Year End CD Shopping Spree

Now that Tower Record has officially closed their stores, I don't have the luxury of browsing newly released classical music CDs in store any more. The year end's "Gramophone Award" becomes my shopping list. Here are some highlights of this year's winners:

Label of the Year
ECM
Not a surprise. I think I owned at least half of the CDs they produced. From Andras Schiff's Bach to Keith Jarrett's Vienna Concert, and numerous Arvo Pärt.

Editor's Choice
I didn't know Pianist Stephen Kovacevich had a stroke two years ago. Now he's back with a new recording of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. Like Murray Perahia, who suffered from some finger illness, he cherished the time he could play more. I still have Mr. Kovacevich's previous recording of Diabelli Variations. Maybe it's time to listen to it again.

Young Artist of the Year
A young lady named Yuja Wang. Will she be another "Lang Lang"?

Baraque Vocal
Apparently "The Sixteen" is the new hot choral group for Baraque vocal now (where are Opus111 and the Tallis school now, ok maybe I am old). Just listened to their sample tracks on Amazon, their CD (Handel's Coronation Anthems) is in the shopping cart now.

Concerto
I noticed pianist Steven Osborne because of his wonderful Rachmaninov Prelude CD (really reminds me Richter). Well, that CD didn't win the "Instrumental" category, but his Britten Piano Concerto CD did win this one. I have to admit I was not too interested in Britten's music, but after listening to the samples I added it to the shopping cart (since Britten's piano concerto is missing from my discography anyway).

Instrumental
Another wonderful pianist from France. Bavouzet's Debussy is fresh. Though I will still cast my vote to Osborne's Rachmaninov Prelude, his complete Debussy CDs are on my shopping list already.

Orchestra
Techaikovsky's Manfred Symphony by Royal Liverpool Philharmonic won the game (it's by Naxos, so the CD is low price too). However, I bought the Mahler No 4 (Ivan Fischer) instead, which was short-listed.

Solo Vocal
Another "Dichterliebe" (Gerald Finley, Hyperion). Will he be as good as Wunderlich? (Sample track tells me no.) Wait a minute. Where is my Wunderlich CD? Horror of horror, now I need to get it back. I also noticed the late Mezzo-Soprano Lorraine Hunt's Brahms and Schumann CD was short-listed. How come beautiful singers often died young?

Recording of the Year
Another Debussy/Faure/Ravel string quartets! (I forgot how many "Gramophone awarding winning" Debussy/Ravel string quartets I had bought.) Surprisingly, previous years' favorite Takacs quartet didn't win this time. (Look out, the new generation has arrived.) The Schuman violin CD (Carolin Widmann, ECM) on the short list also looks interesting.

A few more images from the Thanksgiving trip

Pebble Beach

Not the one you play golf, but a very interesting state beach full of strange rock patterns.

Movie: The Road

Forget about "2012". If there is only one end-of-the-world-family-survival movie you are going to watch this season, it will be "The Road". (Compared to it, "2012" is like a family trip to Disneyland.) However, it's not for the light-hearted. It is dark, bleak, and you will feel you are walking through hell with the protagonists (a father and son). It shares some common theme with 2007's "The Children of Men", but the view here is much more pessimistic. While in "The Children of Men", a new born baby was treated as the hope of the dying world, in "The Road", children are cattle to be slaughtered.

The whole movie was shot with minimal colors. Dark brown, grey, yellow, and black comprise most of the color palette like a late Goya painting. Some of the scenes were shot in places I had visited (e.g. the high rise bridge where the father and son slept in a trunk was on the way to Mount St Helens), which made it even more realistic, and haunting.

(Warning, spoiler below)
Surprisingly, the ending, compared to another McCarthy adaptation, "No Country for Old Men", seems optimistic. While "No Country for Old Men" ends with Tommy Lee Jones's mumble-jumbo monologue, "The Road" ends with the boy meeting a new family. It seems, to McCarthy, though there is no country for old men, the fire is carried, even in hell.

P.S. The "glorious" tone of the trailer doesn't match the movie at all. I wonder if the editor of the trailer had ever watched the whole movie.

On Thanksgiving Day

Receding Tide

Yesterday was not a good day for the kind of photography I had in mind. First, the weather was bad, clouded, with a 30% chance of rain along the California coast. Then it was the "severe weather alert", warning me of "big waves". However, I picked up my camera and headed for the coast, believing that I could still find subjects to photograph, and, since it was Thanksgiving day, there would be no people on the beach, it would be just me v.s. Nature. How wonderful it would be!

Wrong. I forgot the beach I wanted to photograph was composed of yellow, and gray rocks. While during sunset the distorted rock formations might look surreal and magical, under a clouded sky, they were just messy. My idea of photographing wild life was also off target. Even animals (harbor seals, pelicans) knew to stay put in bad weather. After spending hours of composing bad photos (which directly went to the "delete" key after I came home), I was frustrated and very disappointed about my ability as a photographer.

