Heather King's Blog, page 62
January 10, 2020
SUNDAYS LIVE AT ST. JAMES: FREE CLASSICAL MUSIC
THE HOLLYWOOD TRIOHere’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins:
For years during the 1990s when I lived in Koreatown, I’d attend the Sunday afternoon Bing Theater classical music concerts at LACMA.
After almost a quarter of a century, the concerts have now moved a couple of miles east, to St. James Episcopal Church on Wilshire Boulevard and St. Andrew’s Place. Part of the larger “Great Music at St. James” series, the programs are free, open to the public, and start at 6 pm.
You can go to kusc.org for weekly downloads of Sundays Live. But why not make the trek, at least once, and take in the whole experience?
On December 29, I attended a concert featuring The Hollywood Piano Trio: Roberto Cani on violin, Robert deMaine on cello, and Inna Faliks on piano. The occasion was the celebration of Beethoven’s 250th birthday.
Free parking is available across from the church at 3926 Wilshire Blvd. The church is also close to the Wilshire/Western stop on the Metro Purple Line.
READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.
SUNDAYS LIVE AT ST. JAMES
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins:
For years during the 1990s when I lived in Koreatown, I’d
attend the Sunday afternoon Bing Theater classical music concerts at LACMA.
After almost a quarter of a century, the concerts have now moved a couple of
miles east, to St. James Episcopal Church on Wilshire Boulevard and St.
Andrew’s Place. Part of the larger “Great Music at St. James” series, the
programs are free, open
to the public, and start at 6 pm.
You can go to kusc.org for weekly downloads of Sundays Live. But why not make the trek, at least once, and take in the whole experience?
On December 29, I attended a concert featuring The Hollywood Piano Trio: Roberto Cani on violin, Robert deMaine on cello, and Inna Faliks on piano. The occasion was the celebration of Beethoven’s 250th birthday.
Free parking is available across from the church at 3926 Wilshire Blvd. The church is also close to the Wilshire/Western stop on the Metro Purple Line.
January 8, 2020
“ALL THINGS ARE PHOTOGRAPHABLE”
“I look at the pictures I have done up to now and they make me feel that who we are and how we feel and what is to become of us just doesn’t matter. Our aspirations and successes have been cheap and petty. I read the newspapers, the columnists, some books, I look at some magazines (our press). They all deal in illusions and fantasies. I can only conclude that we have lost ourselves, and that the bomb may finish the job permanently, and it just doesn’t matter, we have not loved life.”
Winogrand, one of my favorite photographers, wrote the above in the wake of the assassination of JFK, and in the midst of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement.
I was able to take in “Garry Winogrand: Color,” an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum (through while I was in NY last November.
And I realized all over again: what made Winogrand great is that he DID love life.
ETHAN, c. 1964GARRY WINOGRAND
Untitled (New York), 1960GARRY WINOGRAND
"ALL THINGS ARE PHOTOGRAPHABLE"
New York, 1968 GARRY WINOGRAND, COURTESY THE COLLECTION CENTER FOR CREATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY, THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
"I look at the pictures I have done up to now and they make me feel that who we are and how we feel and what is to become of us just doesn't matter. Our aspirations and successes have been cheap and petty. I read the newspapers, the columnists, some books, I look at some magazines (our press). They all deal in illusions and fantasies. I can only conclude that we have lost ourselves, and that the bomb may finish the job permanently, and it just doesn't matter, we have not loved life."
--Garry Winogrand
Winogrand, one of my favorite photographers, wrote the above in the wake of the assassination of JFK, and in the midst of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement.
I was able to take in "Garry Winogrand: Color," an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum (through while I was in NY last November.
And I realized all over again: what made Winogrand great is that he DID love life.
ETHAN, c. 1964GARRY WINOGRAND
Untitled (New York), 1960GARRY WINOGRAND
January 3, 2020
HUMMINGBIRD IN UNDERWORLD, A MEMOIR
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins:
Deborah Tobola is known as a visionary pioneer in the field of arts in U.S. corrections.
She is a graduate of the University of Montana, and has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. Her prose and poetry have won several awards. She has worked as a waitress, journalist, legislative aide, and adjunct English faculty member in Alaska and California.
She currently serves as executive director of The Poetic Justice Project, an organization that “advances social justice by engaging formerly incarcerated people in the creation of original theatre that examines crime, punishment, and redemption.”
