can't buy me love. or elections either, apparently

Does anyone remember Al Checchi? I did, vaguely, but I had to paw through a series of Wikipedia articles on California gubernatorial elections to recall his name. He was the businessman who tried to buy the Democratic primary for governor in 1998. He shoveled out from his personal fortune nearly twice as much money as both of the other major candidates combined. But in the primary vote, he just barely squeaked into second place, far behind the winner. (Who was Gray Davis, five years later to be ousted in a recall, so hardly invulnerable.)

Then there was Michael Huffington, who similarly tried to buy a California Senate seat in 1994. Also didn't work.

These came to mind when I read of the results of Elon Musk's attempts to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court election. Money can buy elections, but only if you spend it wisely. Apparently people resent it if the attempted purchase is too naked and too lavish. But I wouldn't expect Elon Musk, who thinks a chainsaw is a useful metaphor for trimming wasteful spending, and who 'trims' as if it is; and who sells a vehicle that looks like a cross between a DeLorean and the box that an Amazon package comes in, to grasp anything resembling a subtle point.

concert review: Bay Area Rainbow Symphony

I go to occasional concerts by the local LGBT&c orchestra because I like their programming. This concert, guest conducted by local luminary John Kendall Bailey, was held in the large hall at the SF Conservatory, which is still rather small and was packed.

There were two items new to me that I was eager to hear. Sussex Landscape is a tone poem by Avril Coleridge-Taylor, who was the daughter of the more-remembered Samuel Coleridge-Taylor but whom I'd not previously known of. The piece was written in 1940, when Sussex, where she lived, and neighboring Kent were right in the path of invasion by air and (potentially) sea. So not surprisingly it's somber-toned, with shafts of light peering through on occasion, ranging in mood from anguished to pensive. The idiom is more like Carwithen than, say, Finzi.

Kurt Atterberg is my favorite of the phalanx of great Swedish composers of the first half of the 20C. I had not heard his Suite No. 3, which is for strings with solo parts for violin and viola, another dark and quiet work of impressive beauty.

The rest of the program consisted of familiar but not overplayed classics. I was impressed enough by the robust presentation of Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, with a rigor better reflecting its subtitle, Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, that I was willing to stay and hear the suite from Ravel's Daphnis and Chloé, one of the most overripe works in the entire repertoire. Also pretty well done without indulgence.

concert review: South Bay Philharmonic

This is the nonprofessional orchestra with which B. plays viola. I've been hearing a lot of comments about this program in recent weeks, but the piece I heard the least about was Schubert's Fifth Symphony, which is the part of the concert that went well. Not only were all the notes roughly in place, which is not a given in the nonpro market, but with the help of music director George Yefchak, the orchestra conveyed the grace and charm of Schubert's delightful composition. Really enjoyable, that.

The concerto half, not so much. We had Beethoven's Triple Concerto, which - though mostly ignored - is really a fun piece when played well - and Addinsell's Warsaw Concerto, which is a 15-minute chunk of ersatz Rachmaninoff commissioned for a movie score by producers too cheap to pay for the original. Neither of these came off well. Communication between the soloists and the orchestra seemed to be completely absent. The playing by the soloists was ... inconsistent, let's leave it at that.

The interesting part is that the soloist trio in the Beethoven were three juvenile siblings, and the pianist in the Warsaw was their mother. Some seven years ago, I'd heard a concert with Mom in which she invited her two then pre-teen string-playing sons to play an encore piano trio piece with her. Now the cellist is about 17 and the violinist about 20, and they were joined by their even younger sister at piano who's about 15. She was the best of the four of them.

Also played, an encore of "Ashokan Farewell" with a really fine solo from concertmaster Gene Huang, and an brief session with a string quartet summoned by cellist Brent Cyca. He likes tangos, so they played two, including this rather familiar one, though they didn't play it that well, sounding more like the string quartet that used to practice in our living room.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Juraj Valčuha surprised me. Previous encounters had shown him a conductor prone to the gentle and lyrical, though not flaccid. This time a more dynamic man showed up. Brahms's Violin Concerto, with the estimable Gil Shaham as soloist, was crisp and surprisingly concise for such a long rambling work.

Then, Shostakovich's Tenth. Very slow and cautious first movement, even a little dull, but then it ramped up fast, with the finale blasting the DSCH motif off in all directions. Pretty exciting.

