(Cross-country drive with Vienna Teng) Departure from North Platte, Nebraska: 9:20AM Arrival in Naperville, Illinois: 9:45PM

I had my first Cracker Barrel experience. I ate trout. Vienna is now called “Stormbringer” because every time she sits down in the driver’s seat, the clouds roll in.

Video follows… (read more »)

(Cross-country drive with Vienna Teng) It’s 2:35AM, and Vienna is sitting behind the wheel driving the final hour to North Platte, Nebraska. With Thelonious on my lap (he makes a great heat shield — this computer gets hot!), I am attempting to upload day 3’s movie (30MB) while we cruise at 70MPH.

Because most of the highways in Wyoming were closed due to a snow storm, we were forced to take a southern detour and ended up in Denver for a late dinner with Eric Miller and Alex King. We ate at a wanna-be fancy restaurant called Rioja, where they scoffed at Eric’s request for a glass of house red and gave Vienna and me attitude for trying to help the water guy by moving our glasses. Our server came by and asked, “is everything wonderful?” We didn’t answer (everything was not wonderful). Later on in the evening, she asked, “is everything still wonderful?” I had to try really hard not to burst out laughing. What a stupid question!

The company was certainly the highlight of the evening; we reluctantly parted ways a couple hours later and resumed our drive to Nebraska.

Departure from Logan, Utah: 10:00AM Arrival in Denver, Colorado: 9:45PM Arrival in North Platte, Nebraska: 4:10AM

Day 3’s video: (read more »)

(Cross-country drive with Vienna Teng) After arriving in Reno at around 3am last night, we slept in and got off to a late start to Logan, Utah. Nothing much happened today; we made it to Logan without much incident and spent the evening hanging out with Lorien and her roommate, Kirsten. We’re supposed to be up and out the door in just 5 hours. Wish us luck. :)

As promised, here’s the movie for day 2. (read more »)

Here’s a video I made documenting day 1 of a trip across the country with Vienna Teng. I’ll try to crank one of these out every day, if possible. (read more »)

The Green Caravan Tour Cross-Country Drive 2007: I’m in a moving van (a van that is moving, that is) on I-80 E with Vienna Teng. We’re starting a drive across the country from San Francisco to New York City, and I plan to make a short video each day to document our 6-day journey.

Mary Lynn Price has graciously lent me her EV-DO express card, so we’ll be wired during times when we are not on roads between places. Having internet access in a car is so novel!

Continue reading for a link to all videos… (read more »)

Darioush Winery in near-infrared

Osvaldo Golijov has been in town for the past week to finish up a project with Francis Ford Coppola up at the Niebaum-Coppola Estate, which I guess is now called the Rubicon Estate. On Monday, Livia, Baby Jack, Corinne and I drove up to the estate to hang out for a couple of days. (read more »)

Geoff comes out to say hi seconds before the lights dim

On Monday night I went to the Baryshnikov Arts Center to see the St. Lawrence String Quartet play in the Movado Hour salon series. Contrary to what the website lists, the quartet did not play Shostakovich 8 nor Schumann 1. They ended up playing a Haydn String Quartet (one I had never heard), Shostakovich 7, and Schumann Op. 41 No. 2 in F Major (the one no one ever plays). (read more »)

A few days ago, Rob Kapilow deconstructed the Bach Double at Dinkelspiel Auditorium on Stanford Campus. Geoff Nuttall and Scott St. John played the solos, and all sorts of people I knew (the rest of the SLSQ plus Livia, Debra, and a bunch of students) supported them from within a small chamber orchestra. If you’ve never been to a Rob Kapilow deconstruction, you should definitely try to get to one (preferably with the SLSQ performing). They’re awesome.

Group photo at Oasis: Jessica Chuang, Livia Sohn, Geoff Nuttall,
Rob Kapilow, Lesley Robertson, Eric Cheng, Claire Liu, and Christina Ho

Afterwards, we hung out at Oasis, a bar close to Stanford campus. I don’t think I had been there since the late 90s. (read more »)

Adam Tow came over a couple of days ago and looked through all of my bags in an attempt to help me find my travel earphones of choice, which I thought I had lost during my last trip (no, it wasn’t his only reason for visiting). When he found them, he inadvertently revitalized my daily BART rides to and from my contract job in San Francisco. For some reason, the BART is incredibly loud when it goes under the Bay; I cover my ears sometimes because I don’t want to damage them. The earphones are like squishy ear plugs with speakers in them — perfect for trains and planes!

The recordings I have been listening to over and over again lately are the recordings of the Haydn String Quartets, performed by Quatuor Mosaïques (recommended by Geoff). My enjoyment of the quartet repertoire has gone full circle, its grand endpoint coming to rest squarely upon its humble beginnings. Normal life takes on a hazy, abstracted quality when Haydn is playing, and when the earphones come off, life slides viscerally back in front of me with a jolt.

