One of my L.A. photographer friends passed on this piece, done by official Texas state photographer Wyman Meinzer with music by Doug Smith. I am told that Meinzer graduated from Texas Tech, then moved back to his ranch near Benjamin, Texas so he could begin his photography. He is said to have lived in a dugout for several months, to be in the middle of the roadrunners, coyotes, and snakes.
(Watch in fullscreen, with your speakers on!)
Wyman Meinzer’s West Texas from Wyman Meinzer on Vimeo.
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In one of the fastest weeks on record, Nik appeared at the train station in Portland, only to have to awaken very, very early a few days (minutes?) later to return. Ivi later paid an even shorter spring break drop-in.
… basketball flops … ever …
Listening to BBC radio news this morning, I hear that a bunch of newspapers in the U.S. are withholding today’s Doonesbury comic from their readers. In case you are unlucky enough to be reading one of those papers, here is the comic strip in question, along with a story on the L.A. Times’ decision to move the strip from the comic section to its Op-Ed pages.
Ivi, this could be you …
Gabrielle sends along this valentine … these are her two youngest.
< click thumbnail to embiggen >
This is too good not to share with everybody, so here is a condensed version of a previous post to my music blogs …
A new album has been added to the collection: Air – The Bach Album by Anne Akiko Meyers. Unique to this album is Meyers’ rendering of the D Minor Double Concerto in which she plays BOTH parts, using both (yes, she owns two of the things) of her Stradivariuses, one from 1697 and the other from 1730. Purportedly, the former was once owned by Napoleon and the latter by the King of Spain. I have several examples of the Bach violin concerti in my musical archives (my favorite up to now being the 1980s Academy of Ancient Music version, with the Double Concerto played by Jaap Schroder and Christopher Hirons), but this is my go-to recording now. I also downloaded from HDTracks a high-resolution 24-bit/96mHz edition — you can get conventional 16-bit versions from Amazon and other sources — and the sound quality is stunning.
For more of Meyers, visit her site and her blog. Now check out this pre-release performance of the Bach title piece on the album:
Also, you can read/hear NPR’s interview of Meyers here, which has a video clip of her appearance on Johnny Carson’s TV show at age eleven.
Finally, I will also share with you a violinist.com interview of a few years ago, where I first came upon this terrific artist, when I was actually trying to track another of my violin favorites, Hilary Hahn. And here is that site’s latest on Meyers and her new album. Whew!
