rain of errror

Reagan: His Life and Legend, Max Boot. (Liveright, 2024)

I found this large book in the library, picked it up and browsed the section on how Reagan won the 1966 California gubernatorial primary, a rather curious story. Boot gets the full tale right, so I checked the book out. Highly readable, discusses all of Reagan's career including both the artistic and economic sides of his movie-tv period. Does not stint on pointing out his habit of telling untrue stories as if they were true, his insistence that he wasn't racist while craftily making racist appeals, his strange evolution from a New Deal Democrat to a Barry Goldwater Republican, his presentation as a personable and friendly man while being completely alienated from all his children. Also explores why, then, he was so damned popular, partly that personable presentation and his quick-wittedness and (selectively) sharp memory, partly because his rather rigid acting background made him so good at speech-making but also because he was so good at writing his own speeches, something you don't expect of either an actor or a politician. Boot likes to end chapters with cliffhangers, which read oddly if you already know what's going to happen, like the chapter introducing his presidential administration which concludes, "And yet his presidential performance almost ended just sixty-nine days after it had begun."

And yet despite the sure command of detail, I found a few clanging factual errors. One of them appears twice:

1) After his wedding to Nancy and a reception in Toluca Lake, "Then the newlyweds drove sixty miles west in Ron's Cadillac convertible to Riverside, California, to spend their wedding night at the historic, Spanish-style Mission Inn." (p. 193)

2) His ranch ownership: "Reagan used part of the proceeds from the sale of Yearling Row to buy 778 acres in Riverside County, west of Los Angeles, for $347,000." (p. 285-6)

No, Max: Riverside is east of Los Angeles, not west. Drive 60 miles west from Toluca Lake and you'll be somewhere around Ventura.

In other erroneous news, I've discovered that there's a vast horde of people who've posted podcast videos on YouTube explaining things about Tolkien. If these were written down, I could glance over them quickly, but I'm not going to listen to them, especially as the only point of my doing so would be to see what they got right and what they got wrong. I did begin one which started with an outline of Tolkien's literary career, but stopped dead early on when the podcaster described The Hobbit as featuring "a large-footed creature called Bilbo Baggins." Oh, dear. Tolkien's hobbits are not "large-footed." They have hairy feet with leathery soles. Read the book, that's what it says. It's only in the movie that the necessity for prosthetic feet on the actors make their feet larger than normal. Don't describe the movies when you claim to be talking about the books.

concert review: Music@Menlo

I approached my first Menlo concert for review on Sunday with misgivings. A narrow slice of the repertoire, it consisted of four works all written during the same half-century (roughly 19C second half) from one small patch of central Europe. That's too default to be worth talking about - I don't like spending my limited review space complaining about the repertoire - while the only interesting thing the works had in common was in all being for three instruments, though not all the same three instruments.

But that seemed a rather esoteric theme to base my review on, so I was wondering how I'd do it.

I found my answer when we got to the third piece on the program, the Elegy by Josef Suk. Young violinist Jessica Lee simply ran circles around the two storied veterans she was playing with, so much so that if this was a meeting of the generations - as was suggested in the introduction to the concert - it was clearly the younger generation that had the goods.

And I realized that the same thing had been true of the second piece, Brahms's Clarinet Trio, which is basically a duet for clarinet and cello with piano accompaniment. Just with less vehemence. But the young cellist had played full of passion and color and a variety of tones and expressions, while the old clarinetist had been kind of bland by comparison. Bland, on a clarinet? The orchestral instrument with the most capacity for wild colorful expression? But yeah, he didn't exploit any of that.

So that was my theme, and while the other works on the program didn't show the same contrast, it was no trouble fitting them in to the theme. And here's the finished review.

choral celebration

B. doesn't sing much any more - medical reasons have put paid to it - but she dusted off her voice for a special occasion on Saturday. A concert was being held at San Jose State to celebrate the 90th birthday of Dr. Charlene Archibeque, long-time choral director in the music dept. About a hundred of her grateful former students - some local, some from across the country - were gathering to form an ad hoc choir for the occasion, and B. was perforce among them. She's long talked about how much she learned from being in a chorus under Dr. A., and this was the opportunity to show her respects.

