Berkeley Blog

Diebenkorn's Daughter

Last night at the Hillside Club in Berkeley I heard Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant, daughter of the artist Richard Diebenkorn, speak about her father’s art and what it was like growing up in the house of a man who made art 365 days and often nights a year.

Gretchen grew up in Berkeley in the early sixties and sometimes wished she lived in a house like those of her friends, which had matching furniture, and curtains rather than bare windows, and didn’t use bedspreads from India as tablecloths. Her father didn’t care about material possessions and either made his own furniture for his studio or picked up discarded chairs and tables from the roadside.

She compared some of his work to that of Matisse, an artist he admired, but apart from similar color and composition choices in several of his works that are now on display at SFMOMA in an exhibit comparing the two artists, the daughter didn’t have much to add except to say both painters ignored world politics as content for their art. (That exhibit seemed to me a contrivance of crowd-pleasing curators that diminished rather than articulated the painters’ respective merits.)

The daughter revealed that Diebenkorn painted from his mind. It turns out the vertiginous, colorful landscapes he painted in his Ocean Park, Santa Monica years were completely imaginary. And he didn’t use photographs or preliminary sketches: he just attacked the canvas, or in many cases, the empty backs of posters since he used any paper surface he could find. He painted directly from his mind to paper, much like a conductor’s wand evokes music from an orchestra.

Most poignant were the match boxes Diebenkorn painted meticulously for his granddaughter’s dollhouse and the Easter egg adorned with a spade – a favorite shape of the artist – created for his grandson. He also sketched a fanciful dragon but tired of filling in the creature’s scales so asked his son-in-law, Richard Grant, to complete the rest and gave him co-artist credits.

Grant and his wife spent more than 22 years and a fortune -- some of it earned from the sale of Diebenkorns given to them by his wife, Phyllis – to create a four-volume catalog raisonee of all the artist’s paintings, recently published by Yale University Press. They spent two weeks and 12-hour days at a specialty color press in Verona, Italy, to insure the color quality of the paintings in the catalog, and now they are embarked on a similar catalog for all the artist’s prints.

The Diebenkorn daughter, a former actress, is an artist in her own right. With a painter’s eye, she captures the processes of her father’s artistic genius as well as the tenderness between a loving father and child.

iPhone 6 versus Knausgaard 3

While most of my friends are hungering to get their hands on the iPhone 6, I'm champing at the bit to secure an English translation of Karl Ove Knausgaard's volume 3, the latest book translated from the Norweigian in this author's six-volume epic, My Struggle.

If I were his publisher, I'd rename the title Hitler ruined for everyone My Hunger for Life because this memoir by the stay-at-home father of four describes every quotidian moment of life, from changing diapers filled with excrement to cooking a meal of fish and potatoes, as if it were a testament to his need to feel truly alive by recording every single moment of consciousness.

Talk about the quantified man. Knausgaard is the epitome of human consciousness , a man for whom every detail, every experience expands his awareness of himself. The irony is that in his struggle to come to grips with the conformity that Swedish society, where he now lives, demands of him and that he has resisted since he was a child, the only outlet for his creativity is to document the routines his life is bound by. 

The Norwegian's art is in the feelings that surface as casually as the smoke from the cigarettes he goes outside to inhale even in the bitter cold of Stockholm. And also in the endless piling up of details, such as in the blow by blow account of his wife's first labor and delivery, which is the most honest description of childbirth I've ever read because it includes the gore and agony most of us want to forget. 

Knausgaard doesn't forget anything. Memory is what keeps us alive, he implies, and it's only by recording our history can we hope to understand ourselves.

A Euphoric Week in the East Bay

The holiday season is upon us, and for an extrovert like myself, it’s the season when Berkeley seems most bountiful. My East Bay epicenter is Berkeley but this week included a field trip to downtown Oakland’s Preservation Village, a mock-up of what Oakland might have looked like when Gertrude Stein was gestating her syntax at the turn of the 20^th century.

The Potemkin Oakland, initiated by then Mayor Jerry Brown, whose wish to draw 10,000 settlers to the city is now being fulfilled because of high rents in San Francisco, Preservation Village's Nile Hall was host to the launch of Oaktown Tech, a local Google map of tech players in Oakland, which includes companies, bloggers, open spaces, and whatevers. Mr. Lotus 1-2-3 Mitch Kapor, who runs the Kapor Center for Social Impact in Oakland, funded the venture. Susan Mernit, editor in chief of Oakland Local, an award-winning hyperlocal news site that trains and employs local journos, created an “ecosystem map” and database that might have blown Mercator’s literal-location-based mind.

I brought a bevy of clients (in high tech) to the tech-revival potpourri, including the formerly (and soon to be) famous Seymour Rubinstein, founder of MicroPro International, which developed the first commercially successful word processor, WordStar, and launched the PC revolution -- before WordStar, why would anyone want a personal computer? The Oakland technorati at this event included the politerati from Van Jones’s Rebuild the Dream and various nonprofits that bring computing to those who can't afford an Internet connection from the likes of ATT and Comcast, which monopolize the market.

Speaking of monopolies, I met a delightful author, Charlie Haas, earlier this week at a fundraiser for Arlene Blum's (my former Reed College housemate) Green Science Policy Institute, which has led the fight to eliminate toxic flame retardants in household products, such as couches. Jamie Redford’s movie, Toxic Hot Seat, about the fight to eliminate these toxins is debuting this Monday (Nov. 25) on HBO, but since I lack HBO – a monopoly on tasteful TV – I’ll wait to see it on the more democratic distributor of culture, Netflix. So I mentioned to Charlie that I bicycle, and so does he, and he recommended a mobile app called sworkit for doing a great, quick workout. He looked fit, so I checked it out and am still pleasantly aching from some of the moves.

