Speed of Life

"The idea that it is some kind of calculated insult is an absurdity. The real insult - to the intelligence and decency of 'the world's 1.5 billion Muslims', for whom people such as Mohammed Ejaz ul-Haq presume to speak - comes from the ignorance and paranoia of leaders who feel so threatened by a novelist that they'll call for him to be killed." -Hari Kunzru (author of Transmission & The Impressionist ) The noted author of The Satanic Verses , Haroun and the Sea of Stories , Midnight's Children and The Ground Beneath Her Feet has been knighted by the Queen of England and the newly minted Sir Salman has again become a lightning rod for criticism from extreme and irrational voices. Heinrich Heine's line from, "Almansor", is once again a call for constant vigilance: "Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings." ("Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.") —Heinrich He...

Claude Monet (1840-1926) "Waterloo Bridge, Temps Couvert" 25½" x 39 1/8" oil on canvas 1904 "I adore London, it is a mass, an ensemble, and it is so simple. What I like most of all in London is the fog. How could English painters of the nineteenth century have painted its houses brick by brick? Those fellows painted bricks that they didn't see, that they couldn't see... I so love London! But I only like it in the winter... It is the fog that gives it its marvellous breadth. Its regular, massive blocks become grandiose in this mysterious cloak."(Monet, quoted in J. House, ""Monet's London: Artists' Reflections on the Thames" 1859-1914). The painting is one in a series of views from the Savoy Hotel that Monet painted in London in the years before World War I. The High Museum presented a fascinating exhibit on Monet in London almost twenty years ago. The catalogue written by Grace Seiberling is well worth finding.

Édouard Manet A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (detail) 1882 Oil on canvas 37 13/16 x 51 3/16 in. The Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London Manet's magnificent and mysterious "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" graces the Getty Museum in Brentwood until September 9th, 2007. Normally housed at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in the imposing Somerset House, we are fortunate to be able to view the painting in Los Angeles. Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" is painted in rich buttery strokes of oil paint. The physicality of the pigment gives tangible visual weight to a scene which combines the still presence of the barmaid with the flickering mystery of the mirror behind the bar. The Getty has placed the work in a room with a mirror on the opposite wall to help spur a dialogue between viewer and painting. We are asked a series of provacative questions on the Getty's webpage on Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" ...

Ganesh Study 12"x9" oil on wood 2007

Listen to a clip from RB Morris'"Empire" Download RB Morris' New Album "Empire" at Digstation RB Morris has a new album out which is available as a download from Digstation. As I mentioned last year after his gig at the Getty, RB's new song "Empire" is a musical poem of political and personal hubris for our times. In early 2008 - RB Morris, Phil Cousineau and I will be leading a workshop on creativity at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. Details to follow. Last year I wrote that Lucinda Williams has called him the "greatest unknown songwriter in the country." Recently at the Edinburgh Castle in San Francisco, I heard RB Morris play the greatest unreleased song in the country - his post September 11th lament - "Empire ". "Empire" is a heartbreaking look at America today. It would fit right in on Neil Young's "Living With War", Pearl Jam's new album, The Dixie Chicks' new collection, Springsteen...

www.instantkarma.org

For the White Book on Matisse’s Table by the Dahlias, Peaches, Water Glass There are two kinds of love and we’ve known both. Two kinds of love: the one that thrills and one that satisfies. Thrilling love compresses time it speeds your heart. The satisfying kind turns days to summers looks to lives. They are two kinds, two courses one cycle short one long neither engendering the other flowing separate harmonious or discordant. Not partial to a party my thrilling lover may satisfy tomorrow my satisfying love may suddenly thrill. We want to weave them but always fail for they are of such unequal lengths to not be braidable. They are played and what we can is tune ourselves to each rhythm to love each way ...

Gregg Chadwick Buddha for Bamiyan 115" x 86" oil on linen 2007

Left to Right: Diebenkorn and Sean Scully at Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University Periodically, I visit the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. Recently, I was struck by the juxtaposition of Richard Diebenkorn and Sean Scully in their permanent collection. The wall label next to Sean Scully's "Angel" (illustrated above) indicates that insight may be generated by the presence of free and unburdened space. Scully calls "Angel" a child of air travel.

Good Night Texas! Wayne Thiebaud "Freeways" oil on canvas 1979 The zeitgeist returns to California. Pelosi in D.C. The Dallas Mavericks on their way home to Texas. Santa Monica, UCLA, and the Warriors' amazing Baron Davis moves on in the NBA playoffs, while we continue to enjoy the visions of Wayne Thiebaud and Ed Ruscha.

Gregg Chadwick Yakushi Nyorai (The Healing Buddha) 12"x12" oil on linen 2007 From the upcoming Venice Art Walk -on May 20, 2007- which benefits the Venice Family Clinic

The Bay Area has enjoyed a weekend of great weather, great art (Picasso and Brice Marden at SFMOMA) and great basketball- Baron Davis and company now are one win away from a historic playoff upset. Davis scored 33 points as the Warriors beat the Dallas Mavericks by a score of 103-99 Sunday night and hold a 3-1 lead over the Mavs in their first-round playoff series. Dallas Maverick's fans watch in disbelief as their team is bewitched by Baron Davis and the Golden State Warriors Golden State's Monta Ellis

Mstislav Rostropovich gave an impromptu concert at Checkpoint Charlie after the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. photo- Reuters Listen to an excerpt from Rostropovich's performance of Bach's Suite No. 1 in G Major: I. Prelude Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich has died. He will be remembered for his music and his brave efforts to keep the arts free from censorship and tyranny. This story from the Los Angeles Times is particularly poignant: "In July 1991, Rostropovich performed a concert in Prague to fulfill his 1968 promise to play there when the last Soviet soldier left Czechoslovakia. A month later, when he heard that hard-liners had put vacationing Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev under house arrest, seized power in Moscow and surrounded Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin in the republic Parliament building, Rostropovich, at considerable personal danger, raced from Paris to Moscow, sweet-talking his way past KGB guards at the airport, to stand ...

An image of the full sun in 3-D. This photo was captured by SECCHI/Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope on March 20, 2007, and combines 4 different wavelengths into one image. Photo courtesy of NASA NASA describes the program: "STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) is the third mission in NASA's Solar Terrestrial Probes program (STP). This two-year mission, launched October 2006, will provide a unique and revolutionary view of the Sun-Earth System. The two nearly identical observatories - one ahead of Earth in its orbit, the other trailing behind - will trace the flow of energy and matter from the Sun to Earth. They will reveal the 3D structure of coronal mass ejections; violent eruptions of matter from the sun that can disrupt satellites and power grids, and help us understand why they happen. STEREO will become a key addition to the fleet of space weather detection satellites by providing more accurate alerts for the arrival time of Earth-directed solar ejectio...

Mark Rothko Untitled (Seagram Mural), 1959 Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. Copyright © 1997 Christopher Rothko and Kate Rothko Prizel National Gallery of Art, Washington DC Sometimes a painting will seem to carry the weight of the moment solely by means of color or form. Mark Rothko wanted his paintings to convey the depth of myth and the struggles of humanity. Richard Lacayo at Time also had an urge to turn to Rothko after the shootings at VirginiaTech. Lacayo only recently learned how to "see" Rothko and has discovered what Rothko was up to: " I understood that all those hovering fog banks of color weren’t gateways to anything, they were emblems of thwarted longing. Rothko was trying to invoke the power of myth, even the power of God, all the while knowing that he could summon those things, but they might not come. Would not, more likely." VirginiaTech ~ Rothko VirginiaTech ~ In Memoriam ~ Lacayo

We are Virginia Tech. We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech. We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again. We are Virginia Tech. We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devestated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy. We are Virginia Tech. The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to tho...

Jackie Robinson during his collegiate years in Los Angeles "A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives." -Jackie Robinson Today marks the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Jackie Robinson was the first African-American baseball player to compete in the major leagues when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Across the United States, players from each major league baseball team will wear tributes to Jackie Robinson. Every player on the Los Angeles Dodgers will wear Jackie Robinson’s No. 42 today. Bill Pennington of the New York Times explains that the movement to honor Jackie's memory began with a suggestion from the Cincinnati Red's Ken Griffey Jr. - "Sixty years after Jackie Robinson shook the baseball establishment and broke the sport’s color barrier, an unforeseen grassroots movement by today’s players has suddenly shaped the way Major League Baseball will commemorate the anniversary....

Eakins’ “Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand” (1874), sold to Alice Walton’s Arkansas museum. The painting is destined for the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, now under construction in Bentonville, Arkansas. Carol Vogel in the New York Times is reporting that Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia has been at it again in their attempt to sell an Eakins to Crystal Bridges. This time it is Thomas Eakin's portrait of Benjamin Howard Rand. "Less than four months after Philadelphians thwarted its bid to buy “The Gross Clinic,” an 1875 masterpiece by Thomas Eakins, an Arkansas museum founded by the Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton has quietly purchased another much-loved Eakins painting from the Philadelphia medical school that sold the first." Michael Kimmelman describes the painting: "A tour de force from 1874 -Benjamin Howard Rand- a chemistry professor whom Eakins knew as a teacher from his school days. He sits, reading and distractedly stroking a c...

"Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach." --Sol LeWitt, 1969 Sol LeWitt's retrospective, which ran from February 19, 2000 - May 21, 2000 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was a revelation. The timing of the exhibition was deeply personal for me. It was the end of one phase of my life, an introduction to a new path, and ultimately a springboard -both personally and artistically- to a new world. Sol LeWitt's life work as laid out in SFMOMA's exhibition was intellectually stimulating and ravishingly beautiful. This was an artist who was deeply serious, yet who had no fear of beauty. Sol LeWitt "Cube-Circle 4" wall drawing from Sol LeWitt: New Wall Drawings & Photographs at the Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco which ran from Sep 9 - Oct 30, 2004 "I would like to produce something I would not be ashamed to show Giotto." --Sol LeWitt, 1980's "Born in 1928 in Hartford, Connec...

I am re-reading Lawrence Weschler's volume of essays: "Vermeer in Bosnia." Weschler's piece on the light of L.A. resonates: The architect Coy Howard, a true student of the light explains: "Things in the light here have a kind of threeness instead of the usual twoness. There's the thing -the object- and its shadow, but then a sense of reflection as well. You know how you can be walking along the beach ... and you'll see a seagull walking along ahead of you, and a wave comes in, splashing its feet. At this moment, you'll see the bird, its shadow, and its reflection. Well, there's something about the environment here - the air, the atmosphere, the light - that makes everything shimmer. There's a kind of glowing thickness to the world - the diaphonous soup- which in turn, grounds a magic-meditative sense of presence." Icons From Sinai

Update: RB Kitaj Exits R.B. Kitaj at Hammer Museum RB Kitaj presented a lecture on his art at the Hammer Museum on Thursday, March 8, 2007 R.B. Kitaj Los Angeles no. 20 1990-2003 Collection of the National Gallery of Australia "Don't listen to the fools who say either that pictures of people can be of no consequence or that painting is finished. There is much to be done. It matters what men of good will want to do with their lives." -RB Kitaj We are fortunate to have Kitaj back in Los Angeles. Much like Alex and Jane Eliot, Kitaj should be declared a living national treasure. Almost thirty years ago Kitaj curated an exhibition, for the Arts Council of Great Britain, entitled The Human Clay. Let me be the first to propose a new exhibition incorporating Kitaj's School of London with our new - School of L.A. The School of London - School of L. A. connection is a natural one with Kitaj and Hockney working here and inspiring a whole new generation of artists. In the ca...

Three esteemed Mexican film directors are up for Oscars at tonight's Academy Awards: Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Guillermo del Toro "Hollywood often makes socks," Cuaron said. "I work with the studios when they decide they want to make a film and not socks." Guillermo del Toro In Guillermo Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth," up for six Oscars including best foreign-language film, fascist soldiers in post civil-war Spain torture rebels as an eyeless, child-devouring demon lurks nearby in a mysterious underworld. Alfonso Cuaron and his daughter Bu Writer-director Alfonso Cuaron's adaptation of the P.D. James novel, "Children of Men," is set in a ruined, post-apocalyptic England. Cuaron directed the third Harry Potter film as well as "Y tu mamá también". Cuaron's take on Harry Potter brought an eerie depth and a sense of real danger. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's film ...