Italics are mine

Virtual New York City weekend

A few weeks ago I was supposed to New York City for a long weekend. I was really looking forward to it, since my kind of people are in NYC rather than in Dallas. (I like the things of Dallas, the museum, the symphony, the indie bookstores, the restaurants, but I need to go to NYC once in a while.) Needless to say, the pandemic put a brutal end to any hope I had of going. So I figured for this post I would daydream about what I would have done if I had gone. 

I was supposed to land on Friday afternoon, and on Friday evening I was going to see Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Booth Theatre. I've loved this play since I've seen the movie with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, although I was never particularly fond of black and white movies that are black and white on purpose when they could have been in color. The show closed during previews when Broadway was shut down, so it never got to premiere, but what a cast it would have been: Laurie Metcalfe as Martha, Rupert Everett as George, Joe Mantello directing. I hope they film it for television to recoup their costs. The play has so much to say about thwarted ambitions and pent-up anger and outright delusions.

The following day, I was going to go and see the Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art exhibition at the Whitney, and of course I couldn't be in that neighborhood without stopping at the Rubin. Maybe the Whitney show will be rescheduled (the website says "dates to be announced") but I'm not sure I'll be able to get back to New York any time soon so I got myself the catalog of the exhibition instead. Thank you, online shopping. That evening I was going to attend the New York Philharmonic concert conducted by Jaap van Zweden himself (the music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra before he got the NYC job) with Mahler's First on the program and Daniil Trifonov playing Mozart.

The next day I was going to attend a matinee at the Metropolitan Opera of Maria Stuarda. This was one of the last operas I saw at the Met before I moved to Texas and I was truly amazed by the set and the voices, so I wanted to see it again and relive the magic. This was not to be. That day I would also have gotten brunch and/or dinner  with local friends, or perhaps a friend down from Boston. I miss face-to-face interactions. Some other time, I suppose. 

Then on Monday I was going to see the Dorothea Lange: Words and Pictures exhibit at MoMA and attend the lecture at the New York Historical Society (Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition and American Complacency). None of that came to pass, obviously, but I ordered the Lange catalog in another round of online shopping from Dallas. As of this writing, the Lange exhibition is supposed to open online instead. 

I suppose I would have eaten on the Upper West Side at Irving Farm Coffee Roasters, Sweetgreen and Nice Matin. I suppose I would have had a wonderful time, if the pandemic had not struck. But with the pandemic of course the trip was out of the question. Better to stay safe, and read those museum catalogs from Dallas instead. 

How I learned Spanish

I've been thinking about learning Spanish ever since I moved to Texas in 2016, and writing a novel set in Madrid at the end of the Spanish Civil War gave me the final motivation I needed, especially once I decided to see Madrid for myself during Thanksgiving 2018.

I bought Spanish I and II from The Great Courses and loved them (of course I didn't get started until the week before the trip and although I found out I loved the lectures by Dr. Bill Worden I only had time to cover five out of thirty of Spanish I before the trip). Because I am a native French speaker, I found that what helped me most was to learn Spanish verbs and how to conjugate them.

 

Once in Madrid, I got myself a variety of books in Spanish, especially museums catalogs and also Invierno en Madrid, which I had loved in its English translation (except for the last chapter and the epilogue). I will admit that my method to further my Spanish is a bit unorthodox, but I love it. I also got Cien años de soledad, which I already had in English, and once I was back in the U.S. I got the audiobook.    

For a while my favorite way of learning Spanish was to re-read a couple of pages of Winter in Madrid and then read the equivalent in Spanish and circle the new words I wanted to put in my notebook with their translation. (Once a nerd, always a nerd.) The thing is, though, literary fiction does have quite a bit of fancy vocabulary, and I found my progress through the book slower than I wanted. So what to do, reader, what to do?

Here is the idea I came up with: read personal development books in Spanish. In those days of quarantine, we can also use a bit of strategic thinking for our life and career, and not only have I read all of them in English already, but I have such a memory that I actually remember most of them almost word for word. (I'm basically Rainwoman when it comes to memory, although  play it down a lot.) The big difference with literary fiction is that the range of vocabulary is much narrower and many words in personal development in Spanish are basically the same as in French. So I'm reading Poder sin límites by Tony Robbins with the same ease as I'd read it in English or French, which I find really funny. This way I'm practicing my Spanish and refreshing my memory on some useful personal development concepts. Once I'm done with the Robbins book I want to read Los principios del éxito by Jack Canfield. I've read it multiple times in English since it first came out a decade ago, so that should be fun too.  