Before I called it a day, I noticed the "waves" had left very interesting marks. The marks only lasted a few seconds. By next wave, they were gone. Though the weather was against me (very windy and very wet, my glasses were all foggy and I had to wipe my lenses once in a while), I decided to give it a try. The result was not perfect. But these photos reminded me the possibilities of photography.

Untitled

A Stroll On the Beach

I hadn't touched my camera for months. After so many weeks of hard work, I knew I had to go out shooting or I would lose my sanity. It was quite windy on the beach and I felt kind of rusty after being out of practice for so long. As expected, not that many good shots. However, at the end of the day, I sat in my car, watching the afterglow and listening to my Kate Royal CD. After all, life is good.

(Mysterious light after sunset.)

Most Beautiful Waitress In Town

One restaurant I often went to recently hired a beautiful young waitress. Before, the restaurant hired a few poker faced overweight ladies (whose attitude implied they were probably paid minimum wages). Though the food there was delicious, the service was definitely not something you would remember. But, boy, what a difference this new waitress made! Not only she's beautiful (too beautiful to be a waitress in Bay Area, the first time I saw her I thought I was in Hollywood), she is genuinely warm and polite, always starting a small conversation with you. After you pick up your food and are ready to leave, she will wish you "have a beautiful day". The words are spoken so sincerely. Looking at her smiling face, you feel your whole day just light up.

Now I visit that restaurant more often because of this new waitress. To be greeted by her and hear her saying "have a beautiful day" have become the high point of my weekend. Alas, I don't even know her name yet!

P.S. for those who are interested in how she really "looks". The lady had very gently denied my photographing her, so for now you will have to use your own imagination.

Got My New Chair

My "Embody" chair finally arrived at noon. This expensive Herman Miller chair costs me a fortune, but does it worth it? You bet! The back support is excellent and I can rock back and forth while I think (the resistance is adjustable). Now I just want to sit in it and continue coding; even Miti seems satisfied with her test sit.

Is Economy Picking Up?

Exactly one year ago, I went to a small start-up for a job interview. I was doing well in the interview, but nothing happened, so I moved on and eventually joined my current company. Today I received an email from the VP of engineering (he was from my Alma Mater), asking me if I would still be interested. (He explained that they had a hiring freeze last year due to bad economy, but had released the product this year and needed to do some rapid hiring.) Wow, apparently you could get an interview response one year after the interview, what a lovely surprise. Does this mean the economy is getting better? I don't know, but I certainly hope so.

Whip It!

OK, I confess: I didn't even know things like "Roller Derby" existed before I watched "Whip It". But I liked Ellen Page's performance in Juno (she looked just like my college classmate W) and was curious what kind of movie Drew Barrymore would direct, I went to it any way. It turned out to be a perfect relaxation. In fact, given the work stress I had recently, even I wanted to go on the derby ring and hit somebody. Hmmm, let me think of a derby name first...

Did Work Make Me Dumb

Today a coworker of mine asked me to add a feature, so I had to go over some code I wrote six months ago (when I just joined my current company). I was shocked to find that the code I wrote then was more daring and more inventive. There were more designs in the code. The code I write now is more cookie-cutter, decent yet lack of imagination, a bad imitation of its previous self. Work stress also makes me less experimental, just want to get things done instead of exploring different ways of doing them. No wonder I am bored!

Jell-O Chair

Had a weird dream last night. I was invited by my college classmate C (which I haven't seen since graduation) to her apartment. It was in an old complex composed of crooked rooms with water leaks and smells of mildew. Every room was dark and small and full of junks. She introduced me to her two artist friends (they were a couple). Their latest work was this "Jell-O" chair. It looked like those no-back ergonomic chairs, but the seat was made of an orange Jell-O type of material (a kind of memory-foamed Jell-O). It vibrated and moved and there was a tiny video camera installed under the seat to record your butt movement. (I remembered thinking "no doubt this is called creative with bad taste".)

Well, don't know what Freud would say, but apparently all work and no play make me dream weird things.

Video of "My Stroke of Insight"

I am always interested in how our brain functions affect our perception and find the book "My Stroke of Insight" quite an unusual case study. With this video I can see the author describe her experience first hand. It's a much more powerful experience than just reading the book.

D700x, Where Are Thou?

Now that Sony had announced Alpha 850 (in a shockingly low price) and Canon announced the 7D (with a 18MP APS-C sensor), all Nikon users got was yet another rumor. I have to say being a Nikon user really feels like waiting for Godot now. Will D700x ever arrive? Or will we get yet another fabulously unaffordable camera (D4)? I am losing my patience. Life is too short to be a Nikon user.

P.S. found this "Waiting for Gadot" video on YouTube: