Fridays at the Cantor: 'Metaphysics'

Every Friday, a different musician climbs the stairs to the Cantor Center balcony to play Mark Applebaum's experimental work "The Metaphysics of Notation." I had previously written about flutist Jane Rigler playing a rippling, percussive version of the piece; last Friday I went to see Sam Adams on electronic keyboard and laptop. (Scroll down for my video.)

How do you play a musical score that replaces standard notes with flowers, wavy lines, human figures and rising lines of dots? Any way your muse takes you. If you're lucky, the composer will come by.

Applebaum was there last Friday, watching while Adams focused on one piece of the score, creating music that used silence and long moments of thought, then intensified. Adams wove in recorded words: "make real sense," "notation," "symbolic structures." A drone created urgency and interest. By the end, the music echoed through the balcony like a plane taking off in a storm. I felt in the center.

Adams' father, the composer John Adams, also dropped by. In my photo above, he's listening so hard to his son playing (at left) that he's barely moving. Applebaum is standing in the pale-green T-shirt. After the performance, he praised Sam Adams for his "studied, ascetic approach" to the music that also allowed in such warmth.

Applebaum's score is on display in panels hung around the balcony; you can view it all week, but it's only on Fridays at noon that it takes on audible life. (My video shows glimpses of a few different panels, not just the one Adams played from.) The free weekly concerts are set to continue through February 2010.

Garden Inspiration, Garden Design

Gardens make me happy. I can't remember ever being in a garden I didn't love...their inspirational.... full of life. I love bees, butterflies and humming birds in the garden. At least one of these elements is essential to garden perfection. Don't you love garden inspired design for summer decor.?.. especially in the kitchen. Below are a few unique gardens and garden inspired elements to add to your summer decorating.

NY city rooftop garden...no need to leave the city up here

French doors lead to the rooftop garden...lovely

Cottage gardens are perfect in the country

Garden inspired linen napkins... Charlotte Moss

A painted garden wall blooms year round.

Japanese garden inspired wallpaper

Duralee sheer fabric will make a fantastic window treatment

'What would Matt do?'

A new San Francisco exhibit calls him "Artist and Educator," but Matt Kahn is just as often thought of as "Mentor." You can't read about him without seeing that word.

It's perhaps the best legacy one could have after teaching at Stanford for 55-plus years. Over and over, people say that Matt Kahn taught them how to appreciate the role of design throughout the world. A few years ago, IDEO design firm founder David Kelley told the Weekly that every day when he works on projects he thinks: "What would Matt do?"

Textile artist Jean Ray Laury also called her former teacher "encouraging, demanding, insightful and fun." She added, "I learned more about quilting from him than I ever learned from anyone else, though I'm sure he never held a needle in his life."

As for me, I never studied design. When I interviewed Kahn for another story, I just liked his crinkly-eyed smile.

The current show, held at the San Francisco Museum of Craft+Design, also showcases the ways in which Matt Kahn helped shape the Bay Area's art and design in the 1950s and '60s. Besides teaching at Stanford, he also worked for Eichler Homes, the developer whose houses are ubiquitous in Palo Alto.

The exhibit includes his designs for Eichler homes as well as works in furniture, textiles and metal, with weavings by his wife, Lyda Kahn. Fittingly, special events include "Matt Kahn: Teacher and Friend," in which designers talk about how the professor influenced and inspired them.


Pictured: Two works by Matt Kahn from the exhibit. Top: "Pair of Tripod Chairs," ca. 1965, oak. Above: "Lidded Box," ca. 1965, wood with enamel on copper lid.

Photographer wins global honor

Another well-deserved honor for Menlo Park photographer Mark Tuschman, whose sensitive and beautifully lit photos let us peer into worlds we otherwise might never see. He won this year's photography contest held by the Global Health Council, an alliance of health-care groups and other professionals. There were 550 entries from various lands.

A set of three photos drew the honors. Above is an image from Bangladesh, where Mark saw many young mothers who seemed totally detached from their newborns. Here, a nurse cares for a baby while the mother sits in the back alone.

