2008

Greetings!

I’m late in composing this letter, so if the card is late, my apologies!

Looking over the calendar, I find the year’s highlights involved, as usual, music and art.

San Francisco in March--the annual visit to the tax preparer was ameliorated by seeing various friends and a visit to the Legion of Honor Museum. I didn’t care for the Annie Liebowitz photography exhibit--the portraits were so ordinary, so superficial--not the slightest reflection of character in each person. But being a keen archaeology nut, especially regarding places I’ve traveled, I found the exhibit of artifacts from the Holy Land (on loan from Israel) more my cup of tea...

In April it was great fun visiting with a cousin from  Toronto and his wife during their tour of California. I hadn’t seen him since my trip to Canada when he was only four years old! We had a great time discussing our various genealogical/ancestral matters. His grandfather was one of my father’s cousins.

In May, a wonderful male choral group based in San Francisco, “Chanticleer,” gave a concert of Spanish colonialera sacred music in the 18th century Spanish mission church in San Luis Obispo (our country seat, 14 miles east)--part of their tour of many California’s old Spanish churches. It included both music from the Mass in Latin, and other sacred music in Spanish. It was exquisite music--giving one a real spiritual uplift.

Another trip to San Francisco in May-- our Wagner Society threw a big bash to combine celebrating Wagner’s birthday and the 25th anniversary of our Society. A concert at the SF Conservatory featured a small orchestra of its advanced students playing the “Triebschen Idyll” (aka “Siegfried Idyll”), and two young singers to whom we had given grants to advance their training sang selections from Wagner’s operas. There was also a pianist who played piano transcriptions of some Wagner music. Then a slap-up reception. A wonderful day.

Back to SF in early June for a Wagner Society symposium on the opera Rheingold, a reception (in the museum part of the Veterans’ Building), and an opera performance of Rheingold. This was the first installment of a so-called “American Ring” (Der Ring des Nibelungen) to be presented one opera each year and then the whole Ring all together). I disliked the production intensely--they turned the Gods into vapid Noel-Coward twits, listless and blah. I could see nothing good in the producers’ taking such liberties with the script, going against everything in the story and characterization. When I grumbled to a friend in the Society, she tried to defend it, saying, “Oh it’s supposed to be an American Ring.” I said, “Not a whole lot of Americans are Noel Coward twits!” So she said, “But they’re supposed to be robber barons.” I countered that robber barons were even less likely to be twits.

For a very un-twitty American program, the little Pewter Plough theatre in the town of Cambria a few miles up the coast from here, produced a one-woman show, “The Belle of Amherst.” A lively young actress portrayed the reclusive 19th century poet Emily Dickinson, who you might expect would have been a twit, but evidently wasn’t, judging from  this script, at any rate. Quite a spirited woman, even if reclusive.

In early September I spent a few days in Santa Barbara, and again took in a wonderful polo match by the highest rated teams the season. Gorgeous!! What fabulous horses, and superb horsemen-hunks.

In late September, back to San Francisco to see a rather oddball opera, Die Tote Stadt,

composed by Erich Korngold while still in Germany, before he came to Hollywood to do film scores. The story was weird, but the music OK, and featuring one very lovely aria

In early November I went to Los Angeles and out to Laguna Beach for the opening of a retrospective exhibit of William Wendt paintings--an artist friend of my father’s, and whose works today are greatly sought after. I also inspected two buildings that had sprung up in Los Angeles since I was there some years ago. The Disney concert hall, made up of various curved sheets of silvery metal (similar to the Bilbao museum in Spain, and by the same architect, Gehry) was interesting on the outside (closed, so I didn’t go in). They had had to sandblast the metal because its intense reflected glare had been frying people in their nearby apartments.

The new R.C. Cathedral is a massive fortress-like structure, huge chunks of ochre-colored stone, and inside--a vast emptiness. Pews, altar cross, bishop’s chair etc. dwarfed and almost lost in it. As an architecture buff, I was so disappointed, since the Spanish architect (Moneo) had done some interesting buildings in Europe. This building just did not generate anything like a spiritual experience, which should be the architectural purpose.

This Fall, had a lovely surprise when I heard that the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas had borrowed one of the paintings by my father (A. Harold Knott, 1883-1977) from a gallery in Pacific Grove (as well as works by various other artists from his period) for a special exhibit juxtaposing writings of John Steinbeck, and the Carmel poet Robinson Jeffers with paintings and photographs reflecting these writers’ celebration of California landscapes. And it was even more exciting to learn that my father’s painting, “ROCKY INLET,” was placed right at the entrance to the exhibit--the first thing visitors would see! What a splendid venue, since the Steinbeck Center has visitors from all over the world.

Everyone is familiar with Steinbeck’s novels; many of his works are assigned reading in our schools, and many have been made into movies. The poet Jeffers is nowadays less well known than in his heyday of the 1920’s-30’s. His poems celebrated the grandeur of Nature--the rugged coast and mountains, of California.

As the curators wrote in the Steinbeck Center’s Newsletter,

“The words written by both Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck echo a deep response to the landscape of California’s Central Coast. The rich soil. The quiet valleys. The howling surf. The timeless granite. The skeletal cypress,majestic oaks, and sentinel pines. And the delicate lupine and fragrant sage. Artists of the time were recording responses to the coastland’s natural beauty in paintings. Jeffers and Steinbeck, too, were artists creating enduring images, their work in word and thought rather than pigment...Both writers shared an intense intimacy with the landscape. For Steinbeck his native surroundings served as a microcosm for the human experience...For Jeffers the natural world offered a tangible source for exploring the vastness of intangible thought--mortality, eternity, meaning.”

(D. Silguero and Dr. L. Staples, Guest Curator)

Now for a few less-grand aspects of Nature on the home front. My famous longhair tuxedo cat, Jazz, disappeared in February. I put out flyers (with his picture) on telephone poles all around the neighborhood, phoned all the friends and neighbors, police, veterinarians, and listed him on the animal shelter’s “lost and found” website. I looked in every nook and cranny of the house, garage and studio. I was distraught. A couple days later, having just about given up in despair, I had to settle down and do some paperwork. I opened a drawer in the metal filing cabinet--and there was Jazz, curled up at the back of the drawer! “JAZZ! You’re HERE!!” What a relief. I hauled him out, none the worse for wear, apart from hunger and thirst (he rushed into the kitchen to drink and eat too much, promptly throwing it all up). Evidently I’d left that half-filled drawer open, and he’d climbed in and gone to sleep at the back, where I didn’t see him when I subsequently closed the drawer.

Of course when I called everyone back to say that the lost was found, I heard a lot of jokes, such as “Was he filed under “C” for “Cat?” etc. Well, not exactly. But I later noticed that he had chewed up a lot of the material at the edges of folders under “B” for Bank.”

Recently when I too-vigorously pushed the seed out of an avocado, I sent it flying across the kitchen and rolling along the floor. My orange-striped shorthair cat, BB, flew after it and had a great time chasing it about. A new and inexpensive cat toy! (But the trouble with cat toys is that they disappear under beds or other furniture, reappearing months later in unexpected places.)

On the Amphibian front, I saw only ONE frog all year, flopping into the rain barrel when I lifted the lid. And I heard only ONE frog sing, calling from the saltbush hedge in an attempt to find a mate. If there is really one one frog out there, what about the future? Or are there actually two frogs, who do manage to get together? As I’ve mentioned before, I’d read that global warming has increased the viral or bacterial population, which is in turn killing off frogs everywhere. I just hope my tiny frog population here can hang on.

Now to get this printed up and on its way. Best wishes to everyone for a happy Christmas and New Year!