And this is the story of how I became fluent in self-help Spanish!  

Homer's Odyssey as a Self-Help Book

Back in November 2017, Daniel Mendelsohn stopped by the Dallas Museum of Art while he was on book tour for his memoir An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and An Epic, which recounts his seminar on the Odyssey one year at Bard College, followed by a cruise down the Adriatic with his father, following on Ulysses's footsteps. I loved his talk so much I bought his book, and after devouring his book in one weekend I bought the actual Odyssey by Homer in the Robert Fagles translation.

I really love that translation, the poetry in the choice of words, the way the language flows,  and while I haven't read as much of it as I should (I'm a long way from finishing it), I was reminded to pick up the book at a reading of excerpts of The Odyssey I attended in Dallas a few weeks back. So now I am past the chapter where Ulysses convinces Calypso to let him sail home after spending seven years on her island, and because the quest for home has been a major theme for me for many years, I've been asking myself how much the story can shed any insight into my next steps in life. 

In Bethlehem things were easier in the sense that I knew I hadn't found my home. Dallas is more complicated, because Dallas as a city is phenomenal: symphony, opera, a Regional Tony-winning theater, indie movies, indie bookstores, the Met in HD, the Bolshoi at the movies, restaurants, ballet, theater, an Amazon fulfillment center nearby to give me same-day delivery if I feel like it, 2 airports, you name it, Dallas has it, and of the utmost quality to boot. Everything is very close: about 6 minutes max from where I live and 12 minutes from where I work. My quality of life is simply phenomenal. For me Dallas is a paradise, especially after the years in Bethlehem.

Yet recently I've been asking myself whether I've found my home or whether I've wandered onto Calypso's island, because work wise, the environment has its challenges, for reasons I won't get into. So while my broad environment has brought me much joy, my immediate environment has provided some serious headaches too, and it is only through my immediate environment that I will fully utilize my skills and contribute to the world. Plenty of people go to the symphony or the opera in Dallas, or more generally consume the available entertainment. Whether I participate in it or not will not change a thing. Where I can have an impact is through my work, and I'm not sure the conditions are there for me to pull it off. But maybe I can bring them about. Maybe I can make it work. Or am I kidding myself? Am I just listening to a siren's song? 

Sadly, The Odyssey doesn't provide much advice on living, except if you believe in praying to Hermes or Athena. (You may not mind praying to the shopping gods, but here Hermes is the god of trade, commerce and travelers.) Both Circe and Calypso ultimately help Ulysses leave them, so perhaps if you're lucky, the people who have been keeping you tied to a place will send you on your way after they realize your place isn't with them. But Ulysses always knew home was Ithaca where Penelope was waiting for him. Where is home for us wanderers? Where is the tradeoff between wanting an enjoyable environment with great quality of life and fully utilizing your skills by playing your edge? When do you know when you have found home? What do you compromise on and what do you refuse to give up? Or do you just wait until, like Ulysses, you decide you've had enough and it is time to continue on your path?

So, it's complicated, precisely because Dallas is an amazing city to live in. But at least I have The Odyssey to keep me company.

Musings on Maria (Callas)

Back in December I finally got to see the movie Maria on Callas, a documentary that recounts Maria Callas's life based on her own interviews and the interviews of people who knew her. It is heavy on the interview snippets and footage of the time and light on the big picture, but I still enjoyed it tremendously. As much as I love opera, I've never much listened to Callas, until I saw Norma in DC back in 2013 (time flies...), wanted to get a recording and ended up with this, where she sings her signature role at La Scala. I loved it so much I spent an inordinate amount of time listening to it again and again on my 3-hour road trips when I was driving down from B'lem to Bethesda and back, but it didn't make me want to hear Callas's singing in other roles.

I'm also fortunate to have this recording of her, offered by a student and his mother after he had graduated (long story as to why, which I can't get into in order to protect the student's privacy), and that book+CD combo I got at the Juilliard Book Shop a few weeks before I left the East Coast, thinking it'd be nice to know more about Callas and then finding other things to read. I never got around to listening to the CD from the book+CD combo until I saw Maria on Callas and then I was floored by how good she was and saddened by the way her life turned out. 

After seeing Maria on Callas I watched Tony Palmer's movie about her, a more traditional documentary that gives a better analysis of her life. In both movies Callas proves herself very shrewd in commenting on human nature, people who betrayed her or tried to bring her down, although she didn't give details, yet she allowed Aristotle Onassis's betrayal to completely destroy her. The Tony Palmer movie explains the constant battle between Maria the woman and Callas the artist: after she had scaled unheard-of heights as a soprano, she also wanted to know a sweep-her-off-her-feet love story. (She had married a much older man who served as her manager.) Onassis, Greek like her, was one of the richest men of the world, although the movie presents him as a womanizer and a shady character. Callas was particularly vulnerable because her voice started giving signs of strain so it became all-important for her to "go out with a bang". Marrying Onassis would have provided that bang. Instead, Onassis dumped her and married Jacqueline Kennedy - a woman far less talented than Callas, but evolving in powerful circles and more conventionally attractive.   

Now, if Onassis hadn't come about, would the end of Callas's life have been much different? It wouldn't have taken the turn of a Greek tragedy, but given the signs of strains on her voice, it is unlikely that she would have remained in the opera world much longer. What would she have done? She tried to reinvent herself, directing operas and conducting masterclasses, but her heart wasn't in it. What a terrifying prospect, to have been put on earth to mesmerize the world doing one thing, to have done it, and then, as someone quoted her as saying to him (I paraphrase), to spend the days waiting for death to come.

Thomas Schippers in "The Opera House"

Writing my previous post about Leonard Bernstein reminded me of another New York conductor who once reached great fame, but one whose career later plummeted and who met an untimely death of lung cancer at 47: Thomas Schippers.

To be honest, I had never heard of Thomas Schippers until I watched the documentary “The Opera House” during a Met-in-HD broadcast. He led the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera house at Lincoln Center on September 16, 1966 with a performance of Samuel Barber’s “Antony & Cleopatra”, an opera that was panned by the critics in spite of the performers’ best efforts, including those of a stunning Leontyne Price. Schippers was also “handsome as a Hollywood leading man” (from the NYT obit), Leonard-Bernstein-kind of dashing, and like Bernstein he was a homosexual in spite of being married (his wife passed of cancer in 1973), although back then people didn’t talk about those things. They prefer to focus on his enormous talent.

He was considered a major contender to lead the New York Philharmonic after Leonard Bernstein stepped down in 1969 (his conducting A&C on opening day of the new Met in 1966, a great honor, suggests he was being groomed for a top job) but was ultimately passed over for Pierre Boulez and ended up at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, hardly a ringing endorsement of his future. But perhaps he would have staged one of those comeback stories Americans are so fond for, if lung cancer hadn’t felled him. Most of his recordings are out of print (Sibelius, to name just one), but a few remain (Barber's Adagio for Strings, highlights from Verdi's Il Trovatore). 

His New York Times obituary mentions starkly: “Fortune gave him everything and then brutally snatched it away.” Although he is most remembered for conducting the A&C performance that opened the new Met, if he’s remembered at all, the 1977 NYT obit asserts that “One of Mr. Schippers's greatest Metropolitan triumphs came in 1974, when he conducted a new production of “Boris Godunov” in Mussorgsky's original version, a first for the company.” This gave me pause when I read it, because the Met has shown so many more productions of Godunov since then. Schippers’s story reminds me that even the greatest fame is fleeting, and for every Bernstein who remained at the top throughout his career, we also have to count many artists who were once promised to great things but left us too soon or didn’t quite live up to their early days. I don't know if there is any way to rescue from obscurity a conductor who has been dead for over 40 years, but I've done my part by ordering his 1970 recording of Lucia di Lammermoor with Beverly Sills and the London Symphony Orchestra, after he had left the Met but before Cincinnati, before his wife's death, before the lung cancer diagnosis. He only had 7 years left. 

