TRAVEL: Belize, Turneffe Atoll

Where I'm Going April 21: The Belize Atolls are all considered distinct anomalies in the Caribbean. Most atolls are formed by subsiding volcanos. This process creates rings of coral reefs.

The Belize Atolls and one in Mexico were formed quite differently. These atolls, Chinchorro Reef, Lighthouse Reef, Glover’s Reef and the Turneffe Islands, are true coral atolls.

They were developed over 70 million years ago, originating atop giant fault blocks of limestone covered ridges that settled in steps, providing a series of offshore platforms for coral growth.

 After the last ice age, with the slow rise of sea level, coral growth continued upward, creating the precipitous outer walls and the shallow inside lagoon that is typical of these distinct formations. Not only is Turneffe the largest of these, Turneffe is the largest and most biologically diverse atoll in the Western Hemisphere. (From the website)

I'm dreaming of blueness.  Of fish suspended in weightless joy, of warmth and sun.

PHOTO ESSAY: Bodie - Ghost Town

Bodie is a ghost town, a real one, in a remarkable state - the residents just walked away and disappeared, leaving most everything behind.

A bitter cold day for our visit:  a cold quick snow, then mist began rising from the warm earth, the ghosts and memories leaving, too.

MUSIC: Sunrings, Kronos Quartet-The Astronomical Sublime

Tonight, I see the full moon, so bright it's visible in the blue sky even before twilight,  rising in the soft blue sky of a greening California spring.  Yesterday, new photography revealed that the universe is 13.7 billion years old - give or take a few billion, I suppose.  

The Voyager missions in the 1970's, space probes and journeys never before made by human kind, were magnificent resets of my perceptions of what is possible.  It's poignant that human feet have not walked upon the surface of the moon again for many years, even though we could.  It's as if we frightened ourselves profoundly and dare not tread again.

What's interesting to me about space photography is that it represents the real thing in a unique way for us - we will never see "the real thing" the way the sophisticated cameras are able to, never see the real thing at all.  A photograph mostly represents  a real-life object that's been seen or that we can see ourselves on this earth in our lifespan.  But not these space photographs.  They become real to us in a perceptual sense that other photographs do not.  For me, this pushes visual truth into further ambiguity, adds a distancing orbit to my relation to what's real, present, and truthful.

NASA commissioned music to commemorate these space events, based on the images from the satellites and capsules, and the sounds recorded from radio waves listened to as scientists sought to comprehend the magnitude of space and our place in it.

Terry Riley, a musician-composer bridge between Indian and Western sound, made this orchestration and the Kronos Quartet, the most revered  performers of avant-garde music, performed it last night at Cal State Long Beach in Carpenter Hall.

It's depressing to go to Carpenter Hall - it honors the sweet brother-sister singing group The Carpenters,  whose syrupy tunes purveyed a 70's hippie innocence combined with moral rectitude.  But Karen Carpenter died of anorexia, unable to make a life for herself apart from her brother - her story makes me queasy.  A woman who could not live a real woman's  life, effacing her body and denying its needs and denying her soul a vessel for human sentience.

Sunrings is about the cosmos and the experience of our minute place within the timeless grandeur of the space-time continuum.  The photos are awe-inspiring and sometimes frightening, mesmerizing me with their swirling fans of flares and gases emitted from orifices of stars and planets, or dense pulsing clouds that seem to be body cavities viewed during intimacy or surgery, raising and lowering as the body energy of blood pressure and breath so move within them.  

This is not New Age soporific stuff - it clashes, becomes dis-harmony, returns to an energy lull, finds moments of melodic beauty, then back to joyous radiating chaos.  The conclusion - Alice Walker chanting, "One world, one people", with very underwhelming daily-life photos, still lingers, however.

I enjoyed seeing this work a great deal; I have always wanted to hear the Kronos Quartet.  However,  this particular piece, despite conveying a sense of wonder, is very PC, like an upscale advertorial for NASA.  I suspect that an IMAX theater probably has more compelling images of nebulae, The Milky Way, star collisions, etc. than were used in Sunrings.

I had imagined wallpaper-type nebulae of fantastic glowing forms like google image charts - these images don't quite get there, although they are compelling.

The piece has been reviewed as "lite" by more than one critic, surely a death-smooch.  Nonetheless, the dream of one world, one love, does not release easy.  I would never want it to.

BOOK: Three Graves Full

A gravid, gooey mess of a thriller - pathetic loser Jason is bullied and conned by Harris, whom he murders in a fit of sudden retribution and buries in his backyard.  Unknown to him, his yard is popular spot for stashing murder victims - the last owner, Boyd, killed his wife and her lover and buried them - although he used the front yard.

