Discoveries: Arts and Culture

January 11, 2016. Read Ben Lerner's "The Custodians ".  T he Whitney's conservation method s.  Fascinating review of the kinds of practice of conservation in museums, and how contemporary art conservation has evolved in less than an orthodox fashion, but more as a collaboration with the living artists. p. 50 Read Anne Carson's "1=1"   An assertion of the impossibility of leaving an interiority which this author possesses and expresses. Always provocative.  p 60 Read   Peter Schjeldahl's SEEING AND BELIEVING   The Mysteries of Matthias Buchinger (1674-1739) a fascinating review of " Wordplay: Matthias Buchinger's Drawings from the Collection of Ricky Jay"   at the Met ,  Ricky Jay is a magician.  Buchinger was an  artist born without hands and feet and who stood 29 inches tall and was also a musician.   p. 70. Read Alex Ross 's review of Igor Levit and Evgeny Kissin , one of my favorite pianists. Ross is critical, but poin...

Joyce Carol Oates is teaching Short Fiction at UC Berkeley this semester.  She has brought out a memoir, The Lost Landscape, which she has been writing for 15 years.  She wrote short pieces about childhood upon request for magazines and journals, and she added them to the pile. It took her since the early 80's to write The Accursed.  She let the manuscript sit for nearly 15 years and when she returned to it, she had new insights.  She said all the biographies of Wilson show him to be a horrific person.  He was inculcated into being a racist when he was three years old. One of her personal favorite books is Wild Nights , where she imagines the life of authors in their final days.  She started with Edgar Allen Poe, as he left a couple of pages of an incomplete story.  She tried to write in the voice and style of each author.  She wanted to finish his story, the story in his mind, when he was found dead on the streets of Baltimore.   She i...

The program began with the familiar Balanchine "Rubies " set to Stravinsky's music which premiered in 1987 in SF, on my birthday, January 30 with its world premiere in NYC in 1967...lovely, traditional, pairs and groupings in ruby red costume.  On point.  I didn't wear my ruby; with the diamonds, it has so much sparkle and glitter...anyway, my seat partner, an artist who lives in Berkeley says, 'Why don't they do Diamonds or Sapphires, why always the repetition of "Rubies". Mark Morris's (always) very unorthodox and unexpected "Drink to me only with thine eyes " (the title comes from an old English song, " Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes" , the lyrics from a poem in Renasissance playwright Ben Johnson's masque, " The Vision of Delight" ) was anything but conventional...and lively music was played on the piano upstage while the dancers are downstage.  Curiously the pianist is not listed in the program...the co...

This is a great read.  Rushdie starts with a fantastical tale, and then turns philosophical, and vernacular.  It is roughly based on Scheherezade's Tales, and task, but also gives an account of the Jinni....you remember the one who is let out of the bottle and grants the three wishes?  Fanciful, and just what I need to read this moment.  On page 112, -- a small sample: Her father the professor, so handsome, so smart, a little vain, was dead but she tried every day to bring his ideas to life.  We were all trapped in stories, she said, just as he used to say, his wavy hair, his naughty smile, his beautiful mind, each of us the prisoner of our own solipsistic narrative, each family the captive of the family story, each community locked with its own tale of itself, each people the victims of their own versions of history, and there were parts of the  world where the narratives collided and went to war, where there two or more incompatible stories fighting ...

This was brilliant and so relevant.  I cannot say more.  I was moved to tears.  The couple tried to hard, and the protagonist tried to achieve the Amercan dream, and went back to his "bones" when forced to...a lesson for all of us. Well enacted, tasteful and topical. Amir Kapoor is living the American Dream—an upper East Side apartment, Italian suits, and the promise of becoming partner at the law firm. But when he and his wife Emily, an artist influenced by Islamic imagery, host a dinner party for their friends and colleagues, lies and deception threaten to shatter Amir’s carefully constructed life of cultural assimilation.  Playwright Ayad Akhtar won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for this engrossing and combustible drama that probes the complexity of identity, the place of faith in today’s world, and the hidden prejudices still alive in liberal society  Director Kimberly Senior comes to Berkeley Rep to stage the provocative play that she shepherded from Chica...

Experienced pure joy this evening at the Philharmonia Baroque holiday concert at the Congregational Church in Berkeley, which was looking festive. Here are some excerpts from the " Ode for St Cecilia's Day , text by John Dryden"A Song for St. Cecelia's Day".  Dryden's text is an amalgamation of Newtownian physics, Biblical apocalypse, and a yougn person's guide to the baroque orchestra...beginning with the "jarring atomes " of creation and condluing with the trumpet of Last Judgement. Like "the Messiah", Cecelia was composed in ten days ! . First presented at Covent Garden 1736, Music by the incomparable Handel(for the Holiday season)    Cecilia is, as you know the patron saint of Music (18th century) . Pope Piux  IX invoked her name in the resotration of Gregorian chant and a cappella choral...counterpoint to the excesses of symphonic and operatic church music. November 22 is her "feast day". The signed and dated manusc...

This author is a genius.  He is teaching at Columbia Univerisity in NYC. He was in conversation with Steven winn, at the Arts and Lecture Series at the Nourse Theater on Hayes, in SF.  November 2. The description with which I agree is the following:  " He writes vivid and lyrical works, often set in the changing and political and cultural landscape of his native country of Turkey .  "  Turkish Americans were among those who stood up in the audience and queried him about Turkey's political elections.  He said he liked being in America, as he did not require body guards and could speak freely to his friends.  Humorously,he also remarked that his students at Columbia are very ambitious and talented and intelligent and "scare" him, but then he laughed, "But they are also scared of me." "Istanbul:  Memories and the City : Pamuk's  nostalgic autobiographical work of his childhood in Istanbul was a point of refence.  I visited Istanbul ...