Copland, Bernstein, Shostakovich

I’ve been listening to Aaron Copland a lot since I became an American citizen. When it comes to classical music, what is more American than his Third Symphony or Appalachian Spring? Predictably, I’ve gravitated toward my recordings of Copland’s by American conductor extraordinaire Leonard Bernstein. August 25^th marked the 100^th anniversary of his birth, so Bernstein has predictably been the focus of much musical programming over the past few months, and the subject of several books. Interestingly enough, I valued Copland before I became an American but didn’t care for Bernstein. I'd heard many good conductors live; I didn't feel I missed out on much if I didn't hear Bernstein's recorded take on things. Besides, Bernstein has been dead for 28 years. But I gave him a closer listen for the centenary of his birth, and perhaps also because the man is as fascinating as the music he was able to coax out of his orchestras, I've changed my mind about him. 

Bernstein is famous for many things, from his interpretations of Mahler to his leading the New York Philharmonic to his being a gifted composer in his own right, but also for conducting American composer par excellence Aaron Copland with the New York Philharmonic - an American superstar conducting work by another American superstar with an American orchestra. But Bernstein has also led the NY Phil in landmark performances of work by Soviet composer Dmitry Shostakovich.

So recently Bernstein became part of a broader reflection I had on musical nationalism: Bernstein conducting Copland with the New York Philharmonic, (Valery) Gergiev conducting Shostakovich with the Mariinsky Orchestra, Bernstein conducting Shostakovich with the New York Philharmonic, (Andris) Nelsons conducting Shostakovich with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Do American orchestras have something novel to offer in the performance of Russian works? What would we think of the Mariinsky Orchestra performing Copland? (It seems hard to imagine, perhaps because Gergiev has been a staunch supporter of Russian works. He knows where his competitive advantage lies. On the other hand, the United States doesn't have a large tradition of first-rate American classical music that would go back multiple centuries. So American orchestras wouldn't have much to play if they had to limit themselves to American music.)

Countries are naturally proud of their best-known composers, and their best-known work shows the essence of that country. Appalachian Spring is imbued with the spirit of the American West at the beginning of the 20^th century and evokes Americans' resilience and can-do attitude. Shostakovich’s symphonies capture the difficulties of life under Stalinism. His Seventh Symphony (“Leningrad”) echoes with the pounding rhythms of war and became a symbol of resistance to Nazism, his Thirteenth (“Babi Yar”) pays homage to the great massacre of 1941.

 Do conductors and orchestras of the composer’s same nationality have a particularly insightful perspective to bring to that composer’s work? I like to think so, yet Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theatre have thrived under Putin, and not every American these days relates to the can-do "I will succeed on my own terms" attitude of their elders. Recent scandals suggest that to some American companies, lying, cheating and exploiting workers might have become the preferred way to wealth. Now that the Soviet Union has imploded and music is available easily on the Internet, should we even continue to consider Bernstein’s recording of Shostakovich’s Symphony No 5 as a landmark contribution to music? Or should we accept instead that an American conductor, born and raised in a democracy, will never completely relate to the horror of living in a dictatorship, and so will not be able to fully convey the symphony to his listeners? To be fair, Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic recorded Symphony No 5 after they toured the Soviet Bloc, where they performed the piece in front of Shostakovich himself, so the musicians did draw from this deeply moving experience. Their performance remains recognized for its emotion to this day. Perhaps the gratitude of living in a democracy shines through in their playing, as does the 1982 performance at the John F. Kennedy Center of the National Symphony Orchestra led by Mstislav Rostropovich, the most famous cellist of the 20th century with great conducting gifts and a staunch advocate of human rights. 

Bernstein recorded the symphony in 1959. A lot has changed since then, and I prefer purchasing recordings of Shostakovich symphonies by Russian orchestras or at least orchestras from the former Soviet bloc. Among those, no one is better than Valery Gergiev. But can a famous Russian conductor and music director at the helm of the best Russian orchestra who could live anywhere in the world but chooses to keep living in Russia (perhaps to keep conducting Russian musicians), who necessarily has to make compromises with people in power, relate to Shostakovich’s anguish in any sort of meaningful way? Or should we forget who the conductor and orchestra are? In the end, I tend to gravitate toward Rostropovich when I want to listen to Shostakovich's 5th, because of his human rights record. I don't know if it makes for better playing but it does lend the conductor more gravitas. 