Reunited with Andy Lan, an old violinist friend from nearly ten years ago, I met up today with him and a few of his friends to read string quintets (2 violins, 1 viola, 2 celli) at a beautiful, Eichler-esque house in San Mateo.

We started by reading an anonymous arrangement of a virtuosic Kreisler sonata (originally for violin and piano), followed by a string quintet reconstruction of Brahms Piano Quintet in F minor, opus 34. I didn’t know this beforehand, but the Brahms quintet was completed in 1862 — originally as a string quintet! Anyway, it was really a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed meeting a few more talented musicians in the Bay Area who masquerade as normal folks in other professions during the day.

After reading music, I went with Livia to Han Kook in Cupertino for Korean-food shopping madness. (read more »)

iTunes 7 must have been upset with me after I went on a rant about it not long ago. An hour ago, I plugged my little iPod Nano into my Mac Pro, and iTunes 7 rendered the poor thing completely inoperable. It took quite a bit of work to resuscitate it… (read more »)

Last month, Osvaldo Golijov was in town with his son, Yoni, to work on a project with Francis Ford Coppola. The last time I saw him was in New York earlier this year; I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to photograph a series of his concerts at Lincoln Center, which was amazing, both musically and visually.

Geoff, Ozzie, Yoni and I had a nice dinner out in North Beach before heading back to Coppola’s place (one of many, I’m sure) to hang out and chat over cigars, wine and anisette. Unfortunately, none of the Coppolas were there. :)

view photos »

It is absolutely incredible. iTunes for Windows keeps on getting worse! The UI improvements in iTunes 7 are welcome, but I just tried playing a 320×240 downloaded podcast, and it totally takes down my 2Ghz Core Duo IBM Thinkpad T60p. Incredible.

In the little integrated video window, the podcast is choppy. Heaven forbid that you’d want to click on the video to bring it up in its own window. At default size, podcasts run at 2 frames per second, and audio filters in and out. I would have been really embarrassed to release a software product so crappy.

An anonymous iTunes development team member replied, “use the Mac version,” when I brought up the extreme shittiness of the Windows version. Nice. :)

Update: I’ve gotten one of my other Windows boxes to play video smoothly using iTunes 7 for Windows. All I know is that on my Thinkpad, iTunes 6 worked, while iTunes 7 barfs on video.

I’ve also been migrating of my music library from WMV Lossless to AAC Lossless. (read more »)

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross posted a link to what must be one of the most bizarre Mozart cadenzas ever performed. (read more »)

While I was in Tonga last week, Vienna Teng’s third album, Dreaming Through the Noise, was released. I’ve been listening to the album for about half a year now, and I really like it. Back in February, I flew down to Los Angeles to document Vienna’s photo shoot for the album. A lot of coordination has been going on behind the scenes since then, and she has just left for an insane tour of something like 36 cities in less than two months.

Due to the lack of overlap in our two schedules, it has been 16 months since I have seen Vienna perform. Luckily, I follow her progress via the reports of her crazy fans. If you see her on the road, snap a photo of her and send it to me. :)
[buy DTTN @ Amazon] [NPR Director's Cut Blurblet]

Chee-Yun was in town last week to play at Herbst Theater. I was out near Union Square with Lynn (on a shopping spree for cargo pants and shorts to replace my ripped ones), and stopped by the Hilton to see her over a cup of chai/coffee. Photos: (read more »)

I was over at Livia’s place the other night, and when she turned on the TV, up popped a re-airing of Vienna Teng on PBS! I pretty much never watch TV, and having a friend show up on the television upon it being powered on is a strange coincidence indeed.

Obviously, I had to get a super-dorky photo of me in front of the tube:

i am a dork, part 315,164.

Crap. I am leaving for the Kona Classic in less than 5 hours. I should get some sleep.

Some of you have been asking me about Vienna Teng’s new album, Dreaming Through the Noise. Well, you can stop asking me because you can simply place a pre-order directly from Zoë/Rounder Records! Yep, on July 25, 2006, the new album comes out. I’ve been listening to it, and it’s very good. If you liked her other two records, go pre-order the new album now. :)

While I was in Boston last weekend, I stopped by Louie and Stephanie Leguia’s place to check out their line of Luis and Clark carbon fiber violins, violas, and cellos. The reputation of their carbon fiber instruments is good — and well-deserved. After trying out six of the cellos (and having a home-cooked dinner), I walked away a new owner. It will be a fantastic alternative to my Will Whedbee cello for travel — and, it’s just neat to own something so big made of carbon fiber (the gadget-geek in me is satiated!). :)

The cello was shipped to me overnight, and was still in tune when it arrived at my door. (read more »)