Grace, Art, and Beauty

My dinner tonight was a simple but excellent Cobb salad. I spent the rest of the evening relaxing, then catching up with my DVR watching. I watched an episode of Eureka, I watched an episode of Haven, and I watched the Jon Stewart show.

Interwoven through those shows I was moving stuff from the kitchen into the spare bedroom. I pretty much got all of boxes cleaned out of the kitchen - they are now stacked in the middle of the floor in the spare bedroom, with the rest of them in the dining room. My kitchen table is still covered with books I haven't started sorting yet and I probably won't do that until Friday or maybe one of the other days this weekend.

Having officially recaptured my kitchen however I'm looking forward to cooking dinner tomorrow night. I've been eating out a lot and I can tell the impact of processed food on my system. I'm craving fresh fruit and fresh salads. Maybe an egg white omelet or two.

Let me entirely switch gears now. I'm not sure if you're fans of the show So You Think You Can Dance. If you're not you're missing what really amounts to being a truly incredible show. I've always been terribly impressed by the raw physicality and grace of dancers.

I remember when I was an undergraduate I had class, a theater history class, that was preceded by a jazz dance class. It was held in an auditorium and sometimes I would arrive early before my class began and join a handful of people watching the jazz dance class. Over the course of the semester I recall just a tremendous growing admiration for the sheer strength and stamina of the dancers. That feeling infuses me when I watch So You Think You Can Dance. This season has been incredible and it has come down to two truly amazing dancers - Melanie and Sasha. They are both simply dazzling. So, that is my little tribute to one of the truly entertaining pieces of television out there.

Since this is my three-day weekend tomorrow is my last day of work this week. I've got a small stack of meetings, I've got about 20 odd things stacked up in my e-mail box, and I've got about a dozen open tickets. What can I say - it's been a week. I'm definitely looking forward to the weekend. I really want to go out and see the movie The Guard with Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle. My tentative plan is to do that on Friday.

So as I slide into the weekend let me do it in the state of grace, dazzled by the dancers on television, and anticipating the power of modern theater through the lens of filmmakers. It seems that I am ending the day in appreciation of the arts that so cover our lives, that so enrich us, that so dazzle us. The picture that graces the beginning of this entry are those two amazing dancers I spoke of earlier, Melanie and Sasha. This is link is to one of their routines that brought the house to it's feet - enjoy - Melanie and Sasha Dancing.

Daily Life:A Quick Sum of Things

It was an excellent weekend. I sincerely enjoyed the trip to Sacramento, to the Crocker Art Musuem, to see the Maxfield Parrish Exhibit. For those of you who may be scratching your head wondering why that name seems familiar, the picture above is what many consider to be his magnum opus - "Daybreak".

As is often the case with art let me just say that in my opinion so much art can only be appreciated in person. There are so many telling details that the best copies of photographs of the art works simple cannot capture. Art, in itself, has a presence. When ever I am in the presence of art the latin phrase "ars longa, vita brevis" always resonates in my mind.

I am going to write more about the trip to the Crocker Art Museum over the coming days - I really enjoyed it and immediately upon return to San Jose have begun enlisting my friends for a return trip. In addition to the Parrish exhibit, they have an excellent gallery in the French Salon style that is in itself worth the visit.

Tonight though, I cooked a simple casserole for dinner, followed it with a piece of German Chocolate cake, and then spent a very enjoyable evening in the company of my dear T.R., wandering the web and looking at various photographs in galleries like Deviant Art and other places online. The internet is truly an astounding place.

The Art of Greg Martin

I was wandering the internet tonight, clicking the "Next Blog" button at the top of the page and I wandered, eventually, on this site - The Gallery of Greg Martin.  There are some astounding images there, I spent quite a bit of time just looking at them.  I think that is one of the things I love about the internet - the potential it holds to take you someplace wonderful with the click of a link.

The Art of Alfonse Mucha

Are you familiar with the art of Alfonse Mucha? My friends Pierre and Helen had a coffee table book of his work that they had received for Christmas, so a small portion of my day yesterday was spent gazing at it. I was very much enthralled with this particular piece, called Les Saissons (The Seasons). I thought I would share...

The Mercy Of Monday

I just liked the title - it has actually been a pretty good Monday. I got a good night sleep last night and woke fairly crisp. The morning went smooth, traffic was good, the weather was crisp and covered in early morning fog.

