#berkeley art museum

[garadinervi]

From: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Between the Teeth, Curated by Robert Milne, Manifold Books, Amsterdam, November 28, 2021 – January 22, 2022 [Courtesy of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA. © Theresa Hak Kyung Cha]

[1000wordsonly]

The treachery of images.

[meisterdrucke]

Saving the Guns at Colenso, 1899 (chromolitho) by Stanley Berkeley

chromolithograph, 1899 National Army Museum, London

[xxthewolvenstormxx]

The funeral procession of Henrik Ibsen, walking up Ullevålsveien from the church to the cemetery. 1906-06-01

A Funeral Procession… passing along Berkeley Street in Dublin.

The funeral of Ismail Gasprinsky, Bakhchisaray, 1914.

The funeral procession of French president Sadi Carnot. Image published in Finnish periodical Uusi Kuvalehti in July 1894.

Funeral_do_ator_Joaquim_de_Almeida_(1921)

The Funeral of Lord Trịnh Tùng from Recueil de Plusieurs Relations et Traites by J.B.Tavernier, Chevalier and Baron D'Aubonne 1679.

The lying in state of King Edward VII, showing guards surrounding his coffin at Westminster Hall 17 MAY 1910

Maharaja Ranjit Singh's funeral. ca. 1840, paint on paper, The British Museum. Pahari-Sikh, from the family workshop of Purkhu of Kangra

Marc Antony's Oration at Caesar's Funeral by George Edward Robertson

*All Art from WikiCommons

[thinkingimages]

Theresa Cha | Life Mixing performance (1975), at University Art Museum, Berkeley. 

In the exhibition No other cure none other than words in talking, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden is currently showing historical and contemporary female artists whose works are linked by the themes of language, memory and the experience of foreignness. The title of the exhibition is taken from the book Temps Morts by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951, Busan, KOR - 1982, New York, USA).

In her lecture, Dr. Lisa Steib refers to the art that influenced Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's work in the Bay Area of California in the 1970s, especially the performance art that emerged in and around San Francisco during this period. In addition to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the lecture will focus on artists such as Terry Fox, Jim Melchert and Tom Marioni.

The lecture will be held in German.

[lesb0]

I'm always trying to stay on the cutting edge of every permutation of our constantly evolving visual culture but the elusiveness of every new form makes it difficult for me, even as one of the youngest possible millennials. in fashion, my freshman students are all wearing 2000s or "y2k" fashion: baggy grungy or baby phat hiphop, with an elevated touch of modesty, good color theory, and a stark awareness of bodily proportion. in memes, legendary 00s icon, lisa frank. its embarrassing to follow influencers with over 10 mil, now, as if it breaks the parasocial connection.

someone asked yesterday if tiktok is now the premier vehicle of visual culture. I open tiktok. on one side, a zoomed in interview with the mother of a shooting victim. but the other side is a compilation of slime videos, a woman cutting soap, life hacks, and chinese "smart" product placements. you can hear and see both. this bizarre genre, I can only recognize as content. on social media, content is technically anything you can doomscroll, the action of spending over 2 hours on a social media feed, a for you page, a timeline, a dashboard to tumblr addicts.

I'm watching cable TV with a girl I'm seeing. the ads are remarkably only geared towards boomers and older gen x. but, so is the 'content', bad action movies made for cable and reruns of 80s/90s TV shows, but the exact same show marathoned in hours long successions.

to be an effective art historian, I have to take things from this ever-shifting visual culture and translate it into the equally fickle and amorphous art world... so what does 'content' look like for museum shows? my first 100+ object loan show was in part by a colleague, a younger curator at BAMPFA. a massive exhibition of all female nonbinary artists, from the 60s PoMo feminists to the self obsessed identity displayers of today. I absolutely LOVED it. I had no problem enthusiastically flitting from object to object, frontwards and in reverse twice, to spend special time with all my favorites. a fave professor stopped me. I hadn't even recognized him in the excitement. he looked bewildered, but laughed about how giddy I was. he didn't write any criticism on the show. my boss at the time, our museum director, told me she thought it was "such a big mess". my favorite lesbian professor clutched onto her wife with an anxious look. my lesbian artist friend had panic attack and put his headphones on in a dark corner. on the other hand, the younger undergrad girls from berkeley looked elated and delighted, flitting around and oohing and aahing at my same pace. I learned one of them was an engineering student named erin who needed a feminist pickup from the disouragement in her male dominated field.

so how has the 'content' show, or the art world reception to them, changed in the past 4 years? well for one, it seems like major flagship institutions are dropping the mononym altogether. as the french impressionists take over the east coast, none of shows feature one painter as a sole focus, but curators use juxtapositions to keep people interested. in MoMAs, monoynym shows are reserved for major retrospectives or figuratively and literally, monolith artists like simone leigh. the older art historians are hesitant to adapt to these changes. one of my favorite shows this summer, over 300 very different collection pieces packed onto the floor and across the hall, wasn't enjoyed by any of the critics I know. My dates all hated it. except one, a hot ADHD butch who had a tiktok doomscrolling addiction.

what does this mean for the future of how shows are displayed.... how do museums let go of the traditional princely standard: 3.5 inch hangings with a 25 degree downwards tilt? is it better or worse to compromise museums into messy 17th century curiosity cabinets?

[asclexe]

⭐️ government-forced blog intro post ⭐️

(new and improved!)

welcome to marvin’s marvelous mechanical museum!

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i write fanfiction and poetry (i take requests feel free to hmu), i do local theater, i make pride icons (also requests hmu) i drabble in the occasional doodle, and i like baking and watching youtube and scrolling through tumblr and walking through the forest and my neighborhood and making bracelets and spending money and laying on the floor and singing and dancing and being silly and reading medical textbooks and cool novels and hanging with my irls and idk, yeah! life! carpe diem!

*also i’m trying to get into reality shifting! (im not a freak i swear)

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i love pretty much all kinds of jazz, rock, and showtunes (except ballads. i dislike ballads)

my music taste can be described as like. neurodivergent weird kid alt rock and hot girl summer pop.

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⭐️(new) tags guide!⭐️

*note this is a new system i’m trying out, some older posts do not apply

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old man doctor yaoi prompt list :3

my house md oc :3

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@ask-the-ducklings - ask/roleplay blog 4 the house md duckligns

1/2 of @meanwhile-on-the-road, the other half is pookie @sillyhyperfixator

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@theindierockcafe - writing blog

this will be mostly reblogs of my silly mutuals/my fyp, i try to make original content often! I ❤️ REBLOGGING ART YOU SHOULD DO IT TOO!!!! hope we can get along! ask me whatever! i don’t know! be nice and respectful cause i’m a minor!

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blinkies made in the blinkie cafe :3

[thealogie]

grabbed MCR san fan tix, any advice from an out of stater for SF?

Pack layers because it gets cold and hot quickly. Definitely go have a burrito in the mission. Palace of fine arts and the de young museum should be at the top of your list but Golden Gate Bridge is good too. Go buy stuff at bi-rite market and have a picnic in Dolores park. Ride a Waymo because it’s sort of fun doing it for the first time. Also if you’re there for a few days I would go to Berkeley just to have pizza at cheeseboard pizza. I think about her (their pizza) at least once a week

SF is one of my fave cities in the world and people dunking on it for being a hotbed of crime or whatever are wrong but like any other big city be aware of your belongings and don’t walk through bad neighborhoods alone

This is all assuming you have a couple of days to do stuff

[hildegardavon]

Giuseppe Cesari, 1568-1640

Judith with the head of Holofernes, ca.1605/10, oil on canvas, 61.3x48 cm

Berkeley Art Museum, University of California

[garadinervi]

From: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Between the Teeth, Curated by Robert Milne, Manifold Books, Amsterdam, November 28, 2021 – January 22, 2022 [Courtesy of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA. © Theresa Hak Kyung Cha]

(art: Untitled (Poem to Mother and Father))

[justforbooks]

Trina Robbins

American cartoonist and author whose pioneering work in comics included being the first female artist to draw Wonder Woman

The American illustrator and writer Trina Robbins, who has died aged 85, began her career in comics in her native New York in the 1960s as a contributor to the counterculture newspaper East Village Other. She also drew and wrote strips for Gothic Blimp Works, an underground comic.

Then came comic strips, covers and spot illustrations for the underground publications Berkeley Tribe and It Ain’t Me, Babe, often described as the first feminist newspaper, before before she put together an all-women comic, It Ain’t Me, Babe Comix (1970), followed by the anthology All Girl Thrills (1971) and the solo comic Girl Fight Comics (1972).

Her black heroine, Fox, was serialised in Good Times (1971) and another of her characters, Panthea, who first appeared in Gothic Blimp Works (1969), was a regular in Comix Book (1974-76).

She also became one of the 10 founders of Wimmen’s Comix, an all-female underground comics anthology published from 1972 to 1992, and in the late 70s was a contributor to High Times, Heavy Metal, National Lampoon and Playboy.

Later she adapted the 1919 novel Dope, by Sax Rohmer, for Eclipse Comics (1981-83) and wrote and drew Meet Misty (1985-86) for Marvel. She was also the first woman to draw Wonder Woman, in The Legend of Wonder Woman (1986).

Robbins’ wider interest in the history of girls’ comics led her to co-write a book about the genre, Women and the Comics (1986), with Catherine Yronwode, and later A Century of Women Cartoonists (1993), followed by a number of biographies of female comic pioneers, including Nell Brinkley, Lily Renée, Gladys Parker and Tarpé Mills.

Born in Brooklyn, she grew up in Queens, where her mother, Bessie (nee Roseman) was a teacher. Her father, Max Perlson, was a tailor who later wrote for Yiddish-language newspapers and published a collection of stories, A Minyen Yidn (1938), that was turned by Trina into a comic anthology in 2017.

At the age of 10 she graduated from reading wholesome animal comics to Millie the Model, Patsy Walker and others with female protagonists. The Katy Keene comic was especially influential, as it encouraged Robbins to make paper dolls and design clothing for them. She was also a huge fan of the jungle adventuress Sheena.

Having discovered science fiction at 14, Robbins began attending conventions, and at one such gathering she met the short story writer Harlan Ellison. At 21 he was five years her senior, but they dated briefly and he later wrote her into his film The Oscar (1966) as Trina Yale, played by Edie Adams.

Trina attended Queens College before studying drawing at Cooper Union, although she dropped out after a year. In 1957 she married the cartoonist Art Castillo; they moved to the Bay area of Los Angeles until he disappeared to Mexico and the relationship ended.

Working for a time as a model for men’s magazines, she was a cinema usherette when she met Paul Robbins, whom she married in 1962 following Castillo’s death. Her new husband wrote for the LA Free Press, which gave her access to the Byrds, Bob Dylan and other musicians, and she began making clothing to sell to musician friends, including Mama Cass.

Returning alone to New York in 1966 (she and Robbins eventually divorced, in 1972), she opened a boutique called Broccoli on East 4th Street, making clothes for exotic customers and having flings with a number of them, including the Doors’ singer Jim Morrison and the activist Abbie Hoffman; she also had longer relationships with Paul Williams, editor of Crawdaddy magazine, and the cartoonist Kim Deitch, with whom she set up a cartoon art museum on East 9th Street.

Her clothes-making got her into a song by Joni Mitchell, who wrote in Ladies of the Canyon that “Trina wears her wampum beads / She fills her drawing book with line / Sewing lace on widows’ weeds / And filigree on leaf and vine”.

After she had sold her boutique in 1969 and began to make her living in comics, there was no looking back.

Apart from her writing and illustrating activities over the years, in 1994 she became one of the founders of Friends of Lulu, a US-based charity that promotes the reading of comic books by women and the participation of women in the comic book industry.

Her later work on the history of women in comics produced three further books, From Girls to Grrrlz (1996), The Great Women Cartoonists (2001) and Pretty in Ink (2013).

She also wrote a number of books for children, starting with Catswalk: The Growing of Girl (1990), and including the Chicagoland Detective Agency series (2010-14) of bizarre high school mystery adventures.

For adults she wrote The Great Women Superheroes (1996), Eternally Bad: Goddesses With Attitude (2001), Tender Murderers: Women Who Kill (2003) and Wild Irish Roses: Tales of Brigits, Kathleens and Warrior Queens (2004).

Her most recent comic was Won’t Back Down (2024), a pro-choice anthology.

She is survived by her partner, Steve Leialoha, a daughter, Casey, from her relationship with Dietch, and her sister Harriet.

🔔 Trina Robbins, writer and illustrator, born 17 August 1938; died 10 April 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[vague-humanoid]

Afropessimism with Dr. Frank Wilderson

"Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery—in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms—continue to define the Black experience? And why is anti-Black violence such a predominant feature not only in the United States but around the world? These are just some of the compelling questions that animate Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III’s seminal work on the philosophy of Blackness."

Frank B. Wilderson, III is an Associate Professor in the Drama Doctoral Program and the African American Studies Program at UC Irvine. He has taught literature at UC Santa Cruz; and at the University of Witwatersrand and Vista University in South Africa, where he lived for five years during the transitional years from apartheid to universal suffrage.

While in South Africa he held elected office in the Congress of South African Writers and the African National Congress. In addition, he has worked as an institutional dramaturge for Lincoln Center Theater’s productions of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s Mule Boneand Mbongeni Ngema’s Township Fever; and as a creative dramaturge for the Market Theater in Johannesburg’s production of George C. Wolfe’sThe Colored Museum.

His publications include Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke University Press 2010); and Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (South End Press 2008), which won The Eisner Prize for Creative Achievement of the Highest Order, The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award for Creative Nonfiction; and The National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship.

Frank Wilderson received his A. B. from Dartmouth College (Government/Philosophy); an MFA from Columbia University (Fiction Writing); and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley (Rhetoric/Film Studies). His scholarly work explores cinema’s formal and narrative “awareness” of political ontology by bringing two disparate modes of representation into conversation with one another: (1) the cinema of Red, White, and Black directors and (2) three traditions of epistemological reflection: Humanism (feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis); Indigenism (meditations on sovereignty and genocide); and Social Death (meditations on the accumulation and fungibility of Black bodies).

Currently, he is directing Reparations…Now, a critical documentary (digital film) that captures the terror of unnamable loss shouldered by today’s descendents of slaves.

https://arts.ucdavis.edu/faculty-prof...

____________

LINKTREE: https://linktr.ee/jaredball

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[mappingthemoon]

Books Read 2024

David Bowie (Little People, Big Dreams) / Ma Isabel Sánchez Vegara ; Ana Albero (ill.) (Francis Lincoln Children’s Books, 2019)

Angels and Insects / A. S. Byatt (Chatto & Windus, 1992)

How to Stay Alive in the Woods / Bradford Angier (Collier Books, 1962)

Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes / Edith Hamilton (Grand Central Publishing, 2011)

True Stories / Sophie Calle (Actes Sud, 2018)

The Lottery and Other Stories / Shirley Jackson (The Modern Library, 2000)

The Healthy Deviant: A Rule Breaker’s Guide to Being Healthy in an Unhealthy World / Pilar Gerasimo (North Atlantic Books, 2020)

The Ascent of Man / J. Bronowski (Little, Brown and Company, 1973)*

David Bowie: His Life on Earth, 1947-2016 / Allison Adato (ed.) (Time Inc. Books, 2016)

“The Paranoid Style in American Politics” / Richard Hofstadter, in: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays 1956-1965 (The Library of America, 2020)

Underworld / Don DeLillo (Scribner, 1998)

The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child / Nancy Newton Verrier (Gateway Press, Inc., 1993)

Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America’s Race to the Moon / Alan Shepard & Deke Slayton (Turner Publishing, Inc., 1994)

Nevada / Imogen Binnie (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022)

Collected Short Stories and the novel The Ballad of the Sad Café / Carson McCullers (The Riverside Press ; Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955)

The Discovery of the Titanic / Robert D. Ballard w/Rick Archbold ; Ken Marschall (ill.) (Warner/Maidon Press, 1987)

The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Photographs Collection / Weston Naef (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995)

Changing the Earth: Aerial Photographs / Emmet Gowin ; Jock Reynolds (Yale University Art Gallery in association with the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 2002)

“There’s an Awful Lot of Weirdos in Our Neighborhood” & Other Wickedly Funny Verse / Colin McNaughton (Simon & Schuster, 1987)*

The Anatomical Tattoo / Emily Evans (Anatomy Boutique Books, 2017)

Artists Books / Dianne Perry Vanderlip (cur.) (Moore College of Art ; University Art Museum, Berkeley, 1973)

Risomania: The New Spirit of Printing / John Z. Komurki (Niggli, imprint of Braun Publishing AG, 2017)

American Music / Annie Leibovitz (Random House, 2004)

Atonement: A Novel / Ian McEwan (Anchor Books, A Division of Random House, Inc., 2003)

The Land Where the Blues Began / Alan Lomax (Pantheon Books, 1993)

Snoopy to the Moon! (Peanuts Space Adventures) / Jason Cooper ; Tom Brannon (ill.) (Peanuts Worldwide LLC ; Happy Meal Readers ; Reading Is Fundamental, 2019)

Just for Fun / Patricia Scarry ; Richard Scarry (ill.) (A Golden Book; Western Publishing Company, Inc., 1960)

The Emotionally Absent Mother: How to Recognize and Heal the Invisible Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect / Jasmin Lee Cori (The Experiment, 2017)

A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing / Eimear McBride (Coffee House Press, 2014)

Bluets / Maggie Nelson (Wave Books, 2014)

The Secret History / Donna Tartt (Ballantine Books, 2002)

Touch Me I’m Sick / Charles Peterson (powerHouse Books, 2003)

Rose-Petal’s Big Decision (Rose-Petal Place) / Nancy Buss ; Pat Paris & Sharon Ross-Moore (ill.) (Parker Brothers, 1984)*

9½ Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair / Elizabeth McNeill (Berkley Books, 1979)

Keep Coming Back / Julia Clinker (Nexus Press, 2001)

Parable of the Sower (Earthseed #1) / Octavia Butler (Seven Stories Press, 2016)

Parable of the Talents (Earthseed #2) / Octavia Butler (Seven Stories Press, 2016)

Great Expectations / Charles Dickens (Cherish, [1994])

I’ve Got a Time Bomb: A Novel / Sibyl Lamb (Topside Press, [2014])

My Brilliant Friend: Book One: Childhood, Adolescence (The Neapolitan Novels #1) / Elena Ferrante ; Ann Goldstein (tr.) (Europa Editions, 2012)

Artists’ Books: A Cataloguers’ Manual / Maria White, Patrick Perratt, Liz Lawes on behalf of ARLIS/UK & Ireland Cataloguing and Classification Committee (ARLIS/UK & Ireland ; Art Libraries Society, 2006)

The Book as Art: Artists’ Books from the National Museum of Women in the Arts / Krystyna Wasserman (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007)

Alas, Babylon / Pat Frank (Perennial Classics, 1999)

To the Lighthouse / Virginia Woolf (The Hogarth Press, 1967)

The Photograph as Contemporary Art (World of Art), 3rd ed. / Charlotte Cotton (Thames & Hudson, 2014)

Swamp Water / Vereen Bell (Little, Brown and Company, 1941)

Ongoingness: The End of a Diary / Sarah Manguso (Graywolf Press, 2015)

Selected Poems / T. S. Eliot (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964)

The New Way Things Work / David Macaulay ; Neil Ardley (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998)

The Little Friend / Donna Tartt (Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc., 2003)

At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches / Susan Sontag ; Paolo Dilonardo, Anne Jump (eds.) (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007)

It’s All Absolutely Fine: Life Is Complicated So I’ve Drawn It Instead / Ruby Elliott (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2017)

Things Fall Apart / Chinua Achebe (Penguin Books, 2017)

Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast / Natasha Trethewey (University of Georgia Press, 2010)

A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (Final ed.) / Tom Phillips (Thames & Hudson, 2016)

Tree of Codes (2nd ed.) / Jonathan Safran Foer (Visual Editions, 2011)

Gutshot: Stories / Amelia Gray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015)

Equus / Peter Shaffer (Scribner, 2005)

National Geographic, vol. 136, no. 6 (December 1969) “Space Record”

Sun Moon Earth: The History of Solar Eclipses from Omens of Doom to Einstein and Exoplanets / Tyler Nordren (Basic Books, 2016)

Pittsburgh’s South Side (Images of America) / Stuart P. Boehmig (Arcadia Publishing, 2006)

Books read in 2024; asterisks * denote rereads. Favorites this year were Ian McEwan & Donna Tartt, LOVE a good coming-of-age story with a perceptive & melodramatic protagonist set in that liminal period between childhood and adulthood!! Pretty sure the main reason I grabbed the Donna Tartt books while thrifting was just from seeing the occasional tumblr user obsess about them, and oh man I was not disappointed! It is rare that I speed through a 600-page novel but, ugh, the way she puts words together is so riveting. Dickensian levels of detail! Speaking of which, I did actually read a Dickens book this year, Great Expectations, which ended up on my list a few years ago after a stranger on the bus tried to initiate conversation with me by asking what I was reading. He said that Great Expectations was his favorite book, and I was like, “oh cool, I read that in high school, I liked it,” and he was like, super excited that I had also read his fave classic. Well, later on after I got off the bus, I realized I had gotten that title confused with The Great Gatsby (which I did read in high school along with millions of other Americans probably) and I felt bad for accidentally deceiving Random Guy on the Bus, so the next time I saw a copy of Great Expectations at the thrift store, I picked it up. Not bad!!

What else? I’m very late to the Elena Ferrante party, but I enjoyed My Brilliant Friend in text form wayyy better than my attempt to listen to the audiobook five years ago (I just could not follow the audio version and couldn’t get into the story). Charles Peterson’s Touch Me I’m Sick was a fave photo book of the year; it had been on my list since 2015, whoops (I had to interlibrary loan it). This year I read a pretty even mix of books from my to-read list (earliest titles added 2015), books from my to-read pile (items I have thrifted within the past few years), and random interruptions to those lists. Oh, I also read a TON of essays and articles about artists’ books (not listed above) for the class I took at Rare Book School in the summer. I read a couple painfully healing books about motherhood and adoption (The Primal Wound / Nancy Newton Verrier & The Emotionally Absent Mother / Jasmin Lee Cori) that I wish I could’ve encountered earlier in my life but also who knows, maybe this year was cosmically the perfect time for my brain to be receptive. I picked up Alas, Babylon because it was a title I remembered seeing my dad reading at the kitchen table one time when I was a kid. (It’s a 1959 novel about surviving in post-nuclear apocalypse small-town Florida; there is some light misogyny and racism of its era, but also the librarian plays an important role, which I thought was sweet. A couple paragraphs are devoted to the librarian’s perennial struggles [pre-apocalypse] to secure funding, to keep the populace’s attention in spite of modern distractions like tv and air conditioning!) Finally, I also really enjoyed Moon Shot (which I took with me to the eclipse on April 8); here's what I wrote about it in my reading spreadsheet: “The writing style wasn’t particularly phenomenal, yet I was still moved to tears several times while reading … about witnessing the beauty of space, the thrill of exploration, the astronauts’ successes and tragedies, and at the end, the simplicity and sentimentality and symbolism of the Apollo-Soyuz friendships. I can’t help but wonder what the fuck it is about billionaires … that they seemingly don’t become overwhelmed with the desire to save and protect our fragile planet after seeing it from space, a feeling many astronauts seem to have experienced.”