 When I become interested in a topic, I don’t do things halfway. True to myself, I’ve purchased quite a few books on Bernstein. He was a complicated man who was widely recognized as a genius and deeply appreciated his beautiful wife but he was also a homosexual who collected one-night stands with far younger men and treated his assistants in such a dismissive way that they never lasted. I’ve read the memoirs by his daughter and the one by his former assistant, both focusing on a troubled man rather than his music (the books don’t make for a very deep read), and I’m now engrossed in his biography by Humphrey Burton, but my favorite books are by Bernstein himself: his essays about music and – more than anything – his letters. What a gifted writer he was. Yet he wanted to be remembered for his music, as he instructed his former assistant on his deathbed. So I should end with a mention of my favorite recording of his, his final concert in August 1990. That second movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony gives me chills whenever I listen to it. 

 

Below is a little gallery of the books I have about Bernstein.

 

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Multiple Identities

Not too long ago I came across a blog post entitled “It’s OK to be a writer and __”, by Middlebury College president Laurie Patton on the blog The Millions. Patton happens to be a poet and a scholar to whom we owe a compelling translation of The Bhagavad Gita. Her post in itself was quite shallow and cursory, even for a blog post, but its main theme still resonated with me.

We live in a society that wants to put people into boxes. We are supposed to do only one thing that will be perfectly aligned with our personal brand. I am one of those people who are both strongly left-brained and right-brained: I love data science and I love to write. My time tends to be more productive, meaning I end up using everything I do, when I do left-brained stuff like working on a paper or preparing my next lecture, while I can spend hours or days working on a scene I ultimately discard. Yet there are things I express in my writing that I can’t express in my research papers.

This is not about scattered energy. In the same way that you can’t stay awake 24 hours (at least not on a sustainable basis), I can’t spend all my hours awake working on all left-brain stuff or all right-brain stuff, at least if I want to feel I’m working my edge. Usually I feel more productive when I devote blocks of time to one and then the other within the same day.

I think that as a result my work has a different quality from that of people who would be all left-brain or all right-brain. For instance, I think I am more innovative in the research ideas I pursue, although that comes with its own set of challenges. I also think I am more plot-driven rather than character-driven in my fiction, mindful of cause and effect and characters’ motivations. I am not the type to plop a character in a scene and see what happens.

Of course success doesn’t come without its tradeoffs and people who have gotten to where they are through single-minded pursuit of their goal might find themselves puzzled by my behavior. I got tenure that way, if you can imagine. Ultimately, happy people make for more productive contributors, no matter their line of work.

I’ll add Laurie Patton to the list of women I’d like to meet some day, and perhaps the woman closest to me in personality.

New York City weekend

I spent a few days in New York City earlier this month for the final presentation of a student team I was advising in the Entrepreneurship and Competitiveness in Latin America program at Columbia Business School, and took advantage of the opportunity to enjoy a couple of the activities I loved most when I used to spend a lot of my time in the city (in those days I still worked at Lehigh).

I ended up catching three performing arts events, two from the Mostly Mozart festival in its closing weekend and a Broadway show. The All-Mozart program on Saturday August 11 in the David Geffen Hall was supposed to be sold out but I was tremendously lucky to land a ticket that a patron had returned, just twenty-four hours before the performance. This had me sitting very close to the stage and with a perfect view of pianist Stephen Hough's hands on the Steinway piano during the concerto part of the program (I love the piano and observing a pianist's hand is one of my favorite activities when I attend a recital).

I returned to Lincoln Center the following day for the Mark Morris Dance Group in the Jazz at Lincoln Center's Frederick P. Rose Hal. In between the two, I dropped by the Ethel Barrymore theater on 47th St for a matinee of the Tony-winning Band's Visit. I also had time to swing by the Rubin Museum of Art for its spellbinding exhibition on the Second Buddha. The Rubin Museum of Art was always one of my "special places" when I used to be in NYC a lot and it gave me great peace to be able to return. (One thing I didn't have time to do that Sunday was getting lunch, but the breakfast at Nice Matin was delicious and I had a wonderful dinner at Sweetgreen and great cortado and conversation at the Irving Farm Coffee Roasters on the Upper West Side.) 

