Welcome to A Lady of Letters

Here's the summer edition of Bay Nature Magazine - As part of my research I took a kayaking class and two wonderful trips on the Bay!



(photo © by Kathleen Goodwin)

http://baynature.org/articles/july-sep-2011/from-mild-to-wild

Transcendence

Book review for Michael Laughrin's North American Jyotish newsletter: a world-famous psychiatrist describes the effects of the TM technique through the lens of personal anecdotes by business leaders, artist, scientists corroborated by hundreds of scientific studies.

Transcendence, Healing and Transformation through Transcendental Meditation by Norman E. Rosenthal, M.D.

She is Guan Yin, protector and compassionate saint. She is Frieda Kahlo, fierce and courageous artist. She is Medussa, beauty whose vanity orchestrated her own demise. These are some of the images used by choreographer Paris Wages to express the many facets of womanhood in her new production, Google Woman.

www://sfexaminer.com/entertainment/music/2011/5/paris-wages-google-woman-explores-feminine-mystique

Smuin Ballet Keeps the Momentum Going

Choo San Goh, the late choreographer (and a casualty of the AIDS virus) was known as one of the brightest lights in the late 20th century's ballet world. Astonishingly, his work has never been seen by San Francisco audiences - until now.

http://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/2011/5/smuin-ballet-keeps-the-momentum-going-spring-program

Speaking with the Stars...of Dance

ODC San Francisco hosts the first choreography competition in the Bay Area:

http:///www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/music/2011/01/speaking-dance-stars

Fable and Faith: conversation with Robert Moses

Here is the Convozine interview with Robert Moses in a preview of his latest piece, Fable and Faith:

http://convozine.com/conversations/9170

Unveiling Scheherazade

Alonzo King's LINES Ballet presents a new interpretation of Scheherazade with the music of Rimsky-Korsakov interpreted by Zakir Hussein for western and Middle Eastern instruments.

http://www.sfexaminer.com/lifestyle/Unveiling-Scheherazade-104730474.html

Playing With Our Food

L. John Harris, author and illustrator of Foodoodles relishes the early day's of Berkeley's foodie revolution.

http://themonthly.com/upfront1011.html

Oh, Inverted World

Choreographer Trey McIntyre debuts his new piece for Smuin Ballet, appearing at the Palace of Fine Arts through Octobr 10th. Here's my convozine interview with him:

http://convozine.com/conversations/7370

Former Kirov soloist Yuri Zhukov presents Shared and Divided at the Cowell theater:

http://www.sfexaminer.com/lifestyle/Zhukov-Dance-Theater-offers-up-simple-gifts-102577584.html

Over the past eight years I've contributed numerous features and Shop Talk pieces to the East Bay Monthly, a literary and commerce magazine in the San Francisco Bay Area. For my work on Shop Talk I've loved getting to know the new shopkeepers in town and, hopefully giving them a little boost in traffic. By now, however, I can usually tell which ones will survive, and which won't. These two recent ones are, I believe, keepers.


Modernaire

Step into Berkeley’s Modernaire, and you’re instantly transported back to the midcentury world of Mad Men. Red, orange, turquoise, and chartreuse Murano art glass pops against Paul Frankl’s white, treated-cork tables. You can almost see a Brylcreemed Don Draper, whiskey glass in one hand, ever-present cigarette in the other, reposing on the tweed-covered Scandinavian love seat.

Photo by Spiral-A Photography

Bee Healthy Honey

Verdant valleys carpeted with wildflowers: not our Western vision of Yemen. But for Khaled Almghafi, proprietor of Bee Healthy Honey Shop in Oakland, these are vivid images from his childhood. “Yes, we do have deserts filled with acacias from which we get acacia honey,” he explains. “But we also have mountains and on the beautiful island of Socotra, off the coast, very rare plants. That honey goes for $180 a kilo in France.”

http://www.themonthly.com/shoptalk1004.html

Two for the Road

Chitresh Das and Jason Samuels Smith at the Palace of Fine Arts

What do you get when you combine classical Indian dance and American tap? A jubilant explosion of sound.
On Saturday, Indian Kathak dance master Pandit Chitresh Das and American tap dance phenom Jason Samuels Smith team up to present “India Jazz Suites,” part of the Chitresh Das Dance Company’s 30th anniversary celebration gala.
The performance heralds a collaboration that, since their first match-up in 2005, has received wildly enthusiastic response from audiences here and abroad.Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/Two-for-the-road-87625457.html#ixzz0l1dQJ5np

Performing Diaspora

Diaspora: A body of people dispersed from their homelands. That pretty much describes the Bay Area population in a nutshell. Beginning on November 5, CounterPULSE, the SOMA artists’ collective, presents Performing Diaspora, a series of works-in-progress culminating in three weekends of dance, music and drama featuring a baker's dozen of artists whose fresh and experimental work is rooted in cultural traditions from such diverse parts of the world as Indonesia, Serbia, the Carribean Japan and Africa.

