A Quote for today

A question driven life:

"Know something about something."

Some people center their lives around money or status or community or service to God, but this seems to be a learning-centered life, where little bits of practical knowledge are the daily currency, where the main vocation is to be preoccupied with some exciting little project or maybe a dozen.

Some people specialize, and certainly the modern economy encourages that. But there are still people, even if only out in the African wilderness, with a wandering curiosity, alighting on every interesting part of their environment.

The late Richard Holbrooke used to give the essential piece of advice for a question-driven life: Know something about something. Don’t just present your wonderful self to the world. Constantly amass knowledge and offer it around.

Venice Biennale--3 Pavilions and Their Installations

The Venice Biennale is held every 2 years in odd-numbered years. Countries from all over the world are allowed to place art or an installation in their own pavilions--in some cases, large rooms. Here are 3 current installations.

From a movie review: "The Tree of Life"

In the film, Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt play roles as parents in a family dealing with apparently ordinary things. The reviewer, Mick LaSalle, wrote:
.
- [Director] Malick shows you the world that you know, but he shows it in such a fever that you see it, not differently, but completely. It's a vision so alive to the mystery in everything that the simple depiction of a man walking into an office building feels like a feast of limitless possibility and geometric variety.

-

At its most basic, "The Tree of Life" vividly replicates, in cinematic terms, the way we remember. There are general memories, moods and sensations, and then there are incidents and bits of conversation that are recalled with absolute present-tense lucidity. And so the incidents of voice-over are interspersed with straightforward scenes showing this 1950s family. Malick is trying to give us life as it is consciously experienced, the unceasing inner monologue and its interplay with the outside environment, the thoughts of the past mixing with the suspended and yet always available present.

The ambition behind such an attempt is enormous, and Malick's success is complete. But he doesn't stop there. In "The Tree of Life" he doesn't only want to show what life and consciousness feel like. He wants to capture the nature of life - what life is. To this end, he films waterfalls and mountains, gives us long minutes of churning, multi-colored ooze floating in space, and even includes a brief dinosaur interlude.

-

When he stays within the multiple minds of his various characters, Malick is working here at the level of genius. His hand-held camera hovers with a sense of impending revelation. The beauty is beyond description. But when he ventures into explorations of the universe and its origins, the work becomes general and less interesting, liked warmed-over Kubrick.

Still, there is little doubt that "The Tree of Life" will stand as the cinematic achievement of the year.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/06/02/DDU91JNN0T.DTL#ixzz1OQpi8rJk

A New Photograph

This is a picture of a young woman from Kansas whose son would eventually became the President of the United States. [from New York Times Magazine cover]

















Stanley Ann Dunham at Borobudur Indonesia in the early 1970s.

Courage: An Example

". . . so I've seen a lot of songs and recitals and moments of silence 'to honor our men and women in uniform' who are sometimes said to be 'guarding America's freedom.' I too support our troops, as they say, a lot of whom are in some tactically useful hellhole because of social or economic pressures not of their own making."
. But with all of these events celebrating our men and women in uniform, maybe we could have a few---10 percent, say; I'm not asking for much--celebrating other Americans. For instance, gay men and women in uniform who, at some risk to their careers, are continuing to serve because they believe in the mission, even if their country does not believe in them.
. That is an act of daily courage, and I think they deserve a flyover or two; maybe even a singing of "God Bless America" . . . Not going to happen, I know.
. Anyway, hooray, gay people and this one's for you."
- -from the SF Chronicle columnist, Jon Carroll on Wednesday November 3, 2010.

Pierce The Veil

. Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear. Most readers, of course, wouldn't be able to tell you that they respond to those . . . words because they are soothing and symmetrical, but most readers register the fact unconsciously. You could probably say that meaning is the force we employ, and music is the seduction.
. Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest , will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write. It's one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, in your mind it's transcendent, it's brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic. It contains everything you know and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire. At one point we have a writer in a room, struggling to approximate the impossible vision that hovers over his head. He finishes it, with misgivings. One of the consolations of writing books is the seemingly unquenchable conviction that next book book will be better, will be bigger and bolder and more comprehensive and true to the lives we live. We exist in a condition of hope. We love the beauty and truth that come to us, and we do our best to tamp down our doubts and disappointments. We are on a quest, and are not discouraged by our collective suspicion that the perfection we look for in art is about as likely to turn up as is the Holy Grail. That is one of the reasons we, I mean we humans, are not only the creators, translators and consumers of literature, but also its subjects. [from an essay by Michael Cunningham in the New York Times dated October 3, 2010]

An Image

More Images for You

Clay Figures and post-modern Identity

There is this suggestion: That young people who catastrophically expose their private lives via social networking sites might need to be granted a name change and a fresh identity as adults. This, interestingly, is a matter of Google letting societal chips fall where they may, to be tidied by lawmakers and legislation as best they can, while the erection of new world architecture continues apace.