I spent the first five hours of the working day in meetings and then went to lunch. Lunch was so-so. It was a tomato bisque that was a little granular (I would have preferred a more creamy bisque) and a tomato and mozzarella salad with cherry tomatoes that we just not quite ripe. A disappointing lunch all in all.

Somewhere either yesterday while doing laundry and house cleaning or last night while sleeping I strained my left wrist. I am fine with vertical movement of the wrist but have a limited range of motion when it comes to any horizontal movement. I have a nice little bruise underneath the skin on the outer side of the wrist, as if I hit something with it, but I can't recall any specific blow. I suspect I somehow got it twisted and slept on it.

I had a good weekend all in all. Friday night I went down to the local sports bar and had a beer and a shot of Jim Beam (I don't drink much) and sat and watched the Sharks playing hockey for a while. I left earlier then intended because the noise was getting to me. I have a weird sensitivity to noise - I do not mind loud noises (as in music, etc.) but chaotic noises as in twenty excited drunk people talking at once just irritates me. I am much more a lover of quiet places I guess.

Saturday, I met friends for an early breakfast and then…watched plans disintegrate. Originally, there were five of us planning to go up to SF and one by one through the week everyone cancelled - but me! So, around about ten AM I started out for SF. I took my time driving up, just wandering, stopping at various places, parks and overlooks, to just - enjoy the day, and it was a beautiful one.

My "more or less" goal was the DeYoung Museum. Traffic was stop and go on 19th, as it always is, and the area around the DeYoung was packed. There was some sort of festival going on at the Concourse, so there were a few thousand extra people in the area. I ended up parking across 19th and walking over.

Since the Botanical Gardens were on the way, I stopped and spent about two hours just wandering around the gardens, sitting on various benches, soaking up the sun and the beauty of the gardens.

Then, I went across the street to the DeYoung (cringing as I passed the concert that was mostly…distortion…there should be a law that requires all free concerts to have an actual sound engineer). It was my first visit to the new DeYoung and I must say, architecturally speaking, I was very impressed - it is a visually powerful building.

My first stop inside was…lunch. I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, yogurt, and a brownie, washed down with organic lemonade. It was actually fairly good for museum cafeteria food. Then, I spent the next several hours wandering the galleries and exhibits and the building itself. A good museum (and the DeYoung is one) has a timeless quality about it, so I wandered and I looked and I sat and I explored. My favorite exhibit was an exhibit of Mesoamerican artifacts. Some pretty astounding stuff.

Sated, artifact wise, I wandered out onto the Concourse and checked out the free concert for a while. Not my genre of music, but the crowd seemed to be having a good time. From there, I walked back to my car and came home. I must have walked eight or nine miles, most of it in broad looping circles. I got home that evening, goofed around for a while, watched some television, ate some dinner and fell into bed and asleep about eleven PM.

I slept straight through the night, waking crisply at sunrise (just a little after 7:00 AM). I wake at sunrise pretty much regardless of when I go to sleep, so with the sliding approach of fall, I tend to sleep a little later - at least until we fall back with Daylight Savings Time (November 2nd this year, mark your calendar).

Sunday was a sedate day, lingered in the morning watching football and reading, then spent the afternoon doing laundry, and Sunday evening went to dinner with my friend Tony at Flames on Winchester (where I discovered that every Sunday the owner makes his mothers Greek chicken, rice and lemon soup - outstanding!), and saw the movie Max Payne. Do not rush out to see the movie. It was enjoyable, visually impressive, but also an entirely predictable movie based on a video game, so be forewarned. It's an action/popcorn movie - brain optional for attendance.

Then, I can home, wrote the previous entry, chatted with a friend online, chatted on the telephone and called it an early night to read and drift off to sleep.

Let me share a pair of links to the DeYoung and the Botanical Gardens.

The DeYoung:

http://www.famsf.org/deyoung/

(Oh, and the website shows the Maya Lin sculpture - that is pretty dang cool - you would not think so just reading about it - but it has presence. Technically the exhibit doesn't open until the 25th, but they were in the process of assembling it and it is mostly done.)

The San Francisco Botanical Gardens

http://www.sfbotanicalgarden.org/