Category Archives: Athletes/Artists

Swimming to the Corners of the Earth

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     Question: What do Logan, Utah; Santiago, Chile; and international sports competition have in common?

     Answer: Sixteen-year-old Logan swimmer, Tori Geller.

In May of this year, Geller was chosen, along with nine other U. S. swimmers, to represent the U.S.A. in the youth category at the 2015 Pan American Maccabi Games in Santiago. These games take place in-between each Maccabiah, the “Jewish Olympics” held in Israel.

This December, Geller, one of six hundred U.S. athletes, will join over three thousand international competitors for eleven days in the Chilean capital. Pitted against other top-quality athletes in twenty-two sports ranging from basketball and karate to tennis and chess, all the competitors will have time not only for sightseeing, but particularly for community service, an integral part of the Maccabi Games and of the Maccabiah in Israel as well.

Geller has spent half her life in one or another of Logan’s swimming pools.

“I started swimming when I was eight. I think a friend suggested I try it. I did, and really liked it,” she says, “especially the breaststroke; it was my best, and now I do the IM [Individual Medley] too.”

“Best” is an understatement. In her first competition at eight, she was only two seconds off the state breaststroke record for her age group. Training under Barracuda coaches Jerry Hodgkinson and Dani Harding, Grizzly coach Matthew Butler, and Israeli coach Hanan Sterling, Geller has progressed from that eight-year- old who liked swimming, to Utah State Champion in the breaststroke, to swimming at the Israeli National meet, to being selected Rookie of the Year and voted Most Valuable Player.

Willie Mays once said “It isn’t hard to be good from time to time in sports. What’s tough is being good everyday.” And Geller is. It’s not only innate talent that drives her. A typical summer day for her means getting up at five a.m. to run repeats of the Old Main steps, followed by a dryland workout for strength, and only then moving on to team practice at the Sports Academy or the Aquatic Center for another hard session of dryland, core exercises, and swimming. In the afternoon it’s back to the pool for another one and a-half hours.

Just this year, high school coach Butler convinced Geller to try water polo.

“I wanted to try it, to do something different,” Geller says. “It was a way to refresh myself, so I wouldn’t get stale.”

When asked about her favorite moments in swimming, it was surprising to find out that it was neither the victories she’d won nor the records she’d set that she most remembered. Instead, her favorite times were those of individual challenge and team interaction.

“Every once in a while in practice, I do what feels like a perfect set. It feels so good. It’s not important to anyone else, but that’s one of my favorite moments. And the social things. You get to go to meets with your friends and sometimes stay overnight, and just have fun. So I get the individual times when it’s just me against myself, and the social team times too.”

Geller finds a way to keep swimming no matter what. At age twelve, she traveled with her family to spend a year in Israel. At the Leo Baeck School in Haifa she asked about swimming. The coach tested her, and when he found she was too advanced for his team, suggested she meet Hanan Sterling, coach of the Maccabi Haifa team, which included an Olympian in his twenties and other members, all three to six years older than Geller.

“When he tested me, he made me swim real slow. He was more interested in technique than speed. I got on the team, and it was tough. I could keep up with the older girls though and it was cool to have an Olympian in the next lane.”

Tori Geller is too modest even to think it about herself, but it’s easy to imagine a future international meet in which some young swimmer says, ‘It was tough, but it was really cool to have Tori Geller in the lane next to me.”

 

The community is raising funds to help send Geller to the Games. Anyone interested in contributing can find her Website at: http://support.maccabiusa.com/site/TR/Games/MaccabiTeamRaiser?px=1009901&pg=personal&fr_id=1040

 

 

 

 

Pino Zennaro, Venetian Artist

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Venetian painter Pino Zennaro’s spirit works in conjunction with his hand. Through exquisite detail, his paintings invite us to explore aspects of our lives of which we may have have had inklings, but never investigated. The brilliantly colored abstract, “The First Day”, is an example. The painting encourages us to take part in the wonder of a beginning, a place of bright complexity, a myriad of colored forms where we lose ourselves in awe, just as one would on a true first day. As Franco Vian has said, elements of Kandinsky, Capogrossi, and Vorticism Inglese may be glimpsed in Zennaro’s work, but they are not the sum of, nor do they define his unique and generous gift. More than a statement, Zennaro’s paintings solicit our company; they encourage our presence. The stark and pure “Mandala Yamantaka” summons us to the spiritual. The “Ideogrammi” bring us messages from another world, as if we stood before an ancient wall of symbols and, suddenly, could read them. Then we turn to “Metropoli” and are whisked back to the contemporary world, swept with Zennaro by the rush of the city along the streets of New York or London. The canvas itself appears to stream by. Zennaro’s craftsmanship, his style, his distinctive use of color, and his eclectic vision carry us to places we’ve never been. One can’t help but thank him — and wait impatiently for the next painting.  See www.pinozennarocicogna.com

BROADWAY cm.103x117

BOLLE cm.150x200

A Perpetual Journey 2

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A Perpetual Journey, 2

Lately I’ve been rereading works by authors of the American West.  One particularly intriguing author is David Kranes.  I met Kranes some years ago when he invited me as a guest artist at the Sundance Institute; he’s written a good deal since then. This past week, I’ve been re-reading his collection of short stories set in Idaho, The Legend’s Daughter, published by Torrey House Press.

Kranes is a writer and playwright whose work has won the Pushcart as well as other prizes and whose plays have been performed throughout the United States and abroad.  For 14 years, he was artistic director at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute, where he served as dramaturg and mentored to such fine playwrights as Tony Kushner and Robert Schenkkan. His novel, The National Tree, was adapted for television.

The list of Kranes’s accomplishments is long and varied and intriguing. (He’s an expert at casino design, an award-winning teacher, and from personal experience I know he is an astute and gracious critic, who knows how to improve with no wounds.

The important thing is to read his work. His writing will intrigue, and at times, scare you, and if you are interested in language/fiction, it will send you scrambling to figure out how he does what he does with words and characters.  You’ll think, “This can’t be,” and then you’ll see that it can.

On the initial reading of The Legend’s Daughter, I was so taken by the tight dialogue, by the unexpected juxtaposition of characters, and by the surprises at the turns of the narrative, that I could have missed Kranes’s generous humanity.  His world seems at first to be unlike the world of most of us; a world of sudden shifts of circumstances, of the almost magical appearance of strangers; it’s a world where characters are compulsive. Not like us.  But reading, following the characters, you remember yourself and think Wait! This is like my world. These fears and failings, this grace and cruelty, these impetuous acts are all mine as well. Kranes’s situations, sometimes gentle, sometimes threatening, dangerous or not, plunge ahead, into unknown territory, physical or emotional, and ultimately into some understanding—or not.  Just like us.

For me one of the most compelling stories in the book is “Idaho”.  A man who is looking for peace after the last in a string of failed long-distance relationships decides to drive to Idaho, where it is “wet and gemlike and powerful” and “far enough away for love to happen”. By surreal circumstances he is enticed—in one of the most gripping passages in the book—into an ice cave.  What happens there will make you think hard, about love, about yourself, and about how powerful the urge to tell stories.