Pittsburgh diner

I had some good meals in Pittsburgh. That was one reason I chose to stay downtown, even though it was a bus ride across the river to the wedding venue: I was within walking distance of a variety of restaurants. Among the best were the outstandingly tangy and moist fried chicken at The Eagle, which is actually a chain with outlets scattered across the Midwest, but this was the first I'd encountered it; and the jambalaya at Iovino's, a brasserie out in the suburb of Mt. Lebanon near where my brother lives; he took me there. It's some of the best jambalaya I've had in a restaurant which doesn't specialize in Louisiana cuisine; other entrees I might have considered included grilled fish with polenta or a bbq burger.

Other than that: When I travel, I follow the way of the Trillin: I look for distinctively local foods that I'm not likely to find at home, that are regular cuisine and nothing fancy or expensive. I found two of them in Pittsburgh, neither mentioned in any guides to the city I read, the way that the cheesesteak is always mentioned in guides to Philadelphia. One I liked a lot, the other I definitely didn't.

The one I liked was Italian wedding soup. Every Italian restaurant whose menu I checked, and some places that weren't even Italian, had wedding soup and usually no other. This surprised me. In California, the inevitable Italian soup is minestrone. Go to an Italian restaurant whose menu lists "soup of the day" - seven days a week that soup is minestrone. Almost never any other offerings. I didn't see any minