May 1, 2013 at 3:30 pm (Lists, Places, Recommended, Surprises, Traveling)
Tags: art, discoveries, lists, travel, Venice
Self is loving this beautiful city (pop. 250,000) on the shores of the Adriatic.
She decides to try and organize her suitcase. She opens various pockets, and out of one of them pops the room rate sheet for the Hotel Danieli, which she requested on a whim. And here they are, dear blog readers. Prices quoted are per night:
- A Double DeLuxe Room is 920 euros (about $1,206)
- A Luxury Double Room with an Inner View is 1,095 euros (about $1,435)
- A Double DeLuxe Room with a Lagoon View is 1,295 euros (about $1,700)
- A Luxury Double Room with a Lagoon View is 1,415 euros (about $1,855)
- A Luxury Double Room with a Lagoon View and a Balcony is 1,515 euros (about $1,986)
- An Executive Suite with an Inner View is 1,815 euros (about $2,379)
- A Dandolo Suite with an Inner View is 1,965 euros (about $2,576)
The list goes on.
Needless to say, self will not be staying at the Danieli, not even if she were truly hankering to make believe she is a Princess.
She also happens upon a small book she purchased from the giftshop of the Chapel of the Scrovegni in Padua. She must thank Margarita for making this chapel one of the required stops on their Venetian adventure. Admission is strictly controlled: you must purchase tickets in advance, and each group is limited to 30 minutes within the chapel itself. Margarita and self made reservations for 5:15 p.m., and afterwards the museum curators ushered us into another set of galleries which featured the most sumptuous Medieval and Renaissance church art that self has ever beheld.
Back to the book! Self happens upon this interesting detail:
Recently the Chapel and its decorations have been the subject of various studies and even astronomical research in order to account for the extraordinary lighting effects that have been noticed in the interior – not withstanding the number of ancient trees outside impairing direct observation. It has been noticed that when the sun rises it shines through the first window towards the high altar, just to the left of the painting of the Nativity, and on Christmas Day, between 10 and 11, the ray of light shining through the window completely illuminates the little door through which the Scrovegni family members entered to attend the liturgical functions. At midday, this same bright ray illuminates the head of anyone standing on the axis of the chapel, in front of the steps of the high altar. Furthermore, after careful calculations, beginning with the calendar in use at the time of Giotto, it has been discovered that the part of the Last Judgement depicting the donation of the Chapel to the Madonna is lit up early in the morning by a slit of light that penetrates from a small hole placed above the first window immediately to the left of the entrance door, and that this occurs on the days of the most important Marian feast days (the Birth of Mary on the 8th September and on the Annunciation, 15th August).
Isn’t that wondrous, dear blog readers?
Margarita complained that one couldn’t really see the frescoes that were higher up the walls, and on the ceiling of the chapel, which was true. She noted that none of the guidebooks advised visitors to bring along binoculars, which several Japanese tourists in our group were quite avidly using. But self was simply too entranced about being in the presence of such art to let a little thing like the lack of binoculars disturb her. Seeing all the frescoes in context – that is, on the walls of the structure for which they had originally been intended, as opposed to the walls of a museum – was simply fabulous!
Stay tuned.
Leave a Comment
April 10, 2013 at 2:02 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Lists, Recommended, The Economist)
Tags: art, book lists, inspirations, Iraq, Just published, nonfiction, novel, reviews, The Economist
Self has Don Quijote so much on the brain (it’s overdue at the Library: she better hurry up) that she even sees a theme in the latest book list: it seems to be a list of Quijotic Endeavours. After you read the capsule descriptions, see if you don’t agree, dear blog readers:
- A first novel, Ghana Must Go, by Talye Selasi (Penguin Press): A brilliant medical student from Ghana becomes the scapegoat in the death of a 77-year-old “Boston socialite, wife, mother, grandmother and alcoholic.”
- The “agony” of Iraq, described by Toby Dodge in Iraq: From War to a New Authoritarianism: “The collapse of the Iraqi state” allowed ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’ — “political manipulators of sectarian fears – to flourish.”
- An artist talks about his process in The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making, by David Esterly (Viking): Esterly’s medium is wood. His inspiration was a 17th century woodcarver who went by the name Grinling Gibbons. When “a fire at Hampton Court Palace damaged a series of Gibbon carvings . . . Mr. Esterly was chosen to recreate” one of them, a “seven-foot-long cascade of fruit and flowers . . . This book is the story of the year it took him to do it.”
And, from The New York Review of Books of 27 September 2012, two very interesting reviews: the first by Jerome Groopman, reviewing God’s Hotel: A Doctor, A Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine by Victoria Sweet (Riverhead) and the second by Ezra Klein, reviewing The Obamas, by Jodi Kantor.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Leave a Comment
March 30, 2013 at 1:43 am (Artists and Writers, Links, Places, Recommended, Weather)
Tags: art, exhibits, Fridays, museums, photography, San Francisco, Stella Kalaw
Ever since Stella K told self about the Garry Winogrand exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, self has ached to go.
She was about to go yesterday, but then she got hung up with gardening.
She went today, though. What a gorgeous day it was in the City!
On 101, approaching the Seventh Street exit (The exit for SFMOMA is the one following, on Fourth Street)
It will be clear from the above snapshot that self was doing the dangerous thing again: snapping photos while driving. But she just couldn’t give up the chance to document the day, the excellent weather, the freeway signs, the San Francisco skyline, and of course the traffic!
The Garry Winogrand exhibit was fascinating. Thank you for telling self about it, Stella K! She was fascinated by Winogrand, his “anti-journalistic” stance, his perceptivity about crowds, his alive-ness to facial expressions of people he passed on the street. On the audio tour, his son is quoted as saying that when Winogrand would take his children on outings, he was constantly taking pictures of people they passed, and so it took a very very long time to get from Point A to Point B. But Winogrand’s son said that he was so accustomed to his father’s behavior that he regarded it as entirely normal.
As self was leaving the 4th floor, where the Winogrand exhibit was, she decided to snap a picture of the stairs:
Woman Ascending the Stairs in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Afterwards, as self was walking back to the 5th and Mission Garage, she decided to walk through the Metreon. She would have made it out without damage if she hadn’t been attracted by a colorful sign saying Cako. When she went up close to investigate, she saw tubs of ice cream! And she decided to try the vanilla salt with caramel swirls. She brought her ice cream outside, to the Yerba Buena gardens, and luxuriated in the sunshine and the pigeons. It was such a gorgeous day! Self reflected that she is so lucky to be alive, and living where she does, with pretty easy access to the gorgeousness of San Francisco.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
2 Comments
March 29, 2013 at 3:44 am (Artists and Writers, Links, Writing)
Tags: art, inspirations, photography, science fiction, short story, Stella Kalaw, writing process
Stella K has a pair of photographs on her site that seem to embody the ineffable. They’re landscape photographs, but – it’s hard to tell what’s below the horizon in the first photograph. Could that be a city? The ruins of a city?
The second photograph has branches – sticks, really — rising out of what could be a marsh, a swamp, mist.
Stella’s photographs always lead self to imagine a story. That must be because, even though self’s medium is language, stories come to her in images, flashes, fragments.
There is something really powerful that happens – emotionally – to self when she ponders Stella’s work.
So here’s a story, “Thing,” which is set After the Apocalypse, in Outlier Rehabiliation Center Sector V:
Caesar tells stories late at night if we can’t sleep. He is old. Old enough to remember a time when there were factories and pigs were processed night and day, when the smell of pig blood lingered over everything. He remembers a time when people ate every part of the pigs: ears, eyes, even entrails. Pork fat was used in cakes, and in bread. I try to imagine a cake.
The factories still cry out. When we hear the keening sound, we know it is the herd of ghost pigs, running into walls and crying because they can never find their way out. They are inside people’s heads, like the memories of old ways. And when people’s heads get too full of the memories, the first ones to tumble out are the pigs, running every which way and squealing.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
1 Comment
March 13, 2013 at 2:27 am (Artists and Writers, Links, Lists, Movies, Recommended)
Tags: art, documentaries, happiness, inspirations, lists, memories, Menlo Park, photography, restaurants, under-appreciated
Someday, self will make a documentary about the lives of all her friends.