Boyd is wanted by the police, because he's not actually Boyd - he's pretending he's Boyd, his twin, who died, so he can continue to collect the generous disability checks his brother was receiving.  Lea, the fiancé of the murdered wife's lover, comes searching for closure, the police come searching for bodies, Boyd comes searching for Jason, all while Jason desperately tries to dig up his corpse to rebury it.

It's a fine dark farce, mostly solved by a charming dog and a cop named Ford.  The plot, though quite action-filled, really is more concerned with the dynamics of the characters themselves, as they hide, suffer, grieve, anger, and rage, then try to cope with the consequences of their crimes.

I liked the book quite a bit, although I found the syntax lacked flow, making me stumble as  I read - perhaps just like the poor inhabitants of Stillwater.

OPERA: The Flying Dutchman, LA Opera

CAST

• The Dutchman

   Tómas Tómasson*

• Senta (March 9)

   Julie Makerov*

• Senta

   Elisabete Matos*

• Erik

   Corey Bix

• Erik (March 21)

   John Pickle*

• Daland

   James Creswell

• Steersman

   Matthew Plenk*

• Mary

   Ronnita Nicole Miller++

I don't know why audiences and critics are lukewarm about this L.A. Opera offering, but I"m not.  I thought it erotic and seductive, and the production is exquisite.

This vision of the Dutchman is cold and dark, modern. A beautiful scrim mural of a stormy sea opens the opera.  Lots of fog, blue and silver then brownish blue lighting effects, and silver gray costumes that sweep and immobilize the characters in the face of destiny.  The ship's ribs are cold steel.   The Dutchman appears at the back of the stage framed by a giant windmill/nuclear danger silhouette, and then steps through for a long slow walk to the front of the stage to face the coming events.

 His robes and hat reveal him to be the lonely traveler, perhaps the Man in the Long Black Cloak in Dylan's song.  He is a desperate and icy soul, yearning for  release, trapped by his defiance of the sea's power.  Is he somehow more than a devil's pawn?

The Flying Dutchman is a story of a sea captain whose vow to pass the Cape no matter the sea is damned by the Devil to sail the seas unless he can find a woman who will be true to him - the catch is that he has one day every seven years to do soThe modern parallel story is about women who accept the mythology of Cinderella, of submersion in cult, glamour, celebrity - whatever removes authenticity from their existence.

In some productions the maiden who frees the Dutchman jumps into the ocean, sacrificing herself to free the Dutchman's soul;  in others they rise up together at the finale.  In this version, she walks back upstage to disappear in the foggy gloom.  Her march to her death reverses the long downstage entrance made at the beginning of the opera by The Dutchman.

The Sunday performance was the first after an illness of the soprano, Elizabete Matos.  She sang credibly although to my ear, she shrilled and strained dreadfully as she sang the opera's last lines.  All others seemed quite good to me.  The opera orchestra played the exquisite music beautifully indeed, polishing the shining production to a fine luminosity.

The Spinning Room - the skirts of the maidens awaiting their sailor lovers were  visible steel hoops which shone  golden, suggesting their task and the volume and form of feminine power.

ART: Franz Kline, Earlier Work

From NYT review, Roberta Smith:..."Kline had done no such thing. Arriving in New York in 1938, he dedicated most of his energies to an Ashcan-related representational style. After getting to know de Kooning and some other artists, he began in 1946 to broach abstraction in tentative fits and starts. Then, around 1949, he realized that when enlarged, the small ink studies he had been making for years were not only nearly abstract, but they also had an imposing, built-in sense of scale.

Kline’s representational period is almost an embarrassing anomaly in the annals of Abstract Expressionism. It has not become the stuff of legend, like his colleagues’ confrontations with Europe. Instead it has received little attention and sometimes been ignored altogether. This oversight is partly remedied by “Franz Kline: Coal and Steel,” a poignant, revelatory exhibition of some 50 works from throughout Kline’s career at the Sidney Mishkin Gallery at Baruch College."

"... that the precarious balancing acts of Kline’s art from 1950 on are not simply powerful formal devices. They reflect the ups and downs of Kline’s life, as well as the fortunes of the Lehigh Valley, which flourished when he was a child but declined precipitously during his adulthood, when he made frequent visits home.

The works themselves reveal how Kline’s considerable talents for drawing and painting culminate in the architectonic calligraphies of his mature style. He was always a dazzling draftsman who made something of nearly every piece of paper that came his way, whether with a sharp pencil, pen and ink, or brush and ink. More important, he was almost from the start an impressive painter. Had he never made his black-and-whites, he would still be an artist worth cherishing.

