Category Archives: Culture

Cultural Destinations: The Huntington Library Launchess Centennial Celebration September 5

August 31, 2019 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

From The Huntington Library news release:

The Huntington’s Centennial Celebration kicks off on Sept. 5, 2019, with a special event for press and Southern California civic, higher education, and cultural leaders—a number of whose institutions are also celebrating significant anniversaries. Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence will host the celebration, sharing key news announcements and highlighting plans for the centennial year and beyond. The formal program will include a panel discussion with thought leaders on some of the big ideas shaping the future, brief presentations by Huntington leadership from each collection area, and a special musical performance interpreting sheet music from the Harold Bruce Forsythe collection. Public visitors will enjoy music in the gardens by Todd Simon and members of his Angel City All-Star Brass Band from noon to 2 p.m.

The Sept. 5 event will set the stage for a yearlong series of exhibitions, public programs, new initiatives, and more—inviting people with a range of interests to engage with the venerable institution’s collections and the connections they offer while exploring the interdisciplinary ideas that will shape the next 100 years. The Centennial Launch’s program reflects the interdisciplinary lens of The Huntington’s incomparable collections.

To read more click on the following link: https://www.huntington.org/news/centennial-celebration-sept-5

Arts & Literature, Culture, Recreation

Top Literary Podcasts: Critic James Wood On The British, “Etonian Entitlement” And Brexit

Audio August 30, 2019 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

James Wood: These Etonians

James Wood recalls his time at the college, with David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and others.

Even at a place like Eton, it didn’t seem likely that anyone in my year would actually become prime minister. At school, everyone is ‘ambitious’, everyone loudly stretching upwards, but perhaps true ambition has a pair of silent claws. None of us identified David Cameron as the boy marching inexorably towards Downing Street. When he became Tory leader in 2005, I had difficulty recalling him: wasn’t he that affable, sweet-faced, minor fellow at the edge of things? I remembered him as quite handsome, with the Etonian’s uncanny ability to soften entitlement with charm. Mostly, he was defined by negatives: he wasn’t an intellectual or scholar, a rebel, a musician, a school journalist or writer, even a sportsman.

Website: https://play.acast.com/s/londonreviewpodcasts/6baeeb08-0fd4-4149-af9d-7074e15b6244

Arts & Literature, Culture, Travel

Cultural Events: Smithsonian Magazine Celebrates “Museum Day” With Free Entry To Over 1600 Museums On Sept. 21

August 21, 2019 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

From SmithsonianMag.com:

More than 1,600 museums nationwide will be opening their doors for free on Sept. 21 in honor of Museum Day.

It’s an annual event organized by Smithsonian Magazine to celebrate cultural institutions and museum-goers across the country from Los Angeles to New York and from Hawaii to Alaska. It encourages museums, galleries and historic sites to allow free entry just as the Smithsonian Institution’s Washington, D.C.-based facilities do year-round.

Even some animal centers like the Charles Paddock Zoo (usually $10 for adults) in California and the Swaner Preserve and Ecocenter in Utah (also $10) have chosen to take part.

To find a participating museum click on the following link: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/museumday/search/?q=Frist%20Art%20Museum%20&

Culture, Reviews

WHO SHAPED THE 1960’S?: CULTURAL CHANGE SWEPT UP THE BOOMERS, IT JUST DIDN’T BEGIN WITH THEM

August 18, 2019 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

From a New Yorker article by Louis Menand:

Although the boomers may not have contributed much to the social and cultural changes of the nineteen-sixties, many certainly consumed them, embraced them, and identified with them. Still, the peak year of the boom was 1957, when 4.3 million people were born, and those folks did not go to Woodstock. They were twelve years old. Neither did the rest of the 33.5 million people born between 1957 and 1964. They didn’t start even going to high school until 1971. When the youngest boomer graduated from high school, Ronald Reagan was President and the Vietnam War had been over for seven years.

The boomers get tied to the sixties because they are assumed to have created a culture of liberal permissiveness, and because they were utopians—political idealists, social activists, counterculturalists. In fact, it is almost impossible to name a single person born after 1945 who played any kind of role in the civil-rights movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the New Left, the antiwar movement, or the Black Panthers during the nineteen-sixties. Those movements were all started by older, usually much older, people.