Haas – an Oakland screenwriter and prolific, freelance magazine writer – has written the most hilarious, anti-establishment novel I’ve read since Catcher in the Rye called The Enthusiast, published in 2009 by HarperCollins. It follows the travels and travails of a college dropout who becomes an editor for a bevy of enthusiast magazines, from real ones like ultra running and spelunking to invented mix-and-match sports like kite buggying and mountain boarding. As each magazine folds or gets swallowed by Clean Page, a magazine magnate, we witness the current media disarray mirrored in the hobbyist magazine market. Haas’s attention to detail and sense of the absurdity of modern life – the name of an extreme- sports promotion company the protagonist’s girlfriend works for is called Hindenburg – makes this a rollicking read. I can’t wait for his next book, which he’s writing now.

“The real issue is politics,” said Robert Reich, a UC Berkeley professor in the Goldman School of Public Policy, in a discussion Nov. 21 with Dan Kammen, another UC professor -- of energy (didn’t know these existed!) -- who won a Nobel prize along with the rest of Al Gore’s organization studying climate change. Reich was talking about how climate change affects the poor more than the rich in a talk sponsored by CITRIS, a UC Berkeley institute focusing on science, IT, and social policy.

“Environmental degradation and inequality are responsible for much of the upheaval if not the warfare in this century,” Reich added. To resolve the crisis, which he says is immediate, “We need a new industrial revolution…and the scientific community needs to make this a frontline issue.” He urged the students in the audience to organize, mobilize, and energize. Like Charlie Haas, Reich pokes fun at the hypocrisy between our beliefs and our actions but leverages the laughs he gets to motivate his listeners to change the world. He’s a classroom comedian and one of the most loved teachers at Cal.

Finally, although I have had enough of cycling and drugs, I saw The Armstrong Lie, a documentary by Alex Gibney that was just released and only played one week in Berkeley theaters. The euphoria of bicycle racing is like the allegro con vivace in the last movement of a Beethoven symphony: it brings a rush like no other. Or maybe a rush similar to one induced by drugs. When people  don’t want to make a judgment, they say, “It’s complicated.” That’s the feeling this movie left me with. Basically, everyone is to blame: the coaches, the sponsors, the policing agencies, the media, the teammates, and Lance.

I stayed to watch the credits and saw my friend’s name: Amy Smolens, fellow Albany Strollers & Rollers advocate and professional sports video producer, who was listed as associate producer.

“What did you do?” I asked Amy in an email after seeing the film Thursday night in a theater with all of two other people, who looked as if they had dropped in to kill time. She was elated to hear her name was on the screen. She’d driven the camera car when Lance’s team was training in Santa Rosa in 2009, and she said it was the scariest experience of her life. A fearless camera person herself, she had to weave between cyclists, oncoming cars, and make sure her camera person wasn’t going to fall over a cliff while she was shooting and leaning out of the car. She wrote up the experience in  http://pedalmag.com/cody-campbell-interview-astana-camp-photos/

Brilliant, Crazy and Cocky in Any Language

I just read Techcrunch reporter Sarah Lacy's new book, Brilliant, Crazy and Cocky, describing through personal stories what social, political, economic, and cultural conditions contribute to making a successful high-tech entrepreneur in India, China, Israel, Indonesia, Rwanda, and Brazil. In a style that's as cocky as her topic (she's the Hunter S. Thompson of the tech world), she limns individual entrepreneurs who epitomize the culture, history and politics of the place in which their start-ups are founded.

Despite my inclination for high literature and analysis (e.g., The Economist and The New York Review of Books), I enjoyed this book for its brazen insights. For example, Lacy ascribes Israel's success with security software to its constant state of war and the fact that all citizens serve two years in the military, where risk and an aversion to authority are part of basic training. But she goes a step further and spells out reasons for the country's high-tech failures in other areas. She makes the complexity of factors sound simple, but then everything seems simple in retrospect.

Lacy leverages the research of others, such as Techcrunch columnist Vivek Wadhwa and former Cisco CTO Judy Estrin, to reinforce conclusions developed from her direct observation and involvement (especially drinking at bars!) with natives. She's funny and carries no political agenda; if a country's got no democracy, she notes that and even demonstrates how the lack of democracy or freedom of expression contributes to a particular kind of startup.

For example, China bypassed the industrial and the democratic revolutions altogether. It went straight from a Confucian-based monarchy to communism, and most recently, to capitalism while bypassing democracy. Lacy describes an online dating site that is a consequence of this dramatic historical change. The site is designed for twenty-year-olds who have migrated to the big cities on the eastern coast to work in manufacturing industries. These kids are lonely but they are also pragmatic. Reflecting the mergence of their past and present cultures, the site's consultants ask each participant the sign for the year of their birth (such as the Year of the Dragon) as well as how much money they earn. There are no questions of a romantic nature -- that would be more appropriate in a culture, such as ours, where freedom of choice is an option in politics as well as mating.

If Lacy were to follow up on other countries where start-ups are emerging, I'd be only to glad to read her stuff. I think it's great that Techcrunch and the Kauffman Foundation supported her reporting. It's time we go beyond the Valley into the Brave New World.