TRAVEL: Palo Alto, A Family Wedding

Fogarty Winery, Woodside, CA

Matt McLean and Lisa Chen’s wedding

We drove to Palo Alto to be guests at John’s cousin Star’s child (Matt).  Star is one of three sisters: Lisa and Judith are the others.  John grew up with them, as did his sister Katharine, who is here too.  Also Dayton and Laura and their children, Dayton Palmer and Ginny, and Tessa Harbor, Lisa’s lovely daughter, whose wedding we attended 3 years ago.  The Adamson sisters grew up in an activist East Coast intellectual home.

 Star married Kenny, an African American man she’d met in high school.  Their 3 children, Matt, Josh, and Emily, are extra-ordinarily talented, handsome, and intelligent young people. Kenny and Star were divorced when the children were teenagers.  A few years later, she had a serious stroke at about age 54, and is now in a wheelchair life-bound.

 An old lover returned and began to care for her, Archie, an amazing and full-of-grace occurrence - then Archie had a stroke, too, and so Judith and Lisa began to care for Star and Archie, and a foster child Star had picked up along the way.

Star has recovered her speech and most mental faculties, but has processing and attention issues.  To see her at age 52 with her life in such vertigo makes me urgently bless each day I wake in health and vigor to begin anew. 

Star's  eldest son, Matt, married Lisa Chen, his long time girlfriend.  They met at Stanford as freshmen, and now it’s 10 year later.  These fine young people work at bettering humanity in medical technology design and world public health, and their love is passionate, young, strong, and joyous.  

Star made a toast that she stumbled badly over but which only made the moment more poignant.  I felt tears running down my face and then when they danced, Star leaning trustfully upon his shoulder, shuffling her feet to turn and follow her son’s lead, they began again.  

Judith, aunt to the groom, performed the wedding ceremony.  She will return to upstate New York this year to care for Star.

Lisa, another sister/aunt, is an artist/activist in upstate New York. I enjoyed talking with her, we are both very interested in studio work, and that makes for an animated exchange.  

Katharine, John’s sister, is back in Berkeley after a stop-over in New Canaan to supervise/visit Lib, John’s mother.  She too works diligently, supervising their rapidly aging/deteriorating mother’s needs and care. 

She is a remarkable woman of many accomplishments, polished, intellectually and aesthetically few people’s equal, always interesting and thoughtful to talk to. 

I am finding that I enjoy myself and the places I go now so much.  So much has fallen away, so much remains.

It used to mean so much to me what all thought of me.  Now a sea change - again.  It seems to no longer concern me that people are impressed with me.  I have settled on some things - that most people care little about art or others, or about me, anyway, and that’s OK.  I have myself now, and have no need to seek acceptance.  Since KF and I fell out, I have become free - to please myself - as Rick Nelson sang in “Garden Party”.  

It also doesn’t matter to me any longer that my painting will be disposed of after my death.  I only wish to do it for myself now, in a new and pure spirit and intention that I’ve discovered - as if I’d brushed away enough dust, or mined it, - it was waiting for me to find, I think. 

ART: Painting Landscape Now: D. Flloimibi

Thursday, August 30, 2012 –  

Painting Landscape - D Florimbi

Cinematic, photographic, this paintings’s composition is able to visually disturb somatic orientation  and create the anticipation one experiences when about to crest a narrow highway after climbing a steep grade  - what is waiting for me? 

The Unknown,  New experience, the Future; but peripheral sightlines are  severely compressed, creating stress because one can’t see forever, after all - suggesting existential subjectivity. Is this a plane window, a porthole, or an emergence from a womb/tunnel? 

But one is called, beckoned - there is a sense of urgency:  first to pause and experience a sense of great wonder, to mark the exquisite moment, and then one must take the steps - there is no choice but to go on. 

Once or twice at mass I have felt “called”; called upon, designated, singled out to comprehend that I must go alone.  The place I was to enter is beautiful, severe, alone, distanced - much sacrifice but the reward is authentic and full integrity of spirit and character, and the ability to bear the knowledge of my certain death and to live fully and compassionately with this, my only promise, my only comfort. 

But there will be beauty, always, surpassing, bountiful, endless beauty to attend, the other compensation.  Well, the security of knowing that the veils of ignorance and denial can be unloosed to face the void with quietude and peace.

Characterized by Donald Kuspit, one of my favorite critics, as a “twentieth century visual thinker”, - what does that mean, that he’s dated? - Florimbi also paints erotically charged figures with existential dread read into the imagery.