But ... why a program consisting of nothing but two warhorses, excellent works though they are? It's an evening like an early visitor from next season, recently announced, where the absence of a music director has left the programming with no coherent direction whatever. (I'm still going to be attending. The quality of the musicianship in SFS is what keeps me making the trip up here, and while I expect that will decay soon, I'll wait for it to happen.) I wonder what Kosman will say about this concert, or if he'll even go. Last time they played the Tenth, which was only three years ago, he made clear he was tired of hearing the piece. But I'm not.

Shaham's encore was Isolation Rag by Scott Wheeler, who's got a ways to go before he becomes William Bolcom.

war plans

The silliest argument going on over Signalgate is whether Hegseth's operational details of the then-impending attack on Yemen constituted "war plans."

Insofar as there's a difference between "war plans" and "attack plans," the latter is probably the more accurate term. These were tactical details. "War plan" implies a more strategic overview.

But even given that, the obfuscation over this subtle distinction in terminology is intended merely to disguise the fact that, whether war plans or attack plans, they were or should have been classified information that was treated with total lack of attention to operational security. Hegseth's sanctimonious claim that no "war plans" were discussed is not only misleading but evades the entire point. Senator Duckworth, who's been an Army pilot, was especially scorching: "Pete Hegseth is a f*cking liar. This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately."

Hegseth has been going around denouncing Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist who was handed this info on a golden platter, as a liar and scum. He specifically cited the "very fine people" line, which Republican orthodoxy claims is a hoax. (Actually, DT said it and that's what he meant.) So apparently the kind of thing that makes Goldberg a liar now is calling them "war plans" instead of "attack plans." Karoline Leavitt even claimed that by using the term "attack plans" on the second article, the Atlantic admitted it was lying by calling them "war plans" on the first article. That's a truly pathetic rationalization, and we should keep in mind that this is the kind of thing that DT's minions mean when they call their critics liars.

three more concerts

I had another busy weekend.

Friday: Gut, Wind, and Wire; Piedmont
Three folks from Baltimore who play on early instruments featuring the eponymous sound-makers. The wind was mostly wooden flutes but included a small and recalcitrant bagpipe. They played mostly Renaissance music: Scottish dances, Terpsichore dances, pieces (in their original form) later edited by Respighi for his Ancient Airs and Dances, pieces referred to in Shakespeare plays, and lots and lots of Playford dances.
Performed at the Piedmont Center for the Arts, an old converted house with its main hall turned into a tiny concert hall holding some 30 people.

Saturday: California Symphony; Walnut Creek
SFCV had me reviewing this one, so reviewed it got. I mentioned conductor Cabrera's opinion, expressed in remarks prior to the piece, that it's a mistake to try to power through the triumphant ending of the third movement of Tchaikovsky's "Pathétique" and preempt the inevitable audience applause by diving straight into the finale. But I didn't mention that that's exactly what Elim Chan did with SFS a week earlier. By Joshua Kosman's account, she succeeded in stopping the applause, a feat Cabrera dismissed as unachievable. But I wasn't there so I don't know.
In regard to the piece being premiered, my editors deleted a sentence which would have made clear that a comparison to Luciano Berio is not a compliment in my book. But I guess you're not supposed to be too critical.

Sunday: Santa Cruz Chamber Players, Aptos
Music for piano trio, quartet, and quintet (that's one piano with varying numbers of strings). Included two new pieces, both soft and padding, one titled "A Wish for Ukraine." Also Frank Bridge's Phantasy, very cooly and effectively played, and Dvorak's evergreen Op. 81 quintet.
Fifty minutes turned out to be not quite enough time to drive here from Hollister where I'd gone first.

report

Local temperatures are supposed to be in the 80s F the next couple of days. And it's still March. Then they'll drop back down to the 60s. How? Clouds. Let's hear it for clouds.

I read that 23andme is potentially going bankrupt, so all of us who submitted DNA to their ancestry-testing program should delete our data lest it be sold to the highest bidder. I haven't done anything with mine since getting it years ago - it only told me I was literally 99.9% of the ethnicity I knew I was already - so I had no problem with deleting it, except for how difficult it was to do so. First the site demanded I change my password. Then it sent me a verification code. Then I had no idea what to do next, so I asked Google's A.I. for help and it told me to use the Settings menu, but not how to find the Settings menu, which turned out to be obscurely located. Once I found it, though, it was self-evident what to do next; let's hear it for self-evidence.

