"It's all happening in the lines, isn't it?" said the woman standing next to me in front of Wayne Thiebaud's portrait of his late wife Betty Jean. We were both bent at the waist, peering closely at the figure of Betty Jean's foot. Only up close did we realize how many different colored lines went into its shaping. After the first of several thorough sweeps through the new exhibit of Thiebaud's work between 1958 and 1968 at UC Davis's Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Museum, I came to the conclusion that the lines were only part of what makes this under-appreciated painter's work interesting.

Perhaps 'under-appreciated' isn't the right word. Diversely appreciated? People enjoy Thiebaud's paintings for different reasons. I, for one, first entered the exhibit thinking that his work was not especially complicated or technical. Most everyone I know who is acquainted with his work thinks there's little more to his cakes, ice cream cones, jawbreaker machines, human figures, and landscapes than what we see at a first and even second glance. I've seen reproductions of his work on calendars, notecards, and a jigsaw puzzle. His subject matter only mildly interest me. The landscapes of San Francisco and the upper Central Valley -- none of which is represented here in this exhibit -- intrigued me more than his older, better known work.

Then I had a conversion experience at the Manetti-Shrem. It took only one visit to realize that not only do Thiebaud's concerns as a painter operate on more levels than I gave him credit for. I realized, too, that his technical ability and what I suspect is the main import of his work are poorly served by reproduction or one viewing in a museum. Perhaps that's a truism applicable to all art. In the case of WT's work, it is especially true. Even museum visitors who pass one of his paintings are not likely to look closely. And I mean closely. You have to get up close to notice Thiebaud's lines in this assembly of paintings from his early career. The outlines of his figures -- whether cakes, drinks dispensers, his wife, or a football player -- consist of layers of different-colored lines that emit numinous glows.

Recently, I attended a talk given by the Stanford art historian Alexander Nemerov at the Manetti-Shrem. Rather than focus on the formal properties of Thiebaud's paintings, Nemerov led us through a series of projected slides by means of which he made a case for WT's innocence and sadness. The innocence is reflected in his choice of  subject matter, mainly food. He touched upon some American art history to elicit the sadness in WT's canvases.  First, he showed Thomas Eakins's portrait of Maude Cook (1895) as a example of the meditative mood or interiority of subjects typically seen in American works from the late nineteenth and early nineteenth century. Drawing a line from Eakins to the early twentieth-century American artist, Walt Kuhn, Nemerov showed us "The White Clown" (1929), a monumental Gertrude Stein-like circus performer sitting in a pensive pose. From there, he leapt to WT's "Football Player" (1963), which evinced the same solidity and pensive mood as Kuhn's clown. Indeed, nearly all of WT's human figures stare off into space, avoiding the gaze of other figures in the same painting, if there are any, and the gaze of the viewer. Moving to WT's painting of bananas, Nemerov drew attention to its lack of irony -- it's a painting of bananas, enough said -- by comparing it to one of De Chirico's paintings containing bananas, "The Uncertainty of the Poet" (1913), replete with phallic symbolism. Others of WT's paintings depict food connected to childhood memories -- cakes, ice cream cones -- or the display of food, such as in delicatessens and at meat counters. Under Nemerov's tutelage, we now sensed their forlornness. "Drink syrups" is a good example of superficially cheerful subject matter whose superficiality is undermined by its stark composition and shadowing reminiscent of Edward Hopper. Nemerov backed up his reading by linking WT's concerns to a mood he detected in 1960s and 1970s. Among other cultural landmarks, he projected the lyrics to Neil Young's "Sugar Mountain," a song I've known since I was a teenager but never noticed that it's about the sadness of growing up, leaving the fair and your parents behind. By the end of his talk, we, the audience, had digested the three characteristics Nemerov attributes to WT's work: interiority, a lack of irony bordering on innocence, and a nostalgia for that innnocence tinged with sadness. He convinced me.

