This past Wednesday, the Neuroscience department sponsored a trip to the Getty Center to attend a lecture by Eric Kandel, an Austrian, Nobel Prize-winning neuropsychiatrist. He was there to give a lecture concerning his newly published book The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present, which was incredibly relevant to the Getty Center around this time, because of the Gustav Klimt exhibition, “The Magic of Line.” Klimt is one of the main artists Kandel uses in his book for examples of how artists are actually very psychoanalytical in their art at times, probing into the unconscious with their art at times.
Since I am most definitely not trying to write a report on this lecture (it was awesome, probably the best neuroscience lecture I have attended, but this also might be because it was one of the only neuroscience lectures I have attended and not had to write a report for a class up afterwards), I’m gonna go ahead and stop talking about the actual lecture. Instead, I should probably mention the appearance of a certain president on sabbatical at the lecture, who also happened to sit in the same row as me.
The only notable things pertaining to me that I can say, though, are that Dave had the ticket for the seat right next to me, and chose to sit four seats down, telling the sheepish student who tried to tell him he was in the wrong seat that we had the whole row to ourselves and we could sit wherever. A likely story, Ox, but I was quite offended! It was either the fact that I played an IM beach volleyball game directly before getting on the bus to LA, and the Claremont heat tends to make me perspire quite profusely, or potentially the fact that my bloody knees were not the prettiest sight — FYI, the right side by the line of the far half of the Walker Beach Volleyball court is essentially a slab of concrete with some sand sprinkled on it — as I went to my knees on the first point of my game and found this out the hard way. Anyway, I also happened to look down the row at one point and one of the authorities of the school (may or may not have been Mr. President…) was asleep!