If Google were sufficiently concerned about this, perhaps the company should issue children with free “training wheels” identities at birth, terminating at the age of majority. One could then either opt to connect one’s adult identity to one’s childhood identity, or not. Childhoodlessness, being obviously suspect on a résumé, would give birth to an industry providing faux adolescences, expensively retro-inserted, the creation of which would gainfully employ a great many writers of fiction. So there would be a silver lining of sorts.

The prospect of millions of people living out their lives in individual witness protection programs, prisoners of their own youthful folly, appeals to my novelistic Kafka glands. Nor do I take much comfort in the thought that Google itself would have to be trusted never to link one’s sober adulthood to one’s wild youth, which surely the search engine, wielding as yet unimagined tools of transparency, eventually could and would do.

[By William Gibson, extracted from the New York Times]

Freida Pinto of "Slumdog Millionaire"

The Observer: The Perfect Read

I was a relatively new member of the team or group.

Question: How long did it take to size up whether someone was staying . . .

. "It was about watching them, and watching the organization respond to them. I'll give you an example. We're sitting with a large group of folks, about 40 to 50 [in number] and people are standing up to raise certain issues. And I watched this one executive. People were watching and riveted to him, really listening and engaged.
. And then this other executive spoke, and I watched him address the group, and I watched everyone's eyes. And their eyes went back down to their tables. They couldn't even meet eyes with him. It was a clear signal that said, "You've lost us."
. So sometimes you don't know what the messages are that you're going to get, but you have to look for them. They come from your peripheral vision. And that was one of those cases where I just knew it the second it happened."

How Green Is My Valley?--In Summer Time

Some of the fruits and vegetables now being produced in the San Joaquin County area.
Some of the area's top crops and their value:
. Milk $412,643,000
. Grapes $221,807,000
. Walnuts $178,500,000
. Cherries $175,922,000
. Almond meats $175,200,000
. Tomatoes $145,506,000
. Hay $145,970,000
. Cattle, calves $97,788,000
. Corn / grain $69,564,000
. Apples $48,455,000
. Other $495,370,000
.
In other summer news: San Joaquin county area just flipped on the switch for one of the nation's first 4G cellular networks. Significance? 3G speeds ranged from 600 kilobits per second for downloads of web pages up to a max of 1.2 Megabits per second. The 4G speeds (on your smartphones) will give you 3 - 6 Megabits per second with internet pages coming to your cellphone screen almost instantaneously.
. Coming soon: A technology that allows you to complete your debit card purchases in a store by swiping your smartphone in the air above a check-out device that will then approve your purchase, all without touching anything or entering any pin number. It will be a way for phone providers to become providers of transactions like the credit card issuers currently do. Visa and Mastercard now have a reason to worry. Technology will be tested in a couple of locations in the U.S. soon.
. Also, the Corning Glass company recently plowed $160 million into ramping up its production facilities for the manufacture of their patented and secret process for making "Gorilla Glass"--the very same thin but super-strong material that is currently found as the glass screen on smartphones like the iPhone and the Droid phones. Corning expects to quadruple its sales of Gorilla Glass within one year's time. That should have a very definite effect on the stock's share price of $19.00 per share currently. Hmmmm. The symbol for the stock is GLW.
. Have a great Summer!

In Arts Last Week

Top: Patricia Clarkson at the Cafe Loup in the Village, NYC
Middle: A new production of "Madame Butterfly" at Santa Fe Opera
Bottom: A tribute performance to Merce Cunningham in New York roughly titled, "We Give Ourselves Away At Every Moment." (NYTimes)

Images For You

Alfred Dreyfus in 1884. (all photos provided by the New York Times Book Review)




















Two Earlier Novelists: William Somerset Maugham and E. M. Forster



















Soldiers at Roehampton Hospital in London, a center for prosthetic limbs, after World War I.
























