited in 1963, though I did not see them.  I was still a young HS student.  In the remarks, she reminisces about visits with Caldar in Brazil.  My husband's grandmother and grandfather were entertained an evening with the Caldars in Litchfield, Ct; Caldar brought out the circus to entertain Grandpa Roberts and gave him a piece of it which always hung by the lamp in the entrance hallway, and no one has confessed as to what happened to it! She reminisces about Storm King and Rockland and Penobscot Maine, all summer haunts.   EB does paintings of Key West, of Maine, and...  several hang in the galleries of Vassar College. She has some of rooms she lived in hotels in NYC, and others of Brazil.  They all have a certain charm and poetic quality, of course, associated with her poems and life....

I am taking a very short course, "Wonderful and Bizarre: The works of August Strindberg. Having seen "Miss Julie" on the stage and in the film version and having read it, several times in the past, along with the drama "The Dance of Death" which has inspired music, plays and films, and also, "the Father".  I had not read "The Ghost Sonatas" which were featured in this course, along with two essays and one article, all by Strindberg.  Having visited Strindberg's last apartment in Stockholm, when I visited Sweden for one month, one lovely June, giving a paper on the comparative study of Emily Dickinson's poems set to music by the composers Aaron Copeland and John Adams, in Lund university, for an international interarts conference that was fascinating---- I was happy to have a chance to learn more, from a professor who has written a book on Strindberg, and is based at the University in Stockholm. Strindberg is not as familiar to m...

Dentasili Tibetan temple.  (Saw large exhibition was held at Asia Society in NYC) Julia White who curated this private bay collector's exhibition of fine examples of Tibetan art

In celebration of the centennial of the birth of Benjamin Britten, this was a brilliant production.  Peter Grimes, an Opera in Three Acts and a Prologue derived from the poem "The Borough" of George Crabbe, Opus 33. Floating in back of the orchestra was a moving media presentation of the sea in stormy moods, which furnished a context for the tenor, Stuart Skelton's, extraordinary voice.   The SF Chorus furnishes the chorale, acting as the townspeople's response to the tragic Peter Grimes. Though a grim character, the music transcends, and elevates our feelings to new levels of human concern, for those without means, and perhaps, most of all for child labor and abuse, which still persists in our world. The libretto was written by Montagu Slater, after Christopher Isherwood turned down the task of taking the "bare bones" of the poem and transforming it.   Britten participated in the GPO  film unit which included W.H. Auden, the kingpin, and Christ...

  Quite a feat for the curator, Forrest McGill, to accomplish with the SFMOMA curator, to house the SFOMA exhibition at the AAM.  Art critic H Cotter in this week's NYT said he would love to see a show which displays the eclectic art of India, Japan, SE Asia, and Western art, essentially; he must not have "Gorgeous" on his radar.  It is time; we live in a global world....right.