However, despite Nemerov's refusal to comment on WT's formal qualities, it occurred to me while listening to him that the qualities he identified in WT's work were, in fact, connected to his technique. In addition to being surprised by the vibrancy and depth of the lines around his figures, I was struck by how sensuous and sculptural the paintings are. The ice cream cones invite you to lick them. His impasto tends towards long and linear. And, again, then there are the lines. Yellows, reds, and oranges peek out from under superimposed darker colors. The further back from the canvas you stand, the less you notice them. The closer you are to the canvas, the more the figures glimmer like jewel-like abstractions. Both the richness of color and the sculptural brushstrokes are rarely picked up in reproduction. Now I understood how easy it is to underestimate the artist. And it's my impression that that's just fine with him. Thiebaud is happy to inhabit his lines unnoticed.

This reading of his work does not depend on being acquainted with the man, I hope. But it might. Regular visitors at event at the Manetti-Shrem have the great fortune occasionally to run into and chat with Thiebaud at public talks. He is a kind but quiet man, self-effacing and unpretentious. It is well known that he calls himself 'a painter' not an artist. A genuinely nice man who listens to those who comes up to talk, he doesn't like the glare of public attention. He likes hiding in plain sight, like his lines. And that's about the best way I can describe his art, which I now hold in high esteem: it's hiding in plain sight. Do yourself a favor and go find it.

I have friends, both men and women, who find many of the accusations of sexual harassment and rape incredible to believe, exaggerated, or, at least, redolent of a missing context. A few have likened the #metoo and #timesup movements to a witch hunt that threatens to sweep away the innocent as well as the guilty. Others express a kind of complacency that only weak, naïve, and unassertive women would find themselves in circumstances that practically invite assault or harassment -- as if proximity to men posed the same dangers as entering a tiger's cage without protective, claw-proof clothing. 

None of this is new. I remember similar debates in the early 70s about women "asking for it." When as a young woman, barely out of my teens, I, too, chose to go around for a brief period without a bra, like so many other "women's libbers." The only thing I was seeking was comfort. I have always hated wearing bras, but my braless experiment did not last long. I was made to feel so self-conscious in public that I gave up. I covered myself in order to avert the sexualized gazes and paws of men. Not, however, before being dragged into a backroom by a much older man, who tried to kiss me in the department store where I had a summer job. I pushed him off and ran out. The incident scared me. Other, similar encounters in my late teenage years reinforced my wariness. The unarticulated lesson I took from these experiences was that I brought it on myself by dressing for comfort as I did. Being in men's sexual gaze made me feel vulnerable from then on.

Of course, as a young woman I had never heard the phrase, "the sexual gaze."  I was simply aware of eyes too often falling below my chin. Eventually, I had to accept that I felt more comfortable with my breasts strapped in place. I wondered, what did women do before the bra, which became a commonplace article of clothing only in the early twentieth century? Did bras discourage or encourage groping? Or were bras part of a pervasive shift in American erotic culture, in which breasts became sexualized in a way they hadn't been before? Many decades later, I sympathized with the motivation of some observant Muslim women to cover their hair and faces. I understood the desire to remove themselves from the public, anonymous sexual gaze by dressing modestly and covering their hair. Some women's surrender, including mine, to subtle pressures to cover and encase our female bodies has become normative. Some of the women in my own family believe that young women invite trouble through their choice of fashion -- skin-tight, crotch-high dresses, exposed skin, and the like. We have collectively bought into the idea that male libidos are, in their natural state, barely governable. An idea that goes all the way back to early Jewish, Christian and Muslim notions of Eve's responsibility for Adam's disobedience, women share the burden for men's potential for unruliness in their presence. I was recently reminded of the extent to which we take this idea for granted.

Around the time the storm over Harvey Weinstein broke, I happened to have reached the part in Langston Hughes's 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, where he joins the crew of a merchant freighter headed to the west coast of Africa. After crossing the Atlantic, the vessel makes its way down the African coast, stopping at ports along the way. If the captain released a portion of their pay, the racially-mixed crew would go ashore in search of alcohol and women. If the captain didn't issue wages, the cash-poor, pent-up men stayed on the ship. One night, "two little African girls" rowed out to the ship from the port and came aboard. Members of the crew quickly hustled them below deck and into the sailors' cabin.