A Contemporary Novelist-Lily King

Discovered Poetry--Found Buried Amid The Prose

A dancer who is worshiped as a part-time god,
A female mystic who inhabits a cremation ground
Drinking from skulls,
A sculptor of Hindu idols who believes
He is creating live deities,
A Tibetan monk who enrolls in the Indian Army
In the hope of returning to his homeland,
But ends up killing Pakistanis.

They are survivors from a seductively various world.
Ascetics and mystics,
Mendicant singers and dancers,
Yogic initiates and outcasts.

The nun Prasannamati Mataji is a follower of Jainism.
Mataji’s gentle companion,
Mortally ill with tuberculosis,
Took her own life in the Jain fashion,
Starving herself to death
By stages,
In ritual self-purification.

Mataji is afflicted with the sin
Of intensely missing her.
Mataji has decided to follow the same
Slowly suicidal path,
Although her health is good
And she is still young.

Manisha Ma Bhairavi,
A mystic, worships the demonic god Tara.
She has fled her violent husband
And even deserted her children
To find refuge among sadhus,
Wandering holy men,
In a Bengali cremation ground.
She seeks comfort among other tolerant outcasts
In the goddess’s care.

Ash-smeared and naked,
They sip tea and listen to cricket on the radio.
“It is here, in this place of death,
Amid the skulls and bones and smoking funeral pyres,
That we have found love."
.
[These words, which read as poetry--were discovered amid the statements of a very common form, the book review. They did not reside adjacent to each other but hide among the the ordinary statements of book selling, emerging to be heard only when we listened with the mind's ear. -je] from a review of the book, "Nine Lives," by William Dalrymple and reviewed by Colin Thubron whose next book, "To A Mountain In Tibet" will be published in March (New York Times Book Review dated July 18, 2010)

Atop An Ocean-Drilling Oil Rig

Equipment used to drill for oil under the ocean--a mile deep.

At The Edge of the Earth

The ship contains the orange "Union 76" ball and also the logos for Bank of America and other entities. --from the painting "Ship Shape" by Scott Greene in a gallery exhibition now at the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco through Aug. 21. Reviewed by Kenneth Baker in the SF Chronicle Saturday July 17, 2010

Still Mortal--After All These Years

. Beginning of life makes being older the goal. I'm not 7, I'm 7 AND A HALF! Can't wait to get a driving permit. Can't wait for that day to come. Then the mad hustle begins, with leaps through phases that make your head spin. Proximity makes clear vision possible--so that the current place far from proximate youth makes youth seem all hazy now. But, the proximate is now the other end of the timeline. Spending time with hospitalized people offers the view of all of the steps that we don't want to know about. The tubes, the beds and especially the aging process. It is even possible to see all the way to the end of the line. Don't stare too long. Medusa is there. -je
. "Lots of people get cranky when they get old, largely because they're dealing with pain and fear. It's a good excuse, certainly--I ain't gonna judge it but Richard's embracing of kindness strikes me as a lot more noble.
. The other thing I learned from Richard: Don't give up. Of course, don't give up jousting with [it] , but raging against the dying of the light is only one part of the process. Don't give up being kindly either. Indeed, be more kindly. See if you can do it. See if you can leave a legacy even larger than the one you already have. And if it turns out that you're alive three years from now, hey, it's all gravy." -Jon Carroll

Process . . . Completion . . .Process Again- -Never Finished

. The act of completion, for artists, provokes profound emotion. The painter Arshile Gorky once said that he never finished a piece but that "I just stop working on it for a while." [Artists] . . . speak to the somewhat artificial lines we draw to pronounce a work of art complete. Though it may be ready for departure, the creator can feel a pull to go on painting forever, the way one would feel pulled to continue nurturing a child.
. Or the way a novelist might feel pulled to reopen a story, even decades after closing it, intent on writing fresh resonance into the characters' world.
. --excerpted from a review of the novel "Beautiful Maria of My Soul" by Oscar Hijuelos. Reviewed and quotation from Carolina De Robertis [Special to The SF Chronicle] Sunday July 11, 2010

Neighbor Saves Scores From The Edge

SYDNEY Australia--In those bleak moments when the lost souls stood atop the cliff, wondering whether to jump, the sound of the wind and the waves was broken by a soft voice. "Why don't you come and have a cup of tea?" the stranger would ask. And when they turned to him, his smile was often their salvation.