The power of the pipe organ

Hooray for old-fashioned craftsmanship. When the folks at First Congregational Church of Palo Alto decided to have a new pipe organ built, they didn't buy some all-computer glossy thing with a digital voice. They got the real deal: thousands of gleaming pipes, a lovely console that smells like new wood, and a new acoustically friendly wall for good measure.

(Here's my Weekly cover story on the pipe organs of Palo Alto.)

"For certain things, digital organs work. But we do a lot of traditional music. People expect a real pipe organ," said Joe Guthrie, the church's organist and assistant music director.

The one exception came at the lowest end of the scale, which would have required the largest pipes, 32 feet tall. So for those few pipes, the church saved space and money by installing the capability to play those notes digitally, Guthrie said.

Guthrie says this didn't compromise the sound quality. "It's so low -- it's not really a sound; it's a feeling," he said. For the record, the lowest note on the organ is a C.

The new organ was officially unveiled on May 13, replacing an elderly instrument that had pieces as old as a century. So what happened to Old Semi-Faithful?

It ended up with an organ broker who is "parting it out," so other organizations can buy parts of it to use, Guthrie said. Thanks to the Internet, you can buy and sell parts all over the place. Craftsmanship meets technology.

Guthrie feels nostalgic about some of the old organ, particularly one trumpet stop, which is a knob on the organ console plus a corresponding rank of pipes.

"There's a trumpet stop that has played many brides down the aisle," he said. "I hope it's been recycled and being used for other brides."

Pictured: Joe Guthrie at the new pipe organ. Photo by Marjan Sadoughi of the Weekly.

In praise of pomegranates

Imagine you're choosing actors for a movie, and you can cast only pieces of fruit in the lead roles. C'mon, bear with me.

You want big names. You want box-office draw. So you have to pick someone who's visible and familiar. Maybe an apple, or an orange, or a banana (you can pull in the Curious George crowd). But is that fair to the humble pomegranate?

Fortunately, the pomegranate is getting its moment in the sun on the Peninsula. "Facets of Perception," a new exhibit at the Los Altos Hills Town Hall, features 18 artists' paintings. Each one has a different interpretation of the fruit, from realist to surrealist to abstract expressionist. The result has a lot of festive red and is surprisingly charming.

The show is the work of Artists Beyond Obvious, a group meeting in Los Altos every Thursday "for critique and coffee," member artist Karen Druker said. The flock grew out of a watercolor class they all took from Mike E. Bailey a few years ago through the UCSC Extension in Cupertino.

Bailey had them work with the same still-life set-up for 10 weeks, painting it over and over, emphasizing different art elements. "We'd really get into it! We'd dream of whatever was in our still life," Druker said. "What usually happened was a breakthrough about week 7 when we ran out of ideas; then we'd usually get really wild or go abstract."

Post-class, the artists kept meeting, and now they had experience looking at the same thing from many perspectives. For this exhibit, Los Altos Hills city curator Ethel Blank suggested the pomegranate, which Druker says has "a fascinating 5,000-year-old history of symbolism."

"The pomegranate is an appropriate symbol for a group of women artists as it symbolizes woman, womb, breasts and fertility, along with a lexicon of other symbolism," Druker said.

Pictured: Not from the exhibit, but a nifty snap of a pomegranate trio from loneangel at www.morgueFile.com.

Who were those masked men?

I never knew a publicity photo could be so entertaining. This one showed up in my inbox a few days ago.

Big kudos to the person who thinks up the best photo caption!



P.S. It's actually "Papa" David Sharpe & Friends, who will perform kids' concerts at the Community School of Music and Arts next Saturday.

Free as a bird

Many of the Weekly's arts writers are freelancers. This makes for a nice mix of voices and experiences, as the writers bring their spark from different walks of life. For example, we've got a film teacher and a drama teacher, a seasoned journalist and a chap from the nonprofit world who only recently discovered his knack for newspapering.

Janet Silver Ghent has been working with me for just a few stories, but she's also one of the said seasoned journalists. Previously, she was senior editor at j. (a.k.a. the Jewish news weekly of Northern California).

With freelancers, you get to enjoy the stories they write for other publications. Such as one of Janet's recent j. columns, which she told me was about the difficulty of finding narrow shoes.

But there was much more to this cleverly woven piece. In a polarized world where people wield words like two-by-fours ("Golly, did I smash you in the forehead with my polemics?"), Janet is that rare bird, someone who can mix political issues with gentle humor. Check it out here.

Desktop art walk

Once upon a time, a certain Luddite used to embarrass her high-tech boyfriend at high-tech parties by announcing, "The Internet is a passing fad." Oh, come on. Half the fun of life in the office is roaming around online seeing what artists in other areas are up to.

This morning's wander was inspired by Palo Alto artist Erin Tajime Castelan, who has an exhibit now at Avalon Art and Yoga Center. She's a street painter with a full palette of chalk.

Interestingly, there's a new dimension: she's figured out a way to seal her chalk paintings on canvas, using water-based varnish. Now art that usually gets washed away can live in your living room. If I could create a painting as glowing as this, I'd want it to last, too.



Which made me think of other types of art that gets washed away. Which led me to the website of East Bay artist Kirk Rademaker (above). He makes sand sculpture, or in my official term, really flippin' amazing sandcastles.

Then I wondered about other folks who use media typically associated with children -- and I ended up on this beautiful site of the late finger painting artist Mary Ann Brandt.

I was feeling good, as though I'd taken a morning art walk out to the beach without leaving my desk. Then I drove off the road and ended up here. I'd been pondering macaroni necklaces. Did I really take a wrong turn, or is this just a very peculiar art gallery?

Pictured: Top: Erin Tajime Castelan's chalk-on-canvas work "Woman with Lilies" (Joel Yau was a contributing artist). Above: A Kirk Rademaker creation from Revere Beach, Massachusetts.