More than a few are visual artists.
There’s Alka, who directs movies (and won the L’Oreal Woman Director of the Year Award at the Tribeca Film Festival, several years ago). She did a documentary on the tsunami, traveling all around the devastated areas in India and Southeast Asia. She has a project on women boxers in Calcutta, her native city. One day, Alka, you must meet the Colonel and Pratibha, they will take you all over Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, just about anywhere! Siyempre, self has to come along for the ride!
There’s Stella K, whose work you can see on Fraction Magazine. Awesome!
And there’s Diane, who just returned from a guest lecture in London! And who has the most amazing, interesting art – a combination of photography and painting. It’s like the second coming of Vermeer.
Well, aside from being absolutely awesome women, they also indulge self’s craving for food. Today, Diane met self at Max’s in South San Francisco, and – this may be hard to imagine, but we spent almost three hours talking non-stop. The food was just a secondary concern.
The Remains of a GIGANTIC Meal
It is so good to share a laugh with a Kindred Spirit!
Diane and self met as young wives renting adjacent apartments on Live Oak Avenue in Menlo Park.
One day, there should be a sign: Here lived two of the most talented women ever to grace Menlo Park with their ebullient spirit and awesome Talent!
Here is Diane’s Daily Walks Facebook page. Another site, Immersed Memories, is just gorgeous. See for yourselves.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Leave a Comment
March 1, 2013 at 3:10 am (Places, Recommended)
Tags: art, California history, discoveries, exhibits, museums
A Ship in the Charles Parsons Gallery of Ship Models
Close-up of a Charles Parson ship model: What. A. Sight. To. Behold.
This is a pretty neat museum, as self and The Man found out last weekend, when we took advantage of free admission for the Chinese New Year Festival in downtown Redwood City.
They have a new exhibit opening Mar. 13: “Plowing Ahead: Historic Peninsula Farming”
There is a room called the Charles Parsons Gallery that is full of the most amazing, intricate, hand-built ship models. Self can imagine how long it took to build each of these! Last summer, self visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and that museum had a few ship models. But this gallery in the San Mateo County Historical Museum had about 20, all built by the same San Carlos resident, Mr. Parsons. Sooo amazingly beautiful and definitely worth repeat viewing.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
2 Comments
January 20, 2013 at 10:48 pm (Places, Recommended, Sundays)
Tags: art, exhibits, memories, museums, New York, photography, San Francisco, Sundays, weekends
SFMOMA: View From 4th Floor Walkway to the Roof Garden and Blue Bottle Café
Self loves Giorgio de Chirico. Loooves him. There was a de Chirico in the SFMOMA yesterday. It was years and years since she’d seen one up close. It was a relatively small painting but, the minute self caught a glimpse of it across the gallery, she knew it was one of his.
Lo and behold, it was mid-afternoon, and walking around the galleries had made self exceedingly thirsty. So she told The Man she would get a drink at the Blue Bottle Café on the 4th floor. And on the way there, she looked out the large, plate-glass windows on her left, and saw square buildings and long, rectangular windows and thought: de Chirico!
Another set of Windows Glimpsed at the SFMOMA! Self absolutely loves windows!
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Leave a Comment
January 6, 2013 at 2:27 am (Artists and Writers, Lists, Recommended)
Tags: art, discoveries, exhibits, lists, museums, San Francisco, Saturdays, Stanford, weekends, writing process
Asian Art Museum, Interactive Installation: Viewers write notes to the person or thing or place they miss, then pin them to the tree.
Took son and Kramer to the Asian Art Museum today and caught “Out of Character: Decoding Chinese Calligraphy.” Also walked from the museum to the Shooting Gallery, and saw “Steppe Warriors: New Works by Zaya,” which closes today.
