2007

Greetings!

Christmas is creeping up fast! If this is late, my apologies!

No earth-shaking news (fortunately, in earthquake country)--just the usual array of jaunts within California.

A San Francisco trip in March included a visit to the Oakland Museum’s exhibit on the art and craft work of Arthur and Lucia Mathew (Arts & Crafts period), and the Legion of Honor Museum’s show of French design, with a lot of fantastic jewelry. (Naturally, I was most impressed with a small cat figurine wearing a collar made of tiny diamonds.) The DeYoung Museum had a puny show of American Modernism (hardly any paintings!), and a display of bizarre fashions by the designer Vivienne Westwood.

An August trip to San Francisco yielded the Legion of Honor Museum’s “Works on Paper,” encompassing small pieces by just about every artist from the Renaissance to the present--not what you would call a “focused” show, but interesting. The Museum of Modern Art displayed various items illustrating the reciprocal influences between Matisse and other artists of his period.

Back to SF in September for a Wagner Society symposium on Tannhäuser, and a performance of it at the Opera House. The décor-- a heavy layer of dirt, a tree, and piles of brush all over the Wartburg Castle floor! The opera incorporates two different legends, so it doesn’t work very well for me in the first place--but the music was good.

Samson and Delilah was playing that weekend too, so I took that in. A Biblical tale of sex and violence. Delilah is supposed to be an ace seductress. Imagine how sexy this is going to be with very overweight singers--thus paying minimal close attention to one another.

Southward travel--just a couple of one-day excursions to Santa Barbara on Nordstrom’s “shopping bus” -- an opportunity to browse around the town, galleries and shops.

I attended the Carmel Art Association’s 80th Anniversary celebration in August. My father (A. Harold Knott) was one of its founding members, and I’d loaned a painting for the show of past members’ work. The emphasis for this anniversary was on throwing a huge block party for the community, with music, dancing, entertainment, a birthday cake, and the street closed off for displays by many other nonprofit organizations.

The actual exhibit of past members’ paintings was small, and ran for only three days instead of the normal three or four weeks (they said because of “security concerns”). The ladies working in the gallery told me all the visitors loved my father’s painting -- “Little House of River Winds,” which depicts our home when my parents first bought it so long ago -- so that was gratifying.

During the Carmel visit I went to dinner one evening with friends at a restaurant further down the coast, right on the edge of a cliff, with the sea swirling and crashing on the rocks far below. A dramatic spot for dinner! And it was the kind of rocky coastal scene my father had depicted in many of his paintings from the years he lived in Carmel, and later when he’d moved to Morro Bay.

Locally--entertainment is mostly movies in San Luis Obispo, where thankfully there is an art theatre with three screens for a goodly selection of independent and foreign films, (as well as two mainstream theatres). A special place for live theatre is the Pewter Plough in Cambria (about a halfhour’s drive north of here) is an old building that must once have been a house or place of business. It’s small and intimate, with directors’ chairs (nicely padded!) for seats, each with the name of some legendary actor or actress on it, instead of seat numbers. Audience members love to see whose chair their ticket will put them in. Cambria also has the Tea Cozy, for an English tearoom type of luncheon or afternoon tea, which suits my nostalgia for the years I lived in London.

I’ve spent a good deal of time and energy this year gathering things out of the attic that I’d collected over the globe, and donating them to various worthy bodies’ fundraisers. This is an ongoing task (decisions, decisions!), and serves me right for having treated the family home as a storage depot all the years I was living and traveling elsewhere!

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Now for the NATURE NOTES

The major FELINE news of the year occurred at about 7:30 am one morning in May, when a transformer blew out with a loud explosion on the power pole on the Kern Street side of the property (the house is on a corner). Right by the saltbush hedge, bottlebrush shrubs and vinca beds which comprised BB’s favorite hangout--his little jungle, so to speak. The horrendous noise of the explosion shattered his nerves. Terrified, he dashed back into the house, just as I was also coming in the back door after putting something in the trash bin. And he would not budge out of the house again for four months.

(BB, you may recall, is the shorthair orange-striped number who came from a feral background as a youngster.)

So this poor little fellow has been suffering from shell shock, or “post-traumatic stress syndrome,” in current parlance.

BB had hitherto been a mighty hunter, and although since the end of September he’s begun venturing outdoors under cover of darkness, in the early morning and evening, his catch of prey has been greatly diminished. But as of early December he’s started occasionally popping out for one or two minutes during daylight, so I’m hoping he will continue to recover his composure and regain his former bravado.

The other cat, Jazz, (he of the long hair, black with white trim), being of a more mellow temperament, was only freaked out for one day by the explosion, and was ready for his usual outings the next day. His coat has thickened and fluffed out for winter, so he now looks like a whole lot of cat in this outfit. However, this, and BB’s stress notwithstanding, has not stopped BB from continuing to assert himself as Top Cat. Even if BB has just eaten, or seems not at all interested in eating-- the moment Jazz hits the dry food bowl, BB springs up, pushes him aside, and starts eating as a matter of principle. (It’s not fair--Jazz came here first, and by rights should have seniority.)

As for FROGS--so far I’ve only heard one calling out on a couple of occasions (not really “singing,”) in what sounds like a hoarse (I hope not “elderly”) voice, which I believe they do when seeking a mate. I don’t hear any answering calls. I’ve only seen one frog in the rain barrel a few times (perhaps more than one, separately?) I worry about thefrogs, having read that the diminishing numbers of all varieties worldwide is due to global warming, which causes certain virus(es) and/or bacteria to thrive and overwhelm the frogs. I hope it stays cool enough here for frogs to hold out.

The many Southern California fires were all at least 150 to 200 or more miles away. We did have the hot Santa Ana winds, and the smoke from down south did reach us (cough, cough, sniffle, sniffle) -- irritating to the eyes, nose and throat.

Only a fraction of an inch of rain so far--and we need  it. Pray for rain! (I also have an antique clay figurine of an Indian Rain God here--hedging my bets).

Hope life goes well with you and yours. All best wishes for Christmas and the New Year!!

P.S. The computer’s spellchecker thinks “Matisse” should read “mantises” !!