Dudamel’s philosophy, work and life constitute a resounding rebuke to those who maintain that art is a frivolous whim in these dark times.
ARTS
DEAREST SISTER WENDY
On one level, the book can be read as a dialogue about the active versus the contemplative life.
MARIA SIBYLLA MERIAN, SCIENTIST AND ARTIST
Read up on this amazing 17th-c. caterpillar obsessive, butterfly aficianado, explorer and artist!
PILGRIMAGE TO THE MUSEUM
Auth finds much to like in Realism, Impressionism, and modern art. He gives a fair read to Picasso, Seurat, Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. He celebrates Salvador Dali’s 1954 “Crucifixion,” which depicts an ascendant, cosmic Christ.
But he’s also clear that the soul searching for God finds little sustenance in art grounded in atheism and secularism.
DEATHSONG: MEDIEVAL CHANT WITH DR. ELAINE STRATTON HILD
Dr. Hild’s fervent wish is that we might all come to play music, chant, or sing around the bedside of our dying loved ones.
PIANIST MARIA YUDINA: HOLY FOOL
“Yudina was a strange person, and very much a loner.” “Strange things kept happening to her.” “Yudina saw music in a mystical light. For instance, she saw Bach’s Goldberg Variations as a series of illustrations to the Holy Bible,” Shostakovich observed. “She always played as though she were giving a sermon.”
MY FAMOUS BROTHER JOE
My brother Joe is a 40-year veteran of the punk scene and frontman for The Queers.
We had a long zoom chat the other day, yukking it up about our childhoods on the NH coast, reminisching about our drinking years, and and giving thanks for having followed our respective callings. Watch it on YouTube!
AGNES’S JACKET
Hornstein notes the role trauma so often plays in mental illness. She finds people who are courageously fully functioning in the world while also managing almost unimaginably heavy psychic crosses.
CHAT ROOM
I, for one, am hungry for this kind of conversation. I think many of us are. What’s more interesting than hearing each other’s stories?
MARIPOSAS NOCTURNAS: THE SPLENDOR OF MOTHS
As with a late Beethoven quartet, or a Cézanne still-life, the intensity of the beauty is almost too much to bear.
FLESH AND BONES
To my mind it’s the earliest images that most compellingly evoke the wonder and complexity of the human body. People were closer to God then, more aware of the divine plan. Death was a part of daily life, not hidden away and sanitized.
KEEPING THE PATHS CLEAR
. “Battouflet’s chief concern was the vegetation on the ghostly paths. Cutting and thrusting impatiently, his stick kept open a vestige of the vineyard tracks which would otherwise have been overgrown and lost. It was his single self-imposed task.”
THE INNER LIFE OF AN LA STREET PAINTER
“I don’t pretend to be van Gogh. I’m a commercial artist. I’m one of a thousand. I do simple landscapes to support my family. I don’t do what I want to do; I do what the people who buy my paintings like me to do. If I paint the Manhattan Beach pier ten times, I’ll sell all of them. If I paint the Virgin Mary, I don’t sell one.”