The wonderful thing about being part of a great blogging community is that there is so much good material written by friends, eliciting many thoughts and reactions. The bad thing is there is so much to respond to, and I never quite have the energy to do so immediately.

I'm now getting around to thanking Chris for his reflections on his visit to the SF Asian Art Museum. Once I read Chris' observations, I immediately thought, "hey how can I totally miss out on how the building affected the viewing of the collection." We're in agreement that the collection at the SFAAM is fantastic. I've just been wrapped up with the individual objects. Chris has changed the way I now see the relationship among the objects; he articulated what I had not verbalized.

I too am very interested in what electronic media can do for presenting the materials of the SFAAM. A topic for posts to come, I hope.

On a Berkeley Saturday afternoon marked by weather that is the envy of friends who don't live in the Bay Area, I trotted over to my local branch of the Berkeley Public Library to pick up the latest book on hold for me: Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science The book first entered my consciousness when I encountered an essay in The New Yorker by Atul Gawande, the book's author. When my friend Grace then emailed me some of her thoughts about Complications, I threw the book on my Berkeley Public Library hold list (a la Netflix), looking forward to reading the popular book whenever it happened to come my way.
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Last night, eight of us went to see Nicholas Ray's King of Kings. As I have written previously, I would not have seen this film save for the fact that it was by a great film maker; I'm a Christian who is prejudiced against Bible films. I write and speak out of ignorance, however, since I have actually seen very few films drawing from Biblical stories (and specifically the life of Jesus). But that hasn't stopped me from writing them off as schlock.
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