Philip Glass Concert

Wednesday night I got to go to a concert by Philip Glass at the Mondavi Center in Davis. It was a nice selection of Mr. Glass's work from the span of his career. Some pieces were solo piano, some pieces were solo cello and some pieces were piano, cello and percussion.

I had great seats right in the middle about 10 rows back and it surely is fine to hear someone play a concert grand in a great hall like the Mondavi Center, not to mention the Cello which is one of my favorite instruments.

The cellist was Wendy Sutter a stunning women in her 40's who just so happens to be romantically involved with the 70+ years Mr. Glass. That aside, she was playing this beautiful Stradivarius Cello made back in the early 1600's and which has spent most of its life in the Vatican. You can read about it on her site, but what a history this intrument has had. Thankfully, Wendy Sutter's Cello, unlike Lance Armstrongs bike, did not get stolen in Sacramento.

I think it is time to revisit those Philip Glass movie scores - Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, The Thin Blue Line, Kundun. He has been quite prolific.

Tour of California - 2009

Today was the start of the Tour of California here in Sacramento. It was a pretty big deal, at least in the cycling world. This is the one of the best lineups of riders for any race on American soil that I am aware of. Of course having Lance Armstrong in his first race in the US since coming out of retirement and a hopefully clean Floyd Landis trying to re-establish himself with his new hip and new team helps an awful lot.


It was a little cool day, certainly for the spectators, but it was great to see these guys powering down the streets. Actually what was even more impressive for me was the motorcycle riders accompanying the cyclists. While the bicyclists just go as fast as they can and assume all will be clear in the road ahead, the motorcylists have to stay close, but not interfere in any way, while all the time on the watch out for errant spectators wondering into the streets - very impressive riding on their part.

There was a lot made of Lance's return to racing and there is a big media machine around his Livestrong organization. The scene around his team's warm up area was just ridiculous, with people climbing on vehicles, climbing up trees, just to get a glimpse of the man doing his warm up. The price of celebrity is a high one. Here he is in the photo below.


I actually got some half way decent photos after figuring out how to anticipate where the riders would be when my shutter clicked open. The first few I missed the rider completely and got the trailing cars.

The old guys go skiing...

This weekend we aged and somewhat decrepit guys went skiing up in Tahoe. While George and Dave skied more days, Bill and I were quite satisfied with two half days on the slopes. I did an afternoon at Homewood on Friday, and an afternoon and evening at Squaw Valley on Saturday. Quite enough for my old body. And while I used to relish the challenge of the black runs, these days I really enjoy the easier way down.

That being said we represented ourselves pretty well in the speed department. It's all about conservation of energy and if you avoid the turns and just point yourself downhill it takes a lot less effort. However, it's perhaps a little scarier as I am led to believe our bones are a lot more brittle at our age.


As you can see it was overcast and pretty cold, but nonetheless when the clouds cleared it was quite beautiful.


While there is very little snow up in the mountains this year (we are surely heading for a drought this summer), there was fairly good coverage of man made snow on all the runs. Homewood was nice but Squaw Valley was one impressive resort - I had never seen a 6 person chair lift before - they can move a lot of people up the hill very quickly. And RFID lift tokens were something new for me too - what is more, they seemed to work, most of the time.