5/23/11

Laurence in Israel

I admire my brother so, more than any other.  He's a gifted pianist, composer, and writer.  He tours the world, playing jazz. Watching and listening to him make music is inspiring.  I hope to be as good an artist as he is a musician some day. I always wonder what people are thinking as they experience live music.  In a different way, I'm so curious about what happens in the viewer's mind when they look at my photographs.  I spend a great deal of time thinking about both these things.  I'm reading "Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein," and this morning read an account of an American woman in Paris around 1915 and an interaction with the painter Henri Matisse, whose wife was apparently a very good wife and also his model.  The American woman ...made Matisse blush by cross-questioning him about the different ways he saw Madame Matisse,  how she looked to him as a wife and how she looked to him as a picture, and how he could change from one to the other...  That's very much like my questions about listeners, and viewers, turned inside.

Also this morning, my brother sent me a picture of himself in Israel where he's on tour.  His schedule is full of places where I wonder in a more abstract way what his audiences are thinking, as his destinations are so far away and unknown to me.  Tel Aviv, Milan, Paris, Hamburg, Budapest, and Bielsko-Biala in Poland. 

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