The small but panoramic “Lehigh River” (1944) consists of inspired flurries of strokes that already hint, in miniature, at the slashing and propulsive brushstroke-forms of Kline’s mature style. The river, the factories huddled on its banks, the town climbing a distant hill, the train racing across the center — all are described in a variety of marks made primarily with a narrow palette knife or a paintbrush handle (which provides scratched indications of anything from weeds to house or factory windows). Equally striking is the painting’s rich array of miscegenating browns, ochers, creams and oranges.

When Kline turned to color late in his career, the resulting paintings are often considered his weakest. But these early works reveal him to have been an inspired colorist and show what he might have reclaimed, had he not died of heart disease in 1962, at only 51.

In addition, some works narrow the palette to explore variations of two or three colors, as if heading for the ultimate reduction to black and white. “Chief (Train)” (1942), an image of a toylike locomotive that shares its title with a work from the first Egan show that is now in the Museum of Modern Art, is a little symphony in black and red.

Even better is “PA Street (Pennsylvania Mining Town)” (1947), a row of ramshackle houses in many shades of gray, beneath a deep-pink sky and beside a deep-blue-green street. (The slightly slumping, almost cartoonish quality of the houses can evoke Lyonel Feiningerat his early best, but Mr. Mattison also points to the cheap, flimsy buildings of the region’s company towns.) And “Pennsylvania Landscape” of 1947-49 renders a house, some hills, a bridge, the river and a train in robust strokes of bright, acid-to-Kelly greens offset by crucial touches of orange, brown and cream.

TRAVEL: Point Reyes Chimney Rock

Walking out to Chimney Rock

Elephant seals resting on the shore

Scaups sail the bay

Footsteps of Spring

Manroot

Checkerbloom

Douglas Iris

TRAVEL: Sonoma Springtime

Almond Orchard

The spring in Berkeley and Sonoma is warm and sunny this year.  It's the week of flowering trees glorious and profligate, their innocence spending endless vulnerable largesse.  The white flowers  are most difficult to turn away from, to drive on to forever lesser glories.

The old mission church in Sonoma Square - the mission furthest north of the chain. The square  is  unpolished by visible material concerns, though they are there - the gourmet movement in the United States seems to have one of its hearts here in Napa/Sonoma and Berkeley. Cheese and wine tasting, charcuterie, afternoon pastry and coffee, all there.  And then there's the beauty of the vineyards all about. 

Mustard, brought to California by Junipero Serra, now grows everywhere in the California springtime, the most beautiful  invasive species - he thought it symbolized the spread of the word of God.  Ironically, to be sure, the missionaries' Christianity monstrously transformed the Americas.

But the vineyards are the new latticework crown of thorns of California hillsides. Then the mustard  springs up between the bare vines, begotten by much desired rains.  The scaffolding, bare vines, and golden billows satisfy the urgent need to see structure softened, as snow rounds any form that stands up to its inevitable sculpting.

In Sonoma square we visited a photographer's sales studio - Lisa Kristine.  She is a humanist National Geographic hybrid, roaming the world making images of the exotic, the remote, the forgotten.  Above are the fishermens' boats of Essaouira, Morocco, and the Taureg nomads of the interior Sahara desert.

ART: Vermeers: Getty & de Young Museum (Mauritshaus Collections)

THE GETTY MUSEUM

Vermeer, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter 1662-1665

A Sunday afternoon at the Getty to see a spectacular Vermeer - easy to love this artist of the gentle moments of courtship and young love.  A young woman, who resembles Vermeer's wife, stands at an open window wearing a bed jacket.  She has interrupted her morning's preparations, her pearl necklace lying on the table,  to eagerly read a letter, not even taking time to seat herself.  On the wall behind her is a large map, suggesting that someone in the household travels, as would be common in that sea-faring prosperous country.  

Most critics suggest or acquiesce that the woman may be pregnant, which adds to the drama.  Will the loved one arrive home in time to attend the birth?  My painting teacher suggests that she has merely rolled up the waist of her skirt to adjust its length.  But after looking closely at the painting on the Getty website, the fabric of the jacket seems stretched over a swelling stomach.  My idea is that this painting is a secular Annunciation. Because? Of the quality of the light and the spiritual, meditative, accepting intimacy - the window is invisible, as the Holy Spirit moves invisibly in the balance of the Trinity.    

The tone and mood of the painting is calm interiority, lit by clear creamy thin sunlight.  Spaces, color harmonies and values, and perspective relations have all been carefully arranged to create this mood.  ("...heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter...").

Such lovely subtle colors, such glowing, lambent softness.  A lesson in attending to the beauty of the ordinary, the lived life that is to be valued beyond worldly signifiers of prestige.