Mark, whom I interviewed last year, is a quiet, thoughtful sort with a tremendous social conscience. He's found a way to balance his day job as a commercial photographer with his own creative projects: He travels a few times a year for nonprofits that help the poor, recording the effects of the programs. He took this photo for EngenderHealth, a reproductive-health organization. Check out his blog for some thoughts on microfinance in the developing world.

Cisco is a Friend of Mine

I'm a big fan of Los Angeles furniture maker Cisco Pinedo. He started as a high school student reupholstering furniture after school and is now known throughout the country as a leader in the environmentally conscious furniture movement. Cisco Brothers pieces are well designed, well made, beautiful and sustainable. His style as well as furniture materials are mostly organic. I can't wait to get my hands on the Catalina chaise in a pre-washed cotton/linen blend for my bedroom. Most of the furniture designs in the family run business headed by Pinedo reflect his organic minimalist nature. The family house reflects a tranquil harmonious appeal that seems to block out the business of southern California and has it's roots in the sunny aesthetic...it doesn't disappoint.


Catalina Chaise

Art Dining Chair

Images:LA Times

Pinedo Family

Romantic Window

I absolutely love window treatments. Especially those created by my friend Mary at The Drapery Shop. This sheer was fabricated by Mary. Adding the glass beads made all the difference in the world. Because the client needed privacy the blinds had to stay. By adding the white sheer the blinds are softened and the sheer becomes the dominate feature at the window.

To life and to live theater

I got a cute email yesterday from Bridget Summers, who is doing PR for Paly's "Fiddler on the Roof" and had a story to tell from Friday's performance. Apparently the power went out right before Tzeitel's wedding. Pause. Then, in the dark, the cast started dancing and singing again. (Mics, shmics.) The audience cheered, the show went on, and the lights came back up in time for the Bottle Dance.

Why would a publicist want to tell a reporter about something that went wrong? Clearly, my friend, you haven't spent much time in the audience. Messes, near-misses and glitches that get overcome create some of the best moments in live theater.

If you're an actor, nothing gets the adrenaline jiggling like realizing your castmate has missed his entrance -- and you have to stand there ad-libbing and holding a duck. If the audience laughs at one of the lines you made up, you're golden.

If you're in the audience, how great is it when something breaks and you see the cast keep going? Auntie Mame drops her cocktail and the glass shatters. She immediately puts her hand out to Ito and demands, "Another." Sitting in the audience, you're thrilled for her. It's like watching a car crash that didn't happen.

I do community theater. The kind where you go on stage with your tutu held together with gaff tape. So I've seen lots of power outages, mics go out and set doors stick, and even tiny kid actors just keep belting out their songs. You kind of want to hug all those Paly students.

The best part about seeing a near-miss is that it is a near-miss. It's something that no one expected to happen, and so it's perfectly human. It's an unrehearsed exchange, the man behind the curtain, a test of the stage manager's mettle. It can't be Photoshopped away or edited out. And in that moment, you see what that scrappy little theater company's really made of.

When I was in a Sunnyvale production of "Fiddler" a few years ago, one of my favorite times was during that notorious Bottle Dance, when four men cavort with wine bottles balanced on their heads. Everything looked great, and then suddenly two of the guys dropped their bottles. It could have ruined the dance, but instead the guys looked at each other, grinned through their beards, shrugged, and kept going. The rest of us rooted for them like the close community of villagers we were supposed to be.

Later, another actor told me that an audience member had been doubtful about the dance up until that point. The bottles just looked too perfect, like they were glued on. Then the whole scene became real. The dancers, the shtetl. You could even go out on a limb and say the bottles were a metaphor for the precarious position of the Jews in Anatevka. All because a couple of guys slipped. And that's live theater.

Pictured: Alex Nee and Ryan McLeod in the foreground, with Alex Browne, Marc LeClerc and Jovan Bennett in the background, in Paly's "Fiddler" production. Photo by Carla Befera.