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Over the past two years, we've discussed...
MEDITERRANEAN VILLAGES: The Architecture of Community
STEVEN and CATHI HOUSE
Slide Lecture & Discussion - Commonwealth Club
Steven and Cathi House's slide lecture celebrated village architecture in four Mediterranean regions - the hilltowns of central Italy, the Aegean islands of Greece, the Dalmatian coast, and the Andalusian region of southern Spain. The authors, noted San Francisco architects, have studied, analyzed and documented villages where light, form and movement go beyond beauty to places that can move our souls.
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Sonoma Museum of Art
The Pleasures of Influence: Bay Area Photographers Teach and Learn
Lecture and discussion with Michael Roth, President, California College of Art, followed by wine tasting of local artisan wines.
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September Salon: John Steinbeck and the Sense of Place
On the first weekend of fall, Sept. 22-24, we traveled down to the remarkable adult camp/retreat Asilomar situated along the ocean in Pacific Grove (Monterey). We discussed some of Steinbeck's illustrative writings, see clips from movies made from his books, visit Cannery Row--including the world renowned aquarium--and conclude with a tour of Salinas and the Steinbeck Center on Sunday. Susan Shillinglaw, the resident scholar at the Center and the preeminant authority on all things Steinbeckian, led our conversation at the Center. We hope to repeat this program next spring.
Other recent programs involved conversations with:
-James Donohue, President of the Berkeley Theological Union,
-Amitai Etzioni, the founder of the Commutarian Network
-Adair Lara, writer for the San Francisco Chronicle
-Donlyn Lyndon, professor of architecture, UC Berkeley, and Editor of the journal Places
-Joel Kotkin, Irvine Foundation Fellow, New America Foundation, and author of a major new book on global cities
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We have also engaged in discussions that probed such theatrical pieces as the play Art, David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago @ ACT, and Brian Copelands one man show Not a Genuine Black Man.
We visited ~Cornerstone, A Festival of Gardens~, the Napa Valley Museum and COPIA in conjunction
Toured and Talked About the new DeYoung Museum
Traveled to the Bach Dynamite and Dancing Society
Miramar Beach, Half Moon Bay, to hear Jazz piano sensation Hiromi.
Discussed Multiculturalism at a Sunday Salon using Amarya Sen's essay in The New Republic [see ~Multiculturalism~ page ]
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And used author presentations on their books to focus our dialogues:
 
Should a cosmopolitan society provide for prostitution?
We explored the ~ins and outs~ of the world's Oldest Profession as presented by in:
Indecent: How I Make It and Fake It as a Girl for Hire
Lewis was a witty and caustic observer of human behavior, and offers us some insight into the psychology of the sex industry.
Her comments offered an insider's account of hard-earned lessons gained over a decade in the trenches of one of America's most significant CulturePlaces.
 
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JARED DIAMOND COLLAPSE: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In the companion volume to his mega-hit and perpetual bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond probes what caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what we can learn from their fates.
Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives, moving from Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland.
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Camille Paglia On
How to Approach Poetry
Brake, Blow, Burn is a blistering critique of the forces, educational and cultural, that detract from our pleasure of reading poetry. She lashes out against the marginalization of art generally and poetry specifically "by the complacency of an academy besotted by trendy theory and contemporary poets who treat their poems like meandering diary entries."
She has selected 43 poems she considers exemplary and tells us why. The poets run from John Donne to Joni Mitchell. She sets out to augment the lure of images with the lure of words.
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Martha Nussbaum
on the Frontiers of Justice
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Frederick Crews
reading from
Even when he was a leading academic literary critic at UC Berkeley, Frederick Crews was also a deflator of theories that he felt abandoned common sense and logic. His parodies of literary criticism, The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh were both wickedly funny and incisive. Since then he has written essays, many for the New York Review of Books, that strike a sword of skepticism against what he sees as intellectual irrationalism in fields such as Creationism, Post Modernism, "American" Buddhism, Freudianism, Recovered Memory syndrome, and alien abduction. Frederick Crews will read from his new collection of essays Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays.
Pizza and Dialogue on Crews' views followed at Taste in Berkeley
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Other Previous gatherings....
Sorting out gender
Our initial confabs concentrated on three areas with major significance for contemporary life. We explored the evolving gender roles that make our time so exciting and challenging. We started this thread several years ago with a lively discussion on Susan Faludi's assessment of the plight of the male after the WWII.
This was followed by an exchange led by Kathy Bruin, the founder of About-Face, who focused on the effects that media images have on young women trying to develop an individuality free from damaging peer pressure.
Our roundtable then took up the recently released study of the American Association of University Women entitled. "Voices of a Generation: Teenage Girls on Sex, School, and Self."
We moved on to dissect a provocative essay by Andrew Sullivan on testosterone supplements which examined the how masculine and feminine traits can be accommodated by changing institutions.
Another session was devoted to the depiction of the family in the movie "American Beauty."
Journalist Cathy Young, led a discussion on her book The Gender Muddle: From War to Reconciliation. Cathy discussed how the real gains of feminism, with its emphasis on self determination, can mesh with the new "girlie" femininity espoused by the current generation of young women. Ms. Young offered a common sense road map to the challenging new territory that lies beyond "Sex in the City". The discussion dealt with what might be called postfeminism or as it is usually referred to "Third Wave Feminism" that seeks to build on the generational progress of the Women's Movement.