My favorite moments were Stephen Hough playing Mozart's Piano Concerto No 21 with Louis Langree conducting the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, "Love Song Waltzes" by the Mark Morris Dance Group, and every single moment of the Second Buddha exhibition at the Rubin. My least favorite moment was sitting through the 90 minutes of the Band's Visit, which I found mediocre. There is no character development and for a play about an Egyptian police orchestra stranded in a small town in Israel, one would at least expect some sort of increased understanding between two peoples at loggerheads by the end of the play. Instead, the main female character (the Israeli bar owner) vaguely chats more with the Egyptian orchestra conductor before it emerges she's having an affair with a married man, whom she is very upset to see with his wife (well, it's his wife, isn't it?), and then has a one-night stand with one of the other musicians in the Egyptian band. What in the world. People don't change, people don't grow, it is a play with music rather than a musical and why did I just waste one hour and a half of my life staring at this? The music was beautiful, but there is no doubt the Band's Visit wouldn't have garnered so many awards if it had faced stronger competition that year. 

Anyway, a funny thing happened while I was in New York. I realized I didn't care about moving there anymore. Maybe I will some day, maybe I won't, but it is not one of my goals anymore. It used to be, when I worked in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania and yearned for more culture in my life, more art, more theater, more literary events, more of everything that I like in life. Now that I have found all of that in Dallas, with its outstanding and abundant cultural events, I don't need New York City to fulfill that drive in me. Dallas is a lot more convenient to navigate as well, more affordable, and I find myself in awe of the amazing programs at venues such as the Dallas Museum of Art for its Arts & Letters series, the SMU Meadows School of Art for its performing arts events, the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture for its literary discussions, and of course the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and the Dallas Opera for their wonderful concerts and productions, all of them within 5-7 minutes drive of my home and with an extra 5-7 minutes if I come from work. It doesn't get any better than that. I don't know what life has in store for me - maybe I will stay in Dallas and maybe I won't. But as far as culture is concerned, Dallas has fulfilled my wildest dreams and some. I don't need to dream of moving to New York City anymore.  

Trip to Santa Fe 2018

This summer I decided to return to Santa Fe. I had only been there once before, back in 2011, for the opera and chamber music festivals, and this time around I decided to explore the area around Santa Fe rather than just the touristy, historic part of town, although I did return to the opera festival too, on the outskirts of town. (The chamber music festival hadn't started yet when I was there.)

The main reason I decided to go was to follow in the footsteps of painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), for whom I have tremendous admiration. She first discovered New Mexico in 1929 before settling there permanently in 1949 after her husband Alfred Stieglitz’s death in 1946, and spending the last 37 years of her life alternating between Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch depending on the season. O’Keeffe was a pioneer in many respects and didn’t fit an easy mold. She stood out even before she became famous: for instance as a young woman she taught in Texas at a time where people dismissed everything that didn’t happen in New York as unimportant and she wasn't afraid of raising eyebrows with her dark, austere clothing and her (much less austere) behavior with eligible men. She developed her own unique signature style (if you're still reading this post you're probably aware that she is particularly well known for her flowers) and yet also she didn't paint flowers forever and reinvented herself at multiple junctures in her life. She enjoyed alone time far into nature – and nature there wasn’t, say, the Hamptons outside New York, but the arid and unwelcoming Abiquiu area. She didn't follow fads or trends. She made her life work on her own terms.

Visiting the Georgia O’Keeffe museum again counted as a highlight of the trip. I had been very disappointed in the museum, nestled in the historic part of Santa Fe, when I had visited in 2011 because it showed very few paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, but the museum curators have now developed a brilliant retrospective of O’Keeffe’s work (the new exhibit has only been open for a year or two), which gives an outstanding overview of O’Keeffe’s development as an artist. Perhaps O’Keeffe’s life resonates more with me now that I’ve moved to Texas. I also enjoyed her retrospective at the de Young museum in San Francisco back in 2014, but any exhibition of part of her works pales in comparison to what is on display in Santa Fe. The museum also has prepared a great timeline of O'Keeffe's life, which you can enjoy here.

Then, Ghost Ranch. The tour itself was quite good (it showed the landscapes that have inspired O’Keeffe’s paintings, and the tour guide had reproductions of the corresponding paintings as well so we could see first-hand the simplifications or slight changes that O’Keeffe made to focus on what was important in an image), but the drive to Abiquiu was even better. The picture above is one I took during the drive to Abiquiu. I recommend stopping by the Abiquiu Inn for lunch. I wonder how it must have felt to live so far away from most people, back in the 1950s and the 1960s.

The drive through Taos’s High Country also offered some stunning views of New Mexico and glimpses into areas of stark beauty but also stark poverty. I am not much of a church person but the church of Chimayo, famed for its holy dirt, was worth the stop. The Taos Pueblo also remains a highlight of that day. I also saw the Rio Grande Gorges, with very little water due to the drought. For lunch I recommend stopping at Bella’s Mexican Grill in Abiquiu. Both the salad (I think it was the elote salad with shrimp) and the tableside guacamole were exceptionally good.

I returned to the Santa Fe Opera as well. In a 2010 stunning production by the late Lee Blakeley, Madame Butterfly, which opened the festival when it was first launched in 1957 and when it re-opened after a devastating fire, had all the hallmarks of productions I love, with exquisite lighting, outstanding voices, spare sets and rather monochromatic props (in this case inspired of Japanese art), but in addition to the magnificent singing by Kelly Kaduce as Cio-Cio San (the tenor singing Pinkerton didn’t quite have her vocal range and the audience let it be known at the end that it wasn’t pleased), I loved most sitting in the first row of the mezzanine and observing the headlights of the cars go by in the far distance of the mountain range. The theater’s opening in the back on the range offered a spellbinding spectacle.

I also saw Doctor Atomic. I had never seen it (I usually don’t care much for operas sing in English) but the opportunity to see it next to the Los Alamos National Laboratory was hard to pass up. It was very good. I did like Madame Butterfly better. I also went on a backstage tour of Santa Fe Opera, which perhaps could have provided a few more insights and, disappointingly, didn’t allow the group to go anywhere near the performance hall or the stage because a rehearsal was in progress.  

For accommodations, I couldn’t have imagined a better place to stay than the Eldorado Hotel, with its back entrance just feet from the Georgia O’Keeffe museum. The breakfast restaurant prepared an outstanding egg-white omelet, although staff tended to be slow in the cooking and the service. Thankfully I was never in a rush. I loved that my room had a fireplace and a balcony. I got lucky without knowing it because I booked the trip with a check-out date that happened to be the day that the governors’ association was coming to the hotel for its big meeting, so guests couldn’t stay beyond that for security reasons, which meant a number of people staying in Santa Fe past that day had picked other hotels for their entire trip, leaving people like me with really pretty rooms in spite of my booking the trip a bit last minute. (I also appreciated the direct flights from Dallas.) For dinner I adored TerraCotta Wine Bistro. A glass of cabernet sauvignon and the best tomato, cucumber and watermelon salad I've ever eaten with the most delicious freshly baked bread: total bliss. Second choice was La Casa Sena, especially for its wasabi crab salad.

True to myself, I prepared for the trip by buying a lot of books about O’Keeffe and dusting off a volume I had about Santa Fe Opera as well as some books about O’Keeffe I had bought a while back. I also added a few O’Keeffe monographs to my collection during the trip. (See below for the book covers.) I came back with Native American artwork and artifacts, books about O’Keeffe, many remarkable memories and – after bringing my sketchbook and pencils to New Mexico with me for a few quick sketches – a commitment to start drawing and painting again on a more regular basis. This was a good trip.

 

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David Halberstam, 10 years ago

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the passing of David Halberstam. It is hard to believe it has been ten years already. I remember my shock at hearing that, after surviving on-the-ground reporting of the Vietnam War, he had died in a traffic accident in Menlo Park, CA, on his way to interviewing someone for his next book. It seemed such a trivial way to die, for everyone but especially for him. He wasn't even driving the car. (Another author who died in a car crash is Jeffrey Zaslow, co-author of The Last Lecture with Randy Pausch and Highest Duty with Chelsey Sullenberger. It was five years in February. Such a loss.) I wonder what Halberstam would think of the times we live in today.

I haven't read anything by Halberstam in many years but a local history bookclub in Dallas read The Coldest Winter a few months ago. I've never had any interest in learning more about the Korean War but got the book to take part in the bookclub, and I quickly realized what a gem of a book Halberstam had written - the last one before his passing, as a matter of fact. If you read nothing else, his takedown of General MacArthur at the beginning of the book is a thing of beauty. (He doesn't mince words for his Chief of Staff Edward Almond either, but Almond is lost to history.) Halberstam's mastery of language and ability to write with a punch left me in awe. It is a fascinating study of character, ego, politics, ambition and - more than anything else - the unremitting courage of American servicemen in an almost forgotten war, rescued from oblivion by Halberstam and the sad circumstances that make this, forever, the last book he ever wrote.

You can read Halberstam's obituary in the New York Times here.