Roamin' recorders

Is it me, or was it impossible to make any meaningful music on those plastic recorders we got as kids? All I could ever produce was a weak tootle-oot like some demented animal mating call. I'm lucky I wasn't attacked by tree frogs.

Recorders should be left to folks like the Mid-Peninsula Recorder Orchestra (look up). A press release about their concert this Saturday afternoon inspired me to skulk around the web listening to various musicians. Although I am still bruised from my childhood experiences, I will admit that the recorder can sound groovy.

Mexican musician Horacio Franco can make his recorder sound like a flitty little bird (listen to the top clip). A bird, we hope, that takes out tree frogs in a single bound.

Listening to Eva and Enrico Rosa, I'm not sure if I should be watching the waves from a fishing ship or doing the Half Lord of the Fishes Pose.

OK, this one wins the prize. Check out the Bremen Recorder Touring Company doing jazz's "Take Five." If anyone ever plays "Take Five" in outer space, it will sound like this. I love it.

Photo courtesy of Mid-Peninsula Recorder Orchestra's website.

At least it wasn't an Oldsmobile

So I saw the new Bond movie last night. Loved it, loved it. Ridiculous amounts of fun.

The best part about Daniel Craig as the illustrious spy is that he doesn't strut around like an illustrious spy. You don't get the feeling (as with some other Jameses) that he's always preening for the camera: "Notice how my eyebrows stay natty even when I'm strangling a bad guy? And, oh, my chiseled ear lobes."

Naw. This guy's a raw, real, character who still wears a tux with aplomb. And, icing on the gateau, the man can act. The script handed him a few sappy lines, but Mr. Craig delivered them flawlessly, without making anyone in the movie theater titter.

There were, however, noticeable snorts at the first dramatic shot of Bond driving his new wheels. The camera swooped in for the gratuitous product placement, and then -- wait for it -- we saw the stodgy blue Ford logo.

Oh, people. That was the sexiest car you could find?

She blinded me with science

I like an exhibit where you can sit on a beanbag. Someone should tell the Louvre.

Gail Wight's show at the Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery has two beanbags in front of a projection screen. Also, a huge microscope you can adjust, oversized butterflies under pins, and video of a live mouse nosing around a robotic one.

Wight is a professor of electronic media art at Stanford, and here she jabs an elbow in the ribs of scientific exploration. She says we should look beyond the narrow focus of the laboratory to connect science to our human world. Humor is a good tool for that: how can you not feel connected with a microscope the size of a Buick?

It's a curious exhibit. I'm not sure I got it all, and the butterflies sort of gave me the creeps, but I was inspired to sit, stare and play for a while.

Share it all, my friends, in a video I shot. In the beginning, a museum visitor explores an interactive screen with pictures of animals that look like antique prints. I think he's playing our song.


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Fall photos 2

And a few more fall images from Palo Alto.

Right: Those darn pumpkin boys are making fun of that nice girl again. Their mama should squash that sort of behavior...oh, Rebecca, that was awful.

Who wants to turn playwright and imagine the dialogue from this scene?


Below: Autumn tries valiantly to come to Palo Alto. I think it might be too sad to imagine this forlorn little tree's monologue.

Both pictures were taken on Ramona Street by Rebecca Wallace.

Fall photos

Autumn is my favorite season.
Really, isn't it yours?

The changing leaves, golden slants of sunlight, roast chestnuts sold on the corner, mulled wine, nip in the air... Um. Sorry. Was enmeshed in wishful non-California dreaming.

But I still found some fall-like images while strolling around downtown Palo Alto recently. (I post them here especially for the reader who has moved back East and likes to read this blog for news of dear old PA. An entirely different kind of California dreaming.)

Pictured: Above right: Fall leaves and late-afternoon light near the venerable St. Thomas Aquinas Church. Above left: Public art in a playground. Photos by Rebecca Wallace.

Good thing going

If I'd known they were going to change shows, I would have worn earrings.

I'm thrilled to hear that TheatreWorks is replacing its last show of the season, trading in Sondheim's "Follies" (for budget reasons, I hear) for his "Merrily We Roll Along," which will open next April.

"Merrily" is just about my favorite show, an intricate work with rich, emotional music and themes. It doesn't get done nearly enough.

The story of three friends rolls backwards in time, granting unique insight into the ways youthful aspirations -- and love -- harden over the years. So much can get lost along the way, and this is reflected in the music. "Good Thing Going," for instance, starts out as a poignant ballad. But in the search for a Broadway hit it gets vamped into a blaring blast of a song. Very sneaky how it happens.

Two years ago, I played Beth, the innocent young singer-turned wronged wife, in a production of "Merrily" in Sunnyvale, and she's still my favorite role. (I even enjoyed having the evil Gussie throw a drink on me every night -- it was worth it to get to sing "Not A Day Goes By.")

This "Merrily" is a revival for TheatreWorks, and frankly (oh, terrible pun), I'm eager to see what they do with it.

Pictured: The CD cover from the 1994 Off-Broadway revival cast of "Merrily"