I drove her down to the SJS music building that morning (having previously ferreted out the secret back alleyway in so that she didn't have to walk far) to drop her off for the chorus's one and only in-person rehearsal, and then came back for the concert in the afternoon. Dr. A. herself and several former students who've gone into choral conducting led a total of 16 items, most of them unaccompanied, a few with piano. They included pieces that Dr. A. had composed or arranged herself, mostly for her doctoral dissertation; a few classical standards including Anton Bruckner's supremely beautiful "Locus iste"; and several folksongs and spirituals, including this really striking arrangement of "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho."

The chorus sound was rich, full, and powerful throughout, and not just because it was a large group. Even after many years in most cases, these were good students who had been well-taught.

Afterwards, most of the chorus members and a few sundry like myself adjourned to a function room at a local hotel that had no available parking, for a reception/buffet and a lot of schmoozing among old fellow students. A small cake was presented to Dr. A. and everybody sang "Happy Birthday" at 7:15, because that was the date of her birthday.

Music@Menlo begins

The Menlo chamber music festival began on Friday, so I've got some catching up to do. Friday featured not a concert but a lecture. Aaron Boyd was to speak on the history of chamber music. I went because I'd heard Boyd lecture in past years: his profound erudition and eloquent lucidity always make for a delightful experience.

He began by saying that the size of the topic had thrown him for a loss. Seeking some guidance for a road through his topic, he turned to A.I. But while he tried a vast variety of prompts, he found that invariably the A.I. gave him what he called "completely useless blandnesses."

So, having already covered much of the central history in previous years' lectures, he focused on the edges. The first half was a prehistory, tracing from the first medieval definition of chamber music as any music played in private rooms, as distinct from church or theatrical music. (There were no public concerts then, apart from theatrical performances.) Instrumental music evolved from adaptations of vocal forms, and through Renaissance and Baroque forms like viol consort music and trio sonatas, chamber music as we'd know it had a long history by the time Haydn developed the modern string quartet; he didn't work in a vacuum.

The second half explored works fitting the definition of "late style" as coined by the critic Theodor Adorno, and then proposed that chamber music itself is in a "late style" crisis, identified by Milton Babbitt's infamous 1958 article, "Who Cares If You Listen?", proposing that new classical music should be addressed to a hermetic audience of specialists and not to the general pubic, hermetic obscurity being one of Adorno's hallmarks of "late style." Boyd went on to say that even the reaction against Babbitt's total serialism was still "late style": the general public isn't going to listen to a five-hour piece by Morton Feldman, either.

I think he's excluding a middle, here. The composers inspired by Feldman and Cage eschew their extremes too, and produce music that concert audiences want to hear, as any number of Menlo contemporary music concerts have demonstrated.

Still, Boyd is right in a larger sense, that even the general concert audience for classical music is a hermetic group now, preserving the relics of a grandiose lost past civilization we cannot re-create.

But there was some music on Friday after all, a Prelude concert by the International Program artists having preceded the lecture. A crunchy and urgent version of Beethoven's Piano Trio Op 1/3 was followed by Schumann's Piano Quintet with strikingly vehement solos in the slow movement by violist Sofia Gilchenok; I'll be looking out for her in later concerts.

not seeing Superman

B. wants to see the new Superman movie, enough to have ventured out to see it, but the theater she went to did not have a functioning restroom, so she gave up and left. One more strike against our city's downtown, which we rarely go to anyway.

I am not interested. The last Superman movie I saw was in 1978 with Christopher Reeve. This one has been acclaimed the best one since then, but the last time I saw a superhero movie because it was supposed to be really good was Iron Man in 2008 with Robert Downey Jr, and while he was good, the movie was the usual superhero crap. I saw the trailer for the new Superman which consists mostly of Superman trying to argue that he's not the bad guy. That he's not the bad guy? I don't need this.

I read a review of the movie which listed some other superhero characters who appear in it. Green Lantern I knew about, but to me Mister Terrific is the name of a short-lived 1960s tv comedy show about a gas station attendant who takes a pill that gave him short-lived superpowers. (I remember liking it a lot at the time, but I sought out an episode some years later and found that, like most of the other comedies I liked as a child, it was really bad.)

B., who knows a lot more about superhero comics than I do, tells me that no, there was a Superman-universe superhero called Mister Terrific, and that the tv show was probably named after it.

had a hammer

The doorbell rang this morning, and it wasn't a package delivery, which is what usually generates a doorbell ring here. It was a guy from the utility company, wanting to look at our gas meter.

This was slightly odd, as the same thing had happened the previous day.

The guy said the previous guy hadn't been able to get access to the meter.

Uh-oh, had we blocked it off or something? No, he just meant that the previous guy hadn't had the right tool with him.

It turned out, the new guy explained, that the valve on the pipe attached to the meter was partly underneath the concrete in the patio, and they had to get it free. (It's been this way for the 18 years we've lived here.) So the right tool turned out to be ... a jackhammer.

Not too large a dent in the concrete, and everything was swept up afterwards, and the cats were not as bothered by the loud noise as I'd thought. B. had on her noise-canceling headphones, and I just went upstairs.

dreamworld

I keep having this dream in which I'm the eldest of 6 or 8 children who've been kidnapped, or something, and we're each going to be asked a question, some type of relevant trivia knowledge I think. But though at the time I face the first question, I think I can identify the age and gender of all the other children as well as remember what the question is that each has been asked, by the time I get through that stage of the dream, all that knowledge has vanished and the dream crumbles. (I have particular trouble remembering dreams after I wake, thus even more of the vagueness of this account.)

Speaking of trivia questions, I've been watching compilations from a British quiz program called University Challenge, in which teams of undergraduates expose their knowledge, or, if the questions are about classical music as in these compilations, their ignorance. I've gotten used to identifications of Wagner's Lohengrin as by Leonard Bernstein, or not knowing a crumhorn when they see a picture of one, but this was a real gem. Played a piece of music and told it was from an opera overture and asked to name the opera, they were stumped.

The music was a pastoral theme for English horn and flute that you've probably heard in Bugs Bunny cartoons or even Bambi Meets Godzilla, and which in the overture immediately precedes what is surely the most famous tune in any opera overture anywhere. One team guessed La bohème and the other Carmen. No, it's the Ranz des vaches from Rossini's William Tell.

world according to cat, and more

Tybalt really does seem to find my weekly sorting of pills into pillboxes to be fascinating. Whenever I start it, he'll jump up and start inserting his nose in the business. I've managed to dissuade him before he gets to the point of eating the pills. He also likes knocking pill bottles to the floor. When I'm done, he goes back to wherever he was resting before. We call him my assistant.

B. is struggling with trying to get her new CD player to pair with her older headphones. They're both Bluetooth-enabled, and Bluetooth is supposed to be a universal standard, but apparently not. It's probably something like USB, which may I remind you stands for universal serial bus, but there are now at least four different sizes of USB plugs and ports, and woe if you have the wrong one for where it's supposed to go. So maybe there are different kinds of Bluetooth. They should name the new standard Forkbeard, as he was the next king of Denmark after Bluetooth.

