Livin' the vida blogga

I will be away from my computer for a few days. I will return. So will the iMac, I hope.

Palo Alto Weekly Photo Contest

Last night I went to the reception for the participants in the local newspaper's photo contest. I didn't win, but it was fun to be one of the artists. This was my entry "And no birds sing".


My neighbor and friend Autumn had a photo chosen for exhibition, "Lobelia Beds, New Union Square". Very abstract, and not manipulated at all.


I loved the pride that shone in the eyes of this young girl who had entered "Negative Zebra" in the youth category.


To see all the winners, click on
Palo Alto Weekly Photo Contest Winners

God said HA!

Julia Sweeney had moved into a nice little house and was looking forward to the bliss of solitude. Then her brother was diagnosed with cancer so he moved in with her. Then her understandably concerned parents arrived for an extended visit from Spokane. Oh, and then Julia Sweeney herself was diagnosed with cancer. The cramped living conditions and tragic situation inspired GOD SAID, HA! which is strikingly original and hysterically funny.

Funny? Well, if you have ever gotten the giggles at a funeral or been cracked up by the absurdity of attending to the very sick, you will understand.

Last night Ken and I watched this tour de force one woman monologue, the latest video to pop off our Netflix queue. Check it out!

Lunch in Pescadero

Yesterday Mike and Bill and I went to meet our friends Amy and Jonathan in Pescadero. I suggested that we eat at Duarte's, pronounced locally as "do arts". I don't know whether it was just a bad day or the kitchen has gone downhill, but the food was a real disappointment. I might not be asked for another restaurant recommendation any time soon, but the company was good and the coastal scenery sublime.

Bill Charlap, Harry Allen at SF Jazz Festival

When I was in New York last summer, the New York Times gave a rave review for Bill Charlap's show at the Jazz Standard so I went to see this superb jazz pianist that night. This San Francisco appearance was a welcome opportunity to see him again with his great sidemen Kenny Washington and Peter Washington.

The concert was part of a tribute to Stan Getz and opened with Trio Da Paz to focus on Getz's bossa nova music.

The tune THE PEACOCKS with Stan Getz on sax and Bill Evans on piano has long been one of my favorite recordings. Hearing Harry Allen play it with Charlap's trio last night was almost unbearably beautiful. I had to wipe my eyes before I could join in the roar of applause.

http://www.sfjazz.org/concerts/spring04/artists/bcharlap.html

MOAH takes me back

I was running some errands in Palo Alto yesterday, so I stopped by to see the MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HERITAGE. It is located in a big old house and has various exhibits of a store, a kitchen, cameras, and so on. The special exhibit (which ends very soon) was of radios. At my age, the era covered by this museum is more nostalgic than historic.

These radios really reminded me of the ones that were in the apartment of an aunt and uncle who lived in Oil City, PA. They had a big console radio in their living room. Now that I think about it, the smaller radio in their den probably had a Bakelite case. (They also still had a refrigerator with a basket on top.)

Uncle Bill knew morse code and recalled how he could tell what was happening in the baseball games before it was announced on the air. In those days, the announcer got the game over the wire and fleshed out the details as he spoke. I guess Bill heard the dots and dashes in the background.

Helen Humphreys

I am so impressed with this Canadian author. Her books are such page turners that I want to rush through them, but her prose is so delicious that I want to linger.

I read THE LOST GARDEN a few weeks ago. It's about a woman who moves from London to the countryside in England during World War II to grow food. A good view of this period in history and a must read for anyone who loves gardening.

I just finished AFTERIMAGE which Humphreys was inspired to write after seeing early photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron. Set in 1865, it is written from the point of view of an Irish servant whose family perished in the potato famine. She comes to work in the English country house where the wife is a photographer and the husband is a cartographer. It left me with strong impressions of an English servant's life at that time, early photography, the popular fascination with exploration, and the tragedy of the Irish.