CounterPULSE director Jessica Robinson Love says “The Bay Area has had support for artists who practice traditional forms of dance and that’s very important, especially for recent immigrants. On the other hand we have a vibrant contemporary performance community. What we were lacking was a middle ground - artists based in traditional forms who want to divert from that.”

http://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/Diaspora-dances-around-the-world-67446812.html

Avant garde dance comes to San Francisco this weekend:

Taking it to the Edge
An Evening of Avant Garde Dance at ODC
By Andrea Pflaumer

To someone of lesser mettle than dancer Sara Shelton Mann, broken bones and ripped tendons might have sent them into retirement long ago. But for Mann they only served to drive her deeper into her creative well, garnering an impressive number of accolades along the way, including four Isadora Duncan awards and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Mann, one of the world’s foremost figures in avant garde dance, presents her newest production, Shapeshifter, in a concert entitled Shared Legacies on October 3 and 4 at ODC. Joining her on the bill is her former principal dancer and protégé Kathleen Hermesdorf, whose company La Alternativa (formerly MOTIONLAB) performs their piece entitled the other edge of there is here. “I’m very honored to share a show with Sara,” Hermesdorf says. “She always attracts great collaborators and has fabulous dancers.” [Mann’s lead dancer, Maria Scaroni, created quite a stir this year with an NEA-sponsored performance of a piece by Jess Curtis that had her appearing in the nude.]

(See page 16)

http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/Launch.aspx?referral=other&pnum=&refresh=Gb519N0eZd60&EID=1dfcbb42-fcde-4678-92c3-f2b3a4bb8140&skip=true

Hey All You Environmentalists!

My friend (and webmaster) Lee Leffler has published several terrific articles about the Sustainable Living program at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. It's a wonderful school doing some important work in the field of environmental education. This is a photo of the organic greenhouses on campus.

Check it out:

http://leeleffler.com/category/sustainable/sustainable-campus/

Book Review in the University of Toronto Women in Judaism Journal

The Girl from Foreign: A Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors, Forgotten Histories, and a Sense of Home

Review by Andrea Pflaumer

Sadia Shepard’s remarkable memoir The Girl from Foreign is as satisfying for the personal mysteries it solves as it is unsettling for the larger geo-political questions it raises. Born in Denver, the daughter of an American Christian father and a Pakistani Muslim mother, Shepard embraces her multicultural identity (‘it’s all one God,’) in a country that welcomes hyphenation. But as a young woman embarking on a writing career she learns that her maternal grandmother, who lived with and was an important part of the family during Shepard’s formative years, was not originally from Pakistan nor was she Muslim. She was, in fact, born into the Bene Israel community of Western India as Rachel Jacobs. In her grandmother’s final years she asks Shepard to ‘tell my story,’ launching the young woman on an arduous physical and emotional journey to discover her grandmother’s roots, a voyage that became one of self-discovery as well.

Joyride Art Show Review

Published in the San Francisco Weekly on-line blog "All Shook Down"

by Andrea Pflaumer

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/shookdown/2009/07/last_night_joyride_art_show_at.php

"I'm Gonna Live Forever...."

For those of you who like that song, you may be thinking, "in this decrepit body?". Well, here's a little different twist on the subject - from ancient India - published in Michael Laughrin's North American Jyotish Newsletter

http://jyotish.ws/wisdom/kaya_kalpa_immortality.html

Rowing Down a River of Words

...of Children and Words

This was for the June issue of Parabola Magazine. I wrote about a wonderful Berkeley organization called River of Words that solicits poetry and artwork from children around the world on the theme of "Watersheds'. ROW publishes an annual compendium of the winning entries. Here's the listing and below this excerpt is the entire piece.

http://parabola.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=176:table-of-contents&catid=3:currentissuesections

Winning Photo by Mira Darham age 10

Two things that were essential to our ancestors' well-being - awareness of the natural world and connection to one’s community - are woefully absent in the lives of many children today. Communities are now defined as friends on a Facebook page and a sense of place is variably determined by the location of the best cell phone reception.

Berkeley writer and long-time National Public Radio contributor Pamela Michael sought to remedy this situation by developing a program that encourages children to explore their natural environment and then provides the creative tools to help them express how that experience transformed them. In 1995 Michael teamed up with former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass to co-found River of Words, a non-profit organization whose mission is to promote literacy, creative expression and community awareness of our local watersheds. “Watersheds are a meaningful way of looking at the whole of the natural world,” Michael explains. “We chose [water] as the basis for the curriculum because it is the absolute bottom line determining whether life exists or not. We wanted the children to understand the systems that sustain us by combining science and art -- two disciplines based on observation and experimentation."

http://www.newslettergal.com/files/andrea/rowing-down-a-river-of-words.pdf