Digital Divide
Other dialogues considered the social implications of the information revolution. We convened a series entitled "Cruising into Cyberspace: Who should be at the Controls?" As we enter the new millennium there may be no phenomenon with greater implications for privacy, freedom and personal relations than the Internet.
The first roundtable in this series discussed the views of two of the wired future's most penetrating and lucid observers: Lawrence Lessig and Andrew Shapiro. Next we probed how another member of the digirati, Douglas Rushkoff, sees the influence of virtual reality on real reality. Stephen Donaldson, President of an East Bay design firm, led a discussion of branding and the Internet.
We also examined the American Association of University Women's most recent report "Tech Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age" which lays out ways that the digital culture can be made more inviting to girls. Kathleen Bennett, founder of the Girls Middle School and who served on the commission that wrote the report, led the discussion on the report's findings and how her educational start-up in Mountain View is putting its recommendations into practice.
Design and Art
Another evening included a slide show from tour guide Donald Lyon who explored ways to use photography to heighten the experience of traveling to new locales.
We also convened a session on contemporary classical music - can it be pleasing as well as provocative - led by the coordinator of the SF Symphony's American Mavericks series. A second roundtable was led by the artistic director of the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra and a composer, Paul Dresher, whom the orchestra commissioned to write a new piece.
Other Parts of the River
Our craft has followed more philosophical currents, exploring alternative ways that attempt to achieve and balance both a greater sense of place and tranquility in life. The Hellenistic philosopher Epicurus (340-271 BCE) proposed that serenity, ataraxia in Greek, represented the highest form of pleasure. But to reach such peace of mind requires immersion in the world around us. We will exchange views on various contemporary approaches for pursuing this goal.
Last year we gathered to discuss the ways that the basic principles of Buddhism can enhance our everyday experiences. Media maven Wes Nisker (known in his youthful investigative journalism days as "Scoop" Nisker) who several decades ago moved on to a higher calling, served as our guide. Mr. Nisker is the author of Buddha's Nature; a Practical Guide to Discovering Your Place in the Cosmos.
While we seek to pull more synoptic meaning out of contemporary life, we will also ground this meaning in the evolutionary tendencies that continue to influence our behavior. In the fall we heard Frans M. B. de Waal, Director, Living Links, Yerkes Primate Center, Emory University discuss The Ape and the Sushi Master: The Nature of Culture. One of the world's foremost primatologists, the author of 17 books, de Waal argued that the term "culture" should not be confined to human activity alone. Indeed, we can gain more insight into our own behavior if we understand how our hairier cousins successfully engage in social learning andresolve conflict. Prof. de Waal also explored how his path breaking findings in evolutionary biology and psychology underpin morality.
This talk was followed in the fall by a dialogue on Australopithecus to Homo:Transformations of Body and Mind led by Prof. William McHenry, Dept. of Anthropology, UC Davis who gave his views on the missing link between our animal and earliest human ancestors.
Down in the Wine Cellar of the House of Shields we explored the meaning of love and relationships, using an excerpt from Jacob Needleman's A Little Book of Love.
We devoted a second session to Prof. Needleman's reflections on the meaning of ideas, specifically on his comments on "The American Soul" presented before our dinner in February.
A selection of other sessions from previous years….
ENRON'S END RUN: PREVENTING FUTURE ABUSES
The Enron debacle is being played out in a number of other companies on a smaller scale but with equally unnecessary negative effects. How do we fix the structural problems that result in conflicts of interest and the blindsiding of shareholders? The group shared observations and proposals to increase accountability and eliminate the possibility of management deception.
OUT OF AFRICA:
THE BEGINNINGS OF HUMAN GLOBAL DISPERSAL
DAVID LORDKIPANIDZE, State Museum of the Republic of Georgia
Dr. Lordkinpanidze, who heads the Georgian Center for Prehistoric Research, oversees major digs in the Caucasus that have unearthed the oldest undisputed hominid remains ever discovered. He led us in a discussion of the most controversial issues of why and when our ancestors left their homeland.
A DISCUSSION OF JAMES Q. WILSON'S PRESENTATION ON THE CULTURAL & SOCIAL PROBLEMS IN AMERICA
Legendary social scientist Wilson argues in his latest book, The Marriage Problem, that a culture of individualism and experiences wrought by slavery have conspired to undermine the American family structure with disturbing consequences for children and society. We discussed his previous speech to the Club focusing on his commitment to social science research and the limits of what it can accomplish.
LIBERTY FOR WOMEN: Freedom and Feminism in the 21st Century led by WENDY McELROY, Research Fellow, The Independent Institute; Columnist, FoxNews.com
We discussed how the new feminism asserts the rights of consenting adults to their own sexuality, opposes censorship, and defends every woman’s right to self-defense. It champions competitive markets as the vehicle for women’s economic rights and prosperity. The new feminism celebrates the possibilities of technology and defends reproductive rights. And yet, it also defends the validity of choosing traditional values (e.g., to be a “stay-at-home mom”) for those who find satisfaction in doing so.
REGULATING BIOTECHNOLOGY TO SAVE DEMOCRACY
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
Professor of Political Economy, Johns Hopkins University
This was another follow up to a Commonwealth Club presentation. The provocative thinker who wrote The End of History about the post-Cold War triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism now argues in Our Posthuman Future that species-altering biotechnology threatens both our common humanity and the philosophical foundation of liberal democracy: the belief that all men are created equal.
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