SWANENBURG, Willem Isaacsz. van: The Land Yacht, 1603

Salomon van Ruysdael, View of a Lake with Sailing Ships, 1650-1651

Jacob van Ruysdael, View of the Bleaching Ground, Haarlem, 1670-1675

Franz Hals, Portrait of Jacob Olycan, 1625 

Franz Hals, Portrait of Annette d'Olycan

Carel Fabritus, The Goldfinch, 1654

Rembrandt van Rijn, Self Portrait with Gorget, 1629

Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of an Elderly Man, 1667

van Beyeren, Flower Still Life with Timepiece, 1663-1665

Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring

FILM: Side Effects

 I enjoyed this suspenseful, smart, well-plotted film directed by Stephen Soderbergh. Jude Law plays caring, committed psychiatrist to depressed young rich Rooney Mara, whose husband, Channing Tatum, is being released from jail for insider trading.  Catherine Zeta-Jones is fun to see playing a psychiatrist he consults to help his patient.

The first half of the film depicts the pervasive efforts of the drug industry to market and position new drugs with the medical establishment as well as the public.  It's chilling as our pawn status as drug shopping consumers is revealed - and Rooney commits a dreadful crime while taking a new depression medication that has some -of course, side effects.

Everyone sues everyone, but that's not it - the film's second half twists downward to depths of manipulative traps and plots laid by - I won't tell - the characters.  The psychiatrist, well meaning, goes all mean and ruthless once he loses his wife, his practice, and his reputation and so he too, plots a revenge.  And it's a grim, well designed plan, that flips our sympathy for him and our disgust with Mara head over heels.

The fashion in chic murder thrillers these days seems be - no good guys - just amoral,  pathetic, selfish manipulators, bullies, predators, preyed upon dynamics in which flawed creatures struggle through their crime and its consequences, arriving at closure, but little justice.  But it's deeply entertaining stuff.  I just can't resist trying to figure out who did it, and how.

A SHORT: Baby World, Mad World

Yesterday I got to pretend that I was a young mother again, living through those days of long slow care and deepest connection to a child.  My granddaughter is 17 months old now, just beginning to walk.  She speaks little, but possesses a deep will and quite a temper when foiled.

She spends her time in trial and error manipulations:  how does this drawer open?  How do I make a block tower? How does this light switch turn off and on?  When an awkward pot lid or cupboard door won't co-operate, she pushes, yowls her displeasure. Grammy helps.

I love my kitchen work when the baby is here.  She plays on the floor with beautifully made wooden toy bottles with magnetic lids which fascinate her, and small red pots and pans just her size, working more on the mystery of the drawers and cupboards while I perform those small chores of daily living that make for comfort and orderliness.

My patience seems endless, fed by the circle of innocence that surrounds us.  I know this is my last baby; this island of joy and the smiling lighted face of a little child illuminating my soul.

In the warm late afternoon sun, we go out for a walk.  Her energy is formidable; she holds my hand and  runs as fast as the tiny rhinestone-studded tennis shoes will go, for two long blocks: past the grungy fast food stand, the pigeon-soiled street corner, back to the green grass yards of our 1930's neighborhood, running running with joy joy in each small foot step, a huge smile if one sees her.

I pray for all the babies in the world, each eager reaching pair of arms seeking the care it deserves.  It will give solace for the brutal world heedless of childhood's needs.  At least in this one small place, one child is loved well.

I think now of my adult son, the sweet vulnerable child he once was, now a man with a man's difficult tasks.   The caregiving for his aging father has fallen to him, the most available family member to do this. The man I married so long ago, capable of both generosity and cruelty, mostly cruelty, though, has Alzheimer's.  In the old days we didn't have a name for it.

It's just what happened to you when you got old.  Now aging is a special tragedy, but still our assigned portion though named.  His father falls into rages that are truly murderous, threatening to kill his son, to cleave his head wide open and leave his body in the desert. He is frail and unstable and so the danger is only to our memories.

I think of my children and the generous world I have with them, and wonder.  If I'd known, would I ever have married such a man?  A hypo ethical thetical  dilemma.

I'm stunned into a dumb painful wonder at the dichotomy of my life.  My son and daughter are living with ghastly decline while the they and their children glow and blossom,  pearls of joy nestled in care and a giving forth of endless delight.

The birch tree in our front yard has new leaves.  I'd been on watch for them for days now.  The tree presented me with my wish, but I didn't notice at first because they are very high up; it's the topmost branch that is greening first.

The foundation must be grown deeper and firmer; it must be fixed well for me as this reality deepens,  sad, bitter, unutterably beautiful.