Zaya’s paintings were exquisite in their detail and stylization. Self loved the kinetic depiction of horses and waves. Self’s favorite of the dozen or so paintings was one depicting the Mongol invasion of Japan. On the upper right hand corner were a group of Japanese notables, all dressed in sumptuous kimonos, sitting with extreme poker faces as they watched the arrival of the ships bearing the Mongol army. A few soldiers had already been engaged: it seemed the Mongol invaders had the upper hand, for armor-clad Japanese soldiers were already shown expiring on the ground.
And here are a few observations about the calligraphy exhibit at the Asian Art Museum:
- There was one monstrous scroll painting: Self wished there had been more. She must confess to feeling a wee bit disappointed: she loves the huge calligraphic “slash-and-burn” hanging scrolls because there is such power and concentration in each gigantic stroke of the brush.
- Much of the calligraphic artwork on display was on loan from the private collection of Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo. Self never knew that Yang was born and grew up in Taiwan. Funny, she always thought of him as an Asian American Stanford kid.
- There is a behemoth of a book in the gift shop, Five Centuries of Chinese Painting, written by self’s former Stanford professor, Michael Sullivan.
Here are a few notes self scribbled from the (free) audio tour:
- In calligraphy, the creative act is visible. This visibility is central to the work. And it’s also what makes calligraphy such an exciting medium. The Man said he wished he knew what the characters meant. Self was so absorbed in imagining the power of the brush stroke and in examining the geometry of the individual characters that she forgot she was looking at representations of language. Whenever self sees calligraphy, it moves her. She thinks: Slash and burn. Slash and burn.
- The exhibit included modern artists who had been inspired by calligraphy. One artist, Brice Marsden, said, “I use the form of calligraphy, and then it disappears.” Funny, that’s how self begins some of her favorite short shorts. She begins with the structure – perhaps from a story or a poem she is currently reading. As she writes, the model disappears, melts away. All she is left with are the bones of her story.
- She’s not sure if it was also Marsden who said: “The act of creativity existed in the mind before the brush touched the paper.” That’s right! That’s how self begins most of her short stories! She’ll be washing dishes or doing laundry, and then, SHAZZAM! The first step of writing is in her mind – usually as she’s doing homely chores.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
1 Comment
January 3, 2013 at 7:41 am (Artists and Writers, Recommended)
Tags: art, exhibits, inspirations, interviews, Literary Magazines, museums, plans, San Francisco
Sole Fruit of Self’s Loins is arriving momentarily!
Self told him about this exhibit she’s been wanting to see: “Steppe Warriors,” 12 ink-and-watercolor paintings by a young Mongolian artist named Zaya. It’s in Shooting Gallery at 839 Larkin, San Francisco, through this Saturday.
At the Asian Art Museum, there’s a show called “Out of Character: Decoding Chinese Calligraphy.” That one ends Jan. 13.
In the meantime, self has been busying herself with her literary journals. She’s succeeded in getting the Pile of Stuff down to about half what it was, two months ago. HOO-RAY!
In New Letters, Vol. 78, No. 2, there is a fascinating interview with the late Harry Crews. In fact, it’s sort of a shock to realize the author is dead (He died March 2012, aged 76), because in the interview (conducted in 1989, when Crews was 47), he is so furiously alive. Here’s an excerpt:
Interviewer: Do you associate with other writers much?
Crews: Not much. I go to certain places – conferences, universities and the like – for no other reason than there are writers there whom I know and admire, and I like to spend a few days with them. But to my mind, hanging out with five or six other writers all the time can be a shitty experience. The reason being that writers have such enormous egos that they are hard to deal with on a day-to-day basis. For that reason I’ve never understood how good-publishing writers are married to each other. I don’t see how they make it, and by and large they don’t.
Interviewer: Do you think it is possible for a writer to live a normal life, complete with wife and family, and still write meaningful fiction?
Crews: Yes, I think it’s possible. I have to think it is possible because people such as Cheever have done it. Updike did it until he finally got divorced, but only after a long marriage and when the kids were up and grown. I think it’s possible, but highly unlikely. Of course, it’s highly unlikely that anybody’s going to stay married; but I think the nervous energy and preoccupation with what you are doing is such in writing that you have very little time to give to anyone else. Inevitably, women become – I’m speaking here of women, though if I were a woman writer I suppose it would be true of a man – women become jealous of a typewriter. All the hours and distracted moments that you give to the typewriter can’t be given to her. A writer needs time, and when he needs it, it doesn’t matter if the kids are sick or you’re supposed to have dinner with her mother. Fuck it! You ain’t going! That doesn’t sit well with wives.