In general, I do most of my reading on the bus during my commutes to and from work, so I get in about 30-60 minutes per day of reading. But also this year I had several incidents of extensive sustained silent reading due to long waiting periods during travel – I read at least the first 100 pages of The Secret History while I was stuck overnight at Newark Airport in July; in August, I read almost all of Parable of the Talents on an Amtrak from Atlanta to Greensboro, then a chunk of Great Expectations on the way back. It was so nice to have that kind of IMMERSIVE, hours-long reading experience again! And especially with such richly detailed & descriptive stories! In 2025 I hope to be able to devote more time to slow, analog reading.

[thinkingimages]

The Death of Maria Malibran ~ A Morte de Maria Malibran (Der Tod der Maria Malibran), de Werner Schroeter (Alemanha Ocidental, 1972).

This is about the life and myths about famous opera singer Maria Malibran (1808-1836), who, literally sang herself to death, collapsing on stage.

The Death of Maria Malibran, Schroeter's 1972 masterpiece, seems bent on emulating its eponymous heroine; the film is Malibran's passion, condensed. Magdalena Montezuma and Warhol superstar Candy Darling head a cast of women and cross-dressers who perform still-life duets in a series of theatrical, painterly tableaux; like moving statues, they evoke the gamut of romantic allusions with the slightest gestures. Theirs is a sensuality of the mind, in lamp-lit faces and silent screams. As always, when Schroeter's camera moves outside of these hermetic interiors, he manages to find the same rich colorization in forests and clouds, and to find "ancient" ruins in modern settings. The soundtrack weaves opera and Shakespeare, blues and country music (Marty Robbins singing"Carmen"?) into a tapestry of mock classicism and trashy modernism; dialogue is in whispered snippets, in English and German (no subtitles necessary). For Schroeter, it seems that male form flows into female just as mock passion flows into ghostly sadness. Thus it is no contradiction that, having dedicated the film to yet another fated diva, Janis Joplin, he has her impersonated by an enormous cross-dresser.

BAMPFA ~ University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive

⊹ The mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli dedicated her 2007 album Maria to the music composed for Malibran and her most famous roles. In 2008 Decca released a recording of Bellini's La Sonnambula with Cecilia Bartoli in the lead role using many cadenzas that la Malibran herself used and which restored the tessitura of the role to the high mezzo-soprano range (as Giuditta Pasta and Maria Malibran had sung it).

[beatricebidelaire]

handler's intro page absolutely delights me ....

Daniel Handler is the author of seven novels, including Why We Broke Up, We Are Pirates, All The Dirty Parts and, most recently, Bottle Grove.

As Lemony Snicket, he is responsible for numerous books for children, including the thirteen-volume A Series of Unfortunate Events, the four-volume All the Wrong Questions, and The Dark, which won the Charlotte Zolotow Award.

Mr. Snicket’s first book for readers of all ages, Poison for Breakfast, was published by Liveright/W.W. Norton in 2021.

Handler has received commissions from the San Francisco Symphony, Berkeley Reperatory Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and has collaborated with artist Maira Kalman on a series of books for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and with musicians Stephin Merritt (of the Magnetic Fields), Benjamin Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie), Colin Meloy (of the Decemberists) and Torquil Campbell (of Stars).

His books have sold more than 70 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages, and have been adapted for film, stage and television, including the recent adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events for which he was awarded both the Peabody and the Writers Guild of America awards.

He lives in San Francisco with the illustrator Lisa Brown, to whom he is married and with whom he has collaborated on several books and one son.

books page:

Daniel Handler Writes novels.

The Basic Eight

Watch Your Mouth

Adverbs

Why We Broke Up

We Are Pirates

All the Dirty Parts

Bottle Grove

Poison for Breakfast

And not novels.

Weather, Weather

Girls Standing on Lawns

Hurry Up and Wait

Books for the Holidays.

The Baby In The Manger

The Lump of Coal

The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming

Assorted and sundry.

Goldfish Ghost

The Bad Mood and The Stick

Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid

The Composer Is Dead

13 Words

The Dark

Swarm of Bees

And one as the Pope.

How To Dress For Every Occasion

All while penning children’s books as Lemony Snicket.

A Series Of Unfortunate Events

All the Wrong Questions