My mom and I went to the Hammer Museum in Westwood one drizzly morning, and were delighted to find three exhibits there, all so interesting. We saw Joan Didion: What she means. But more about the actual exhibit in a minute. First, who was Joan Didion?
Joan Didion was a writer, a journalist, a screenplay writer, and a keen observer of culture and chaos in America, especially California, where she was born and raised. She established a distinctive voice n American fiction before turning to political reporting. She died earlier this year from complications of Parkinson's.
Joan was attracted to trouble spots, disintegrating personalities and incipient chaos. In some writing, she included her own psychiatric evaluation. Her talent was for writing about the mood of the culture. She wrote about the 1960's and 1970's and was perfectly matched to the times, with her slightly paranoid, slightly hysterical, high-strung sensibility. She wrote for Vogue, Mademoiselle and National Review. One of her most famous books, "The Year of Magical Thinking", became a Broadway play. Check out the documentary on Netflix about her life. It is excellent.
The Hammer's exhibition is a portrait, a narration of her life, featuring approximately 50 artists and more than 200 works including painting, ephemera, photography, sculpture, and video footage from some of her films. It follows a meandering chronology that grapples with the simultaneously personal and distant evolution of Didion's voice as a writer and pioneer of the "New Journalism." If you're in Los Angeles between now and February 19, 2023, you might want to check it out. And for a special treat, have lunch at Lulu, Alice Waters new restaurant in the museum. It will be a very special day.
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