The Tolkien Society, based in the UK, now has so many US members that it's decided to hold a conference in the US in May. It'll be in Kansas City. Not that they know anybody in particular in Kansas City, just that it's in the middle of the country so it'll be equally convenient from everywhere. That strikes me as a very British attitude to take. The UK is small enough geographically that you can do that. I don't think they realize how large a country the US is. Kansas City is not equally close to everywhere, it's equally far. I'd like to go, but personal schedule and the difficulty of traveling argue against it.

Canada is holding its general election on April 28, it says here. If the incumbent Liberals lose, then new Prime Minister Mark Carney will only have been in office two months, probably outdoing in brevity a previous Liberal tag-end PM, John Turner. Turner also never served in parliament as PM, as Carney hasn't, but Turner at least had previous experience there. Carney's qualifications are as a steel-nerved central bank governor, which his supporters hope will help him stand up against a rampaging DT. And let's stop there.

another C.S. Lewis conference

I got a notice that a Christian theological educational group in Berkeley was sponsoring a daylong conference on "Learning from the Inklings in Wartime." And by the Inklings, they meant - mostly but not exclusively - C.S. Lewis. It sounded more introductory than I needed, but it was nearby, I needed to go to the area anyway for a concert that evening after the conference ended, and I thought I'd enjoy it, so I decided to go.

It was held in the classroom wing of a Presbyterian church, and there were about 35 people there, a few of whom I already knew. As usual at a specifically CSL conference, I was probably the only non-Christian there, but also as usual I made no effort to advertise the fact.

The plenary talks focused on Lewis's essay "Learning in Wartime," correlating Christian imperatives, the goals of a scholarly life, and the pressures of an existence in times of crisis. The fact that we're living in such a time right now was not ignored, but it was not propagandized and if anything leaned left. This group may have been theologically conservative, but it was also in Berkeley and the politics reflected that.

The breakout sessions I attended were more tangentially on wartime. One presenter read poems of his own composition inspired by Lewis's writings, not just those on war. One of the attendees said the poems reminded him of the lyrics of Bruce Cockburn. Another presenter, a scholar whose work I knew, did make the conference scholastically worthwhile for me. He spoke learnedly on Lewis's writings on Hell, observing that they all dated from during or closely adjacent to WW2, but without making much of that point. He did, however, opine that Tolkien's portrait of Satan, as Morgoth and Sauron, outdoes Lewis's in Perelandra and far outshines Milton's in Paradise Lost, for all that one of Lewis's wartime writings on Hell is a study of Milton arguing that Milton's Satan is no proud rebel but a self-pitying whiner.

The speakers were all good and had worthwhile things to say. Several had trouble pronouncing the name of Lewis's character Wormwood, one rendering it as "Wordsworth". Registration cost included a sandwich buffet for lunch. There were a few inspiring songs with guitar or piano. The church locked up the women's restroom before we were done.

the naming of chicken parts

Some people profess to be puzzled as to why other people eat chicken wings. "They're just little bags of bones," I've heard it said. Yes! I reply. That is why I like them! Wings have a higher-ratio of skin to meat than other chicken pieces, and it's the skin - and the seasoning and coating on it - that make chicken more than just good.

Whole chicken wings are less commonly served these days than before. What's become trendy in the last few decades is single joints of wings. The wing is cut into three pieces, the tips are discarded (season and cook them, and I'd eat them), and the rest makes two pieces.

One of those pieces, the one directly connected to the breast before it's cut off, is called the drumette, due to its resemblance to a miniature of the leg piece known as the drumstick from its resemblance to a etc. But what is the other piece called? For a long time I didn't know, which was frustrating because it was my preferred piece. But then I began to accumulate names:

Flats are what I found them called at the original Buffalo wing bar in Buffalo, and which I subsequently confirmed is a generally recognized term among others who serve wing pieces as snacks. Wingstop, for instance, uses the term.

Mid-joints is how they're labeled when you buy them uncooked at an Asian grocery. Many Chinese restaurants that serve chicken wing pieces only use the mid-joints.

Wingettes is how they're referred to on bags of cooked and frozen wing pieces in supermarkets. Isn't that a more general term for all the pieces? No, because the bag reads "wingettes and drumettes."

By any of those names ...

it's spring

If you feel like finding something, however nominal, to celebrate, today's the vernal equinox - and it's this, not Daylight Saving Time, which is primarily responsible for the greater light we're getting in the evening - so here's something to celebrate with:

"Here Comes the Sun," by George Harrison and the Beatles, performed as it would have been done by a ragtime band of circa 1910:



Enjoy!