“Hummingbird in Underworld: Teaching in a Men’s Prison,” out this year from She Writes Press ($17), is ostensibly an account of Tobola’s nine-year tenure at the California Men’s Colony (CMC) in San Luis Obispo.
But this mesmerizing hybrid is much more: part family memoir, part prison system snapshot, partly a narrative of the making of a poet.
January 1, 2020
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Last night, while searching for an Albert Dürer composition entitled “Strange Bird with Scroll,” I came across a whole cache of interesting stuff. The above seems especially apropos for today, January 1, Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God.
Here’s the bird.
And another bird.
And here’s a self-portrait of the artist at 22, done in 1493. Check out the headgear!
Then I somehow found my way to Ernst Haeckel.
Help! I have all kinds of books on reserve not at the library, and have meanwhile become obsessed with James Castle, about whom more anon.
I aim to learn, enlarge my spiritual life, and not be crabby and tired for the year of Our Lord 2020–I pray the same for you!
HAPPY NEW YEAR
THE MADONNA OF THE CARNATIONALBRECT DÜRER, 1516Last night, while searching for an Albert Dürer composition entitled "Strange Bird with Scroll," I came across a whole cache of interesting stuff. The above seems especially apropos for today, January 1, Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God.Here's the bird.
And another bird.
And here's a self-portrait of the artist at 22, done in 1493. Check out the headgear!
Then I somehow found my way to Ernst Haeckel.
Help! I have all kinds of books on reserve not at the library, and have meanwhile become obsessed with James Castle, about whom more anon.
I aim to learn, enlarge my spiritual life, and not be crabby and tired for the year of Our Lord 2020--I pray the same for you!
December 27, 2019
IN THIS PLACE CHRIST WANTS TO BE BORN
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins:
“Now he comes to be born in the narrowness of our lives, to be incarnate in us, to give his love to the world through us, through our flesh and blood. That is one meaning of the Incarnation.
The reason why we are where we are this Christmas, in this house, family, office, workroom, hospital, or camp, is because it is here in this place that Christ wants to be born, from here that he wants his life to begin again in the world…We did not choose this place–Christ has chosen it. We did not choose these people—Christ has chosen them.”
–Caryll Houselander, The Mother of Christ
I’m not sure I ever chose LA. When I moved here in 1990, I was newly married. My brother, a contractor who lived in the South Bay, had given my then-husband and I tickets from Boston as a honeymoon gift. He’d offered Tim, a carpenter, a job.
LA was the last place that, as a lifelong New Englander, I ever thought I’d end up. Yet bit by bit the city, in all its unfathomable, sprawling mystery, grew on me. I underwent so many dark nights, so much searching and suffering here—not because LA is an especially harsh place; rather, because I’m human—that over time the very city came to be incorporated into my bones and blood, and vice versa.
In recovery programs, I’d experienced the fascinating phenomenon that I was not healed by people I had hand-picked, but by whoever happened to walk through the door on any given day.
That rough concept of the Mystical Body prepared me well to come into the Church, which I did in 1996. So did the traits with which I seem to have emerged from the womb: my love of nature, my propensity for the outcast, the hypersensitivity that has made for so much pain but also for so much consolation and joy.
December 25, 2019
LET EARTH RECEIVE HER KING
MERRY CHRISTMAS, LA STYLE...Oh the season of Advent has been deep. I find I'm spent. Not from buying presents, eating, or showing off/arguing/sniping on social media. Rather from the deep prayer of the last four weeks...
"The people who walk in darkness have seen a great light."
And then the Gospel today, the beginning of John: "The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came to be through him, but the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him."
True then, true now.
And yet--Joy to the world. The Lord has come.
Off to 12:30 Mass, then dinner with friends in the neighborhood.
My gratitude and love for your readership, your loyalty, your own questing spirits and hearts is boundless. Thank you, eternally, for walking with me on our PERILOUS journey!
Let's be extra nice to our families today.
LET EARTH RECEIVE HER KING
Oh the season of Advent has been deep. I find I’m spent. Not from buying presents, eating, or showing off/arguing/sniping on social media. Rather from the deep prayer of the last four weeks…
“The people who walk in darkness have seen a great light.”
And then the Gospel today, the beginning of John: “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came to be through him, but the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him.”
True then, true now.
And yet–Joy to the world. The Lord has come.
Off to 12:30 Mass, then dinner with friends in the neighborhood.
My gratitude and love for your readership, your loyalty, your own questing spirits and hearts is boundless. Thank you, eternally, for walking with me on our PERILOUS journey!
Let’s be extra nice to our families today.