Firemen, messboys, cooks, the bo'sun, Chips, the oilers poured forth from their respective sleeping places. The bo'sun, boss-like, grabbed one of the girls and took her off privately to his cabin. Someone threw the other girl down on the floor on a blanket in the middle of the sailors' quarters and stripped her of her flowered cloth.

She lay there naked and held up her hands. The girl said: "Mon-nee! Mon-nee!" But nobody had any money.

Thirty men crowded around, mostly in their underwear, sat up on bunks to watch, smoked, yelled, and joked, and waited for their turn. Each time a man would rise, the little African girl on the floor would say: "Mon-nee! Mon-nee!" But nobody had a cent, yet they wouldn't let her get up. Finally, I couldn't bear to hear her crying: "Mon-nee!" any more, so I went to bed. But the festival went on all night. (The Big Sea, p. 108).

Hughes's decision to go to bed, instead of intervening, makes this scene of casual torture of a woman much more pernicious than, say, Ayn Rand's description in her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, of a woman submitting to a violent rape. Rand intended the rape scene in her book to shock her reader. Hughes, in contrast, included the vignette of a gang rape not to shock and perhaps not to entertain his reader, but rather to fascinate his reader. Such events, he seems to imply, were the curious incidents that occurred at night on the ship. 

How would I have read this before the #metoo movement's launch? Would I have shuddered and quickly read on? My reaction today to this section of Hughes's autobiography embodies the definition of "woke." To be "wakened" doesn't entail a big "Aha!" moment. It means instead that I am now no longer fascinated or entertained by violence. I no longer accept the premise that the African woman on the floor of the sailors' cabin on Hughes's ship asked for the treatment she received. And I no longer believe that men are just that way. If the violence of Nazi Germany has taught us anything, it's that all human beings have the capacity for violence, but no one asks for it.

I have no idea where I was or what I was doing when Elvis died. He did not mean much to me. Nor did his music. In contrast, my location when the news about John Lennon's death is sharply etched in my memory. But Elvis, no. I understand in an abstract, theoretical way why he was important to the history of American music in the post-World War II period. But his heyday was just before my time. The Beatles, Dylan, Motown, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young shaped my Jersey teenage sensibilities prior to the mid-70s far more than Elvis did. Then came Springsteen. In the same year that I discovered Bruce, I left home and moved to the West Coast, where I was immersed in political music, jazz, and ultimately classical music.

This morning, I listened to the extended podcast version of Kirsty Young's interview with Bruce Springsteen on "Desert Island Discs." Springsteen has been on tour promoting his memoir. The DID interview was the third or fourth one that I've heard (my favorite: David Remnick's on the "New Yorker Radio Hour"). As I anticipated, Young asked questions or reframed familiar ones that elicited from the Boss newly thoughtful answers. Only once -- when he quoted T-Bone Burnett about rock and rollers and their fathers -- did his answers sound canned. On the whole, I heard the same sensitive, articulate, and intelligent man I'd heard in his other interviews.

At the end of the interview Springsteen referred to an obituary of Elvis Presley that the rock critic Lester Bangs wrote in 1977. Springsteen paraphrased, but not by much. He seemed to know it by heart, such was the impression it made on him. The last paragraph of Bangs' piece is worth quoting in full:

• "If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others' objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation's many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis's. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won't bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you."

When Springsteen uttered that last line, I felt a clutch in my heart. That's a "gotcha" line for the ages. No one likes the idea of disunity. But, the more I thought about it, the more Bangs's meaning felt slightly bogus. He writes, "We will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis." First of all, "we" did not all agree on Elvis and not merely because I was too young and missed the moment. Most African Americans probably would not have agreed with white Americans on Elvis. Many of them thought Elvis was cashing in on their music, which segregation and exploitation prevented them from doing. Evidently, Bangs was writing under the assumption, probably correctly, that his readers were white youth. 

Without question, Elvis had a huge impact on mainstream (white) American culture. But surely his impact was as great as Louis Armstrong's was on white audiences in the late 1920s. When Armstrong died in 1971, few people, black or white, remembered or cared that decades earlier he had popularized -- meaning, opened up to white Americans -- the new indigenous American music. Without Armstrong, W.C. Handy, Buddy Bolden, Sidney Bechet, Scott Joplin, Robert Johnson, and Jelly Roll Morton, Elvis is unthinkable.