Out on errands and needing lunch, I thought I'd revisit the Thai restaurant in a convenient shopping center. It was OK, never that great, but it'd been a long time since I'd been there. It's gone, replaced by a new Chinese Malatang outlet. This is like the fifth one I've come across in the last couple months of a type of cuisine I'd never heard of before. Malatang is a little bit like Mongolian barbecue in that you take a bowl, fill it with raw ingredients from a buffet, and hand it in for cooking. It's different in the ingredients and the seasoning - typical Malatang is soup, though there are also some dry versions - you pay by the weight, and you can't watch it being cooked. Ingredients are roughly the same between outlets but vary a bit. Some have lots of veggies, some few, some with broccoli, some with bok choy. Some have fish, some don't. Some peel their shrimp, some don't. Meat is always shaved beef and lamb, but there might be pork, might be bbq. There's also plenty of weird stuff, which the westerner tries at their peril. (I did not find cow throat edible.) There are no serving utensils in the containers; you take a pair of tongs with your bowl at the beginning. The quarters are always very clean, which is not always true of Mongolian barbecue. I've been getting kind of used to Malatang and will probably have some more.

a 17th-century joke

I thought this was pretty funny. B. didn't get it. How say you?

A melting* Sermon being preached in a Country Church, all fell a weeping, except a Country man, who being ask'd why he did not weep with the rest?
'Because' (says he) 'I am not of this Parish.'

*I presume 'melting' means 'causing the hearts of the hearers to melt.'

Source: The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose, compiled by Frank Muir (OUP, 1990)

the end of Westercon

The business meeting of this year's Westercon, last weekend, passed a motion to retire Westercon, to put an end to a nearly 80-year sequence of annual science-fiction conventions. It will need to be ratified next year, and any seated conventions will still be held, so unless it's rejected next year, the last Westercon will probably be no. 80 in 2028. I wasn't at the meeting, but you can read about it and, if you're really a glutton for it, watch a half-hour video of the whole thing here.

How have the mighty fallen. When I was active in fandom in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, Westercon was the king of the west coast convention calendar, behind only Worldcon in importance to fans in the area. It was large, maybe 2000 people, full of activity and a great place to expect to meet friends. There were plenty of other large regional conventions around, but Westercon was a centerpiece. Like Worldcon but unlike most other convention series, it moved from city to city each year, so nobody had to carry the entire burden of responsibility for running it. But, once shared, the responsibility was welcome. For instance, Portland had a big annual local convention, Orycon, in the fall. But for nearly 20 years, every five years or so they'd also hold a Westercon, in July. It wasn't too much of a challenge.

Westercon had grown to meet a need. It was in 1948 that LASFS, the LA club, had decided to hold a one-day event to assuage the needs of those who couldn't afford to attend the Worldcon on the east coast. After a few years it got bigger and longer, and started to be hosted in other cities, but for 20 years or more, Westercon served this role of a substitute. When the Worldcon was held on the west coast, no separate Westercon was held - there was no need for it.

But by the 1970s, Westercon had begun to exist for its own sake. 1972 was the first year there was both a Worldcon and a separate Westercon on the west coast. They were both in the LA area. Around the same time, local conventions began growing up: Loscon in LA (starting as a revival of the original format of Westercon), Orycon in Portland, Norwescon in Seattle, Baycon in San Jose, all began in the 70s or early 80s. But Westercon flourished along with them.

But sometime after the year 2000, Westercon began to diminish while other conventions continued to prosper. I'm not familiar enough with the fannish milieu of the time to understand why, but Westercons became much smaller and more obscure. I went to a couple in this period and was really surprised by how the atmosphere had changed.

In recent years it's been suffering from organizational ennui. Every Westercon but one (Tonopah in 2022) since 2014 has been co-hosted with another convention, usually as an add-on to a better-established partner. And for three consecutive years recently there was no qualified bidder, and a special committee had to figure out how to get the convention held. Maybe, Kayla Allen suggested in proposing the motion, there just isn't a need for our product any more.

But as mentioned, what I don't understand is why this has happened. Ben Yalow and Michael Siladi, also experienced conrunners supporting the motion, both suggested that the rise of other regional/local conventions on the west coast has sapped interest away from Westercon, but as Ben pointed out, that phenomenon dates back to the late 1970s/early 1980s, and Westercon was still flourishing in that period. The decline came later. What happened?