But I like these dramatic landscapes - their irony about American land and landscape genres, encroaching civilization, tourism. 

ART: Jennifer Lee, Ceramics

Thursday, August 23, 2012 – Page 1 

Jennifer Lee, Ceramic Artist 

“Breathtaking in their simplicity, Lee’s pots don’t merely illustrate conditions of nature but elegantly, gracefully manifest them.”

Leah Ollman, The Los Angeles Times

These are the most shibui ceramics I’ve ever seen - they outdo the Japanese in their elegance and subtlety.  Makes me want to change my whole palette to paint in these understated lovely tones.

THEATER: Red, starring Albert Molina, a play about Mark Rothko

currently my favorite artist.  How I wanted to like this play! And how dissatisfied I was.  I thought Alfred Molina  delivered a steely vision of artistic purpose, but the writing  was cliched, and seemed culled then quoted from comments, opinions, and stereotypes about art and Rothko that most of us have heard before.

Just can’t help thinking about Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia”, a much better play about art.

Rothko committed suicide in his mid 60's, probably his own self-loathing destroying him.  The contradictions of possessing such a vision and to be yet self-consuming - withdraw as pale vision and reality dawn.

HOME time.

Friday, August 17, 2012 – 

HOME AGAIN

 A busy few days, settling in again, enjoying being home, and realizing the ennui and entropy that settle in again too.  No excuses at home or distractions to combat the boredom; the need to engage real life.  Vacation life is so novel, stimulating, beautiful.  

After I got to see the grandchildren again, a deep rounded fullness came to me, a sense of purpose about remaining near to my family.  I thought of my mother and father on vacation this year frequently, and Earl and Vera - all the vacations they took us on, all the outdoor life experience they gave us.  I hope Dad was looking down when I learned to filet that trout, and when I caught all those fish myself.   

Yesterday I jogged lightly for thirty-five minutes and came home comfortable and exhilarated.  I made a commitment to start hiking around Los Angeles very seriously - there are lots of places and I just need to get up and go do it.

I have decided that exercise and health are going to be my first priority - even before my painting.  It means less time for that, but it’s got to be the most important reality in my personal life.  

TRAVEL: Bishop, South Lake Fishing

Friday, August 9, 2012, page 2 – 

To Bishop and Home

We drove up Bishop Creek Canyon today and fished South Lake, one of our favorite Sierra lakes, the first one we began fishing in.  The lake level is shocking - I’ve never seen it so low.  The dry winter has taken a terrible toll on the eastern side of the Range of Light, the side which is dryer anyway.

  It's down 35 feet; a passage between a small island and the shore has become an isthmus and the back of lake and its inlet is a pond--puddle, in which we got stuck because John insisted on driving the boat into it.  A kind stranger towed us back to the dock and we got the motor going again, and continued fishing.

The intermittent thundershowers speckled us with some rain, but it was almost tropical.  We dried off quickly and continued fishing until we were tired and needed bathroom.  We each caught fish easily, though nothing big.  But fun. 

The unstable thunderstorms weather gave us fantastic clouds, light, rays of sun breaking through around mountaintops, looking like Moses might be giving us commandments that were overlooked in the first installment.  It rained, it shined.   Marvelous.

Dinner at Whiskey Creek and then back to our modest hotel.  I wish we could go home tomorrow instead of Sunday.  I am ready to go back to my other life, the one where I take care of Max, Jack, and Alexa, my roses, and paint again.

TRAVEL: Our Last Sierras Day, page 2

Thursday, August 8, 2012  

Last Day in the Sierras

We drove to Red Lake, a small round green gem surrounded by oxide rubble, to fish for native brown, brook and rainbows. We caught many little 6-8 inch Eastern Brook Trout, a beautiful specked fish with a pink-red tummy.  

A beautiful small waterfall spills into Upper Virginia Lake from Red Lake, and at its ingress we fished again, and John caught a brown, while I caught several nice rainbows. The weather was balmy, windy.  Dinner outdoors again at The Historic Mono Inn, watching the coming evening and the white plumes of smoke mixing with the fantastic cumulus clouds in the big empty sky over Mono Lake.

The Indian Fire, East of  Mono Lake

We'd been seeing distant smoke for two days now, dining at the Mono Inn and watching sunsets.  The local paper informed us today that there's a lighting-ingnited brush fire burning on BLM land 5 miles southeast of Mono Lake.  Even LA fire department members joined to contain it.  The terrain is sagebrush, but it's a vital ground for sage grouse, so losing territory for them is a sad event.