Long live the Kings

I became a Sacramento Kings fan a few years ago. I love the way this NBA team plays the game of basketball. Last night I found out that the Timberwolves had beaten them in the playoffs and will be going on to the next round against the Lakers. I taped the game while we were out, but I still haven't had the heart to watch it. It's irrational how I love the Kings, hate the teams that beat them, and get so excited watching ridiculously well-paid, extraordinarily tall men run up and down the floor to throw a ball through a hoop.

From Ernest Thayer's "Casey at the Bat":
Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright.
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light.
And, somewhere men are laughing, and little children shout,
but there is no joy in Mudville -- mighty Casey has struck out.

Thomas is 19

My son Thomas has his 19th birthday today. He is a smart, funny, honest, interesting young man. Even people who are not his mother say that.

Sometimes I feel like my kids have grown up too fast, but then thoughts cross my mind like "gee, at this time 19 years ago I had been in labor for two days". Then I cheer up.

Here is a picture of Thomas, his friend Ana, and Ken in front of a mural on a Santa Cruz street.

Graphic novels

No, no, not that kind of "graphic" novel! The ones I like are comics that are (sort of) novel length. This has been a factor in quite a few movies lately such as GHOST WORLD and AMERICAN SPLENDOR. But I like to read the books and look at the drawings. I really have enjoyed GHOST WORLD and DAVID BORING by Daniel Clowes, also SLEEPWALK and OPTIC NERVE by Adrian Tomine. Harvey Pekar's HERO: THE STORY OF ROBERT MCNEILL is the only AMERICAN SPLENDOR novel that I have read, but I want to look for THE CANCER YEAR and several others. To save money, I borrow what I can from the library. The Dewey number seems to be 741.5.

A recent read is DREAMTOONS by Jesse Reklaw. People send descriptions of their dreams to Reklaw and he draws four panel comic strips about them. He has a web page with many examples:
http://www.slowwave.com

America's Most Popular Obscure Small-town Newspaper

I read about the Arcata Eye's police log in Jon Carroll's column in the Chronicle a few weeks ago. Now I bookmark the link and check it weekly. When I really need a laugh, I go back in the archives and read another week's. Most items in the log are very pithy and frequently are poems such as haiku or limericks.

Click Police Log on
http://www.arcataeye.com/

From the 5-10-04 edition:

She wandered lonely, also loud
And moped on Bottoms o’er subdiville
When all at once, where fields, once plowed
A dose of vulgar language, shrill
Benighted Karen and V streets
Muttering and cursing in the breeze.
Continuous as oaths that rise
And mingle with construction waste
A streak of never-ending cries
Along the margin of a bay
Too bold for even this expanse
Tossing words unworthy as she advanced.
The cops beside her drove, and they
Asked her for some state I.D.
Her red hair, blue mouth on display
In such a jocund swearing spree.
She ranted - raved - but had to stop
When news of Muni Code was brought.
For oft, when Windsong housing sites
Are vandalized or rendered crude
By trashy talk and verbal blight
From pissed-off chicks with language lewd
Who then depart, however shrill
In Sempervirens they must chill.

I was inspired to find the Wordsworth poem that is its basis:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

The iMac, iTunes, and a Coincidence

Yesterday I left the iMac in sleep mode. When I came back, the SCREEN WAS BLACK!! Sniff, sob. Ken and I dropped everything, got it in the car, and rushed it to the Apple Store. It reminded me of when the kids were little and would suddenly get sick; how we would quickly take them to the doctor. Anyway, something is wrong, it will be in the computer hospital for a few days.

So we rolled out our old PC and that's what I am using now. Frankly, it's a bit like walking around with a pebble in my shoe. It's probably faster than the Macintosh, but what a difference in user experience! Last December when we got our iMac it took about 2 hours before I turned into one of those obnoxious Apple fanatics.

One of the things I like on the iMac is iTunes. Of course, it's available for Windows now, and some of my PC friends like to use it for organizing their music.

I am a loyal customer at the iTunes Music Store and have been thinking about how this has changed my music shopping. Say that you are buying a jazz recording -- with CD's you compare discs, think things like "well, there are 2 cuts on this album I like, 3 cuts on this other one." With iTunes, it's "gee, that's a great old standard. I wonder who has done it. Hmmm, this Sarah Vaughan sounds good, but maybe I want an instrumental." Next thing you know, you have followed your stream of consciousness browsing to a song that you play on repeat for days.

Something like that happened last week. I was thinking about Miles Davis's great album KIND OF BLUE. One of the cuts is "So What" and I was wondering who else had done it. I hit on a 1960 recording of a trio with Shelley Manne on drums, Ray Brown on bass, and some guy named Barney Kessel on guitar. Very cool, very spare -- I love it! I decided to see if I could find out more about Barney Kessel and found his obituary on the web -- he died on May 6 at the age of 80. I hope that I am just the first of many more fans who find him this late.

Night game

Like many Americans, I feel very nostalgic about baseball. Summer picnics in my childhood always included my grandfather and his brothers gathered around the radio listening to the Pittsburgh Pirate games. I learned one of my first Spanish words, arriba (up), because that is what the crowd would yell when Roberto Clemente came to bat.

My husband got a couple of tickets from his company for last night's Giants game in SBC park. They were in a very comfortable corporate suite in this beautiful, well designed ball park. By coincidence, the visiting team was the Pittsburgh Pirates who won the game, 4-2.

Are YOU stoked?

My 21-year-old son Daniel is an avid surfer. Sometimes I look at my Chicago city boy husband and my farmer girl self and wonder how we produced this cool California dude. I can only assume that all that Beach Boy music that I heard as I hit puberty caused some sort of genetic mutation.

Anyway, last night Ken and I watched STEP INTO LIQUID, the latest DVD to pop off our Netflix queue. The movie begins "No special effects. No stuntmen. No stereotypes." It was written and directed by Dana Brown who is the son of Bruce, maker of the surfer documentaries ENDLESS SUMMER (1966) and ENDLESS SUMMER II (1994). In ways, it shares a lot with those classics, lots of spectacular surfing shots, trips to obscure places around the world, funny self-deprecating surfer philosophy. But this movie also gives us views of some non-champion, non-world-class surfing that is sometimes touching and lots of fun. Check it out!

Radio Days

I know everyone likes to say that music was best when they were young. In my case, I can point out that I went to high school during the British invasion (Rolling Stones, Beatles), the California sound (Beach Boys, Dick Dale), and Motown.

When I was a kid growing up in rural Western Pennsylvania, I would listen every night to 50,000 watt clear channel AM radio stations from all over the East. The DJ's spun platters and kept up a snappy dialogue. I still remember Cousin Brucie from WABC New York, Dick Biondi from WLS Chicago, and Bruce Bradley from WBZ Boston. Terry Knight on CKLW in Windsor, Ontario was the voice of Motown -- Detroit was just across the lake.

Recently I discovered that fellow radio nuts have preserved recordings and put them in digital form on the web. Listening to those voices is an instant time trip! Here are a couple of links:
http://www.reelradio.com/
http://www.monitorbeacon.com/

A real find was a site that remembers Rege Cordic of KDKA AM radio in Pittsburgh. "Cordic and Company" did voices for parodies and imaginary friends who would stop by on his 6am to 10am morning show. Some of the bits are pure Pittsburgh or in jokes, but most of the clips have held up quite well. Check it out:
http://www.drtechnical.com/cordic.htm

Starting a new blog!

This marks the beginning of my blog. I am a mother of 3 grown kids, a wife, and a software manager who is currently unemployed. I want to blog to talk about books and movies and music and the human comedy of my life.

Today I went on an interview in San Francisco. Great company, great people that I want to hang out with! I miss the social aspects of work, in addition to the $$$$$. It went quite well, it will all depend on what my competition is.

A good book that I have read in the past month is TRUE NOTEBOOKS by Mark Salzman. I have read all his books, but this might be his best. Non-fiction, it describes his work as a writing teacher in a juvenile detention center in LA. His class is drawn from a unit whose crimes are so severe that they are being tried as adults. Whoa! Very sympathetic characters, but most have committed murder. Food for thought about why these kids do what they do. Mark Salzman's earlier work includes IRON AND SILK about his time in China teaching English and studying martial arts. IRON AND SILK was also made into a movie in case reading a book is a foreign notion to you.