Fragmentation, then, is the norm. Black and white Americans have many times converged and diverged in their appreciation of music. We've said 'good-bye' to one another many times before the death of Elvis.  Each time a "crossover" musical giant passes, the farewells begin as listening audiences release their neighbors' hands and go their separate ways until another generation draws them together again. It's nice when generations or different peoples converge on a musician, but it's wishful thinking to hope the music I love will speak in as strong emotional tones to someone from a completely different generation, background, or culture. Black and white Americans said 'so long, folks' when white baby boomers like me clung to Motown while black and brown kids moved on. The same has been happening in jazz for decades. When I attended the New Orleans Jazz Fest last year, I noticed a parting of the ways had already taken place. Most of those in attendance were white. On the big stages white musicians -- Van Morrison, Michael McDonald, Steely Dan -- performed. The majority of the smaller stages were held by lesser known black musicians playing for largely white audiences.

A similar process seems to be taking place in hip hop. The new Netflix multi-episode documentary, "Hip Hop Evolution," is a good education in the transformation of a genre from outsider to insider. I don't know who stands at the fulcrum of that transformation, but once again, like with Elvis, I've shown up late to the party. Thanks to the wonderful "Hamilton," it looks to me like people are already starting to collect their coats and head to the door. For the moment, though, since I've just stepped into the foyer as many of the guests are leaving, I'm happy to wave good-bye and catch the last songs on the record player. And so good-bye for now. I'll try to find you at the next party. That's just how it goes.
Updated: 1/22/18

 Despite the intermittent blasting heat, I am visiting old friends this summer. Donald Drumpf, Brexit, xenophobia, anti-Muslim, anti-semitism, and the myriad distressing signs of rising -- what? fascism? Is this what it felt like in early 1930s Germany? -- make me seek not a hiding place but comfort. My friends live on my bookshelves, especially in the district I've segregated for my cookbooks. I've already pulled out Judy Roger's Zuni Cafe Cookbook. Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tammi's Jerusalem has comforted me more than once. Suzanne Goin, Ruth Reichl, and Cindy Pawlsen have all been revisited. 

But over the past year or so, I have neglected the Observer/Guardian food director Nigel Slater far more than he deserves. He's published such rich, weighty volumes that, after the publication of Tender, Vol. 2, I felt, "Ok, enough already, I can't consume any more." However, the first of his books that I repeatedly dived into was the first volume of The Kitchen Diaries. The first year I had it, I followed along with him, cooking through the seasons. His instructions for individual cheese soufflés is brilliant in its simplicity and deliciousness. The roast pork belly with Chinese 5-Spice Powder will remain on my menu. Nigel doesn't so much give you specific instructions as stand there at the counter and cook with you. For a cookbook writer as approximate and vague as Nigel seems to be on first reading, he has an exceptional low rate of clunkers. He creates an illusion of imprecision and improvisation at the same time that he encourages bold gestures in an otherwise recipe-reliant cook. You sense that Nigel would be that ideal coach you desperately wished for in school PE classes. "It's ok, I'm here, just go for it and you'll be fine."

The book of his that I am now re-discovering like a long lost love is Appetite (2000). He won this home cook's heart right at the start when he devoted more than half a page to the cook preparing food for herself alone. Long before the movement to get people back in the kitchen, Nigel was on the front lines, providing strong, compelling reasons why single people should cook for themselves. We should take care of ourselves, comfort ourselves, and bring richness into our lives through flavor. He acknowledges the challenges single people face in shopping for the solitary meals. What endears Nigel to me is his understanding of how soothing it can be to answer only to one's own preferences.

Instead of precise recipes, Nigel proposes a kind of dish, say, "A deep, savory noodle soup," outlines the basic way to make a simple one, and then follows up with a bullet-point list of ways of building on the recipe. Is there a young person in your life in whom you wish to instill independence, sensuality, and creativity? Have them focus those combustible qualities on food through this book.