Where else could you sit in a meeting room behind a New Yorker cartoonist who is sketching a world-class quartet as they strike up Dvorak’s Bagatelles? Paul Karasik settles a sketching pad, landscape-wise on his lap, and begins by lightly drawing four ovals which become the heads of Yoonhee Lee, the violinist, Dianne Braun, founder of the Music Street ensemble and pianist, cellist Alan Toda-Ambaras, and in front, Sangwon Lee, the clarinetist. We are in the library on a heavenly June afternoon. Paul continues to outline the postures of the musicians, then their instruments, then the rest, as the lively music swells and delights the 50 or so listeners in the room.
Soo Whiting had been to every country south of here except one, Bolivia. So she decided last fall to complete the whole enchilada, and joined a birding group heading that way. It turned out that it wasn’t the most appealing trip: the infrastructure was rough and the wrong person was in charge of food.
So Soo headed across the Atlantic, accepting an invitation from Allan Keith and his daughter, Lucy, to go to Senegal, where the Keiths have established a nonprofit to protect marine life in that part of Africa. Some people there still eat manatees and tortoises. There on the westernmost tip of the continent, Soo joined Allan, Lucy and her husband Tomas Daign, in the rugged countryside, and proclaimed that the French-influenced food was very good.
In early April Soo was also with the aforementioned birding group, flying to San Antonio, Tex. and from there to a small village southwest of Austin, where they stayed in cabins and were astonished by the numbers of people who had also come to see the solar eclipse. Although they did not quite observe the totality of the event, Soo was wonderstruck by the “bits and pieces” as the eclipse evolved.
The trio, Choro das Tres, returns to the Island on June 21 to play their beloved Brazilian instrumental music at the library, beginning at 3:30 p.m. The sisters have performed on three continents and this performance is their seventh here at the library.
The Vineyard Sinfonietta, a group of local musicians, will play classical favorites at Howes House on Sunday, June 23, at 2 p.m. The group first began making music in the late 1940s, with as many as 30 and as few as four players. On the menu are Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Beatles, all your old favorites. The conductor is Richard Giaimo.
Mark Chester, photographer and journalist, will talk about his latest book, Roadshow Anthropology, at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 26, at the library. Mark will show black and white slides of the oddball and endearing slices of American life he encountered along the country’s back streets and two-lane highways.
I looked closely at the calendar on the kitchen wall to see why I’d marked June 17. Turns out that was the day our quarterly taxes were due. Oh, that.
It’s Omar Rayyan’s calendar I’m looking at. We probably wouldn’t display this calendar if there were toddlers in the house. Snarling dragons and slobbering crocodiles depict the months, usually paired with a pretty young woman or an innocent child front and center.
If Hieronymous Bosch had a sense of humor, and lived 600 years later, he might have learned a little from Omar Rayyan, the West Tisbury artist and illustrator. Omar’s paid work is a collaboration with a number of children’s book authors to depict ancient castles and prancing unicorns and magic and a lovable white dog.
But in his fine art paintings Omar exhibits macabre, gnarling, slobbering nightmares to titillate mature audiences. He also creates calendars of his art, along with sly reminders at the bottom of some of the dates where you might normally see, for instance, Arbor Day.
I looked at the fine print at the bottom of the June 17 box. The message says, Bring your cat to work day.
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