Interviewer: You said in A Childhood that you knew from an early age that you wanted to be a writer above all else. Now that you are 47 and recognized as one of America’s best writers, has it all been worth it? Has it been what you thought it would be?
Crews: It’s never what you thought it would be because before you’ve published a novel, you think it is going to change your life and change it significantly. That it’s going to lead to some sort of salvation. That it’s going to make you happy. It doesn’t do that. Looking back over the shambles of my personal life, I can’t say it’s all been worth it. I have paid a lot. Everything I’ve owned or loved. I looked around one day, and I had made it; but I hadn’t brought anything or anybody to me. There’s a question I can’t answer. I don’t suppose any man could.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
1 Comment
January 1, 2013 at 2:24 pm (Books, Food and Drink, Holidays, Lists, Movies, Recommended)
Tags: art, causes, discoveries, lists, museums, Netflix, restaurants
On the last day of 2012, self:
- Bought plants from Home Depot. It was bitterly cold. The men lining the parking lot, looking anxiously every time self rounded a curve, breathed frost.
- Watched a bitter, painful movie named “Margaret,” in which a nymphet played by Anna Paquin uses her charm to distract a bus driver who then hits a pedestrian and kills her. Charming stuff.
- Tried Five Guys Burgers and Fries, the new burger place next to the Century 20 in downtown Redwood City. When we entered, there were only two other customers in the place. But in the next 20 minutes, almost 30 people came, and by the time we left to watch our movie (“The Hobbit” – the best movie self could possibly have picked to while away the waning hours of the old year. Which does not mean to say it is a great movie. But it is the kind of movie that lets you sink completely into the characters. If you are not fitful. Like the poor young woman to self’s right, who clearly was there only to accompany her boyfriend, and who kept moving restlessly in her seat)
- Read further about the desecration of the Parthenon by 18th and 19th century British scavengers (Lord Elgin among the most egregious) in Sharon Waxman’s absorbing Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World. Here’s a fascinating passage, about how the Parthenon marbles, now housed in the British Museum, were scoured white (The originals were “highly colored,” according to “archaeological evidence”) to please a wealthy patron named Lord Duveen:
When Sir Joseph Duveen, a millionaire art dealer, offered to donate money for a new gallery to properly house and display the Parthenon sculptures, the British Museum gratefully accepted. But Lord Duveen had his own ideas about how the marbles should look. In step with contemporary standards of beauty, he wanted them whiter . . . Incredibly, Duveen’s workers were given free access to the marbles. It was not until September 1938 that the director of the museum, John Forsdyke, passed through the sculpture department and noticed a group of sculptures being cleaned with a number of copper tools and a piece of coarse Carborundum, a hard substance usually used for grinding steel or polishing granite . . . The effect of the method employed in cleaning the sculptures has been to remove the surface of the marble and to impart to it a smooth white appearance.
Continues Waxman: “The Duveen Gallery was meant to open in the spring of 1939 . . . Europe was about to go to war, and when it did the Parthenon sculptures remained out of sight until after the end of World War II. By the time they reappeared in 1949, few remembered exactly what the sculptures had looked like before being taken from view.”
Then, in 1999, the British Museum, in an attempt to patch relations with Greece, “convened an international seminar on the damage.” Unfortunately, “the conference further inflamed tensions between British and Greek scholars. After tense days of discussion, the closing reception was held in the Duveen Gallery, where wine and sandwiches were served. A museum official invited the scholars — who had been handling greasy sandwiches — to touch the sculptures for themselves, a gesture intended to demonstrate that the patina of the sculptures had not been harmed by the cleaning. But the gesture had the opposite effect. The Greek delegation was incensed and stormed out.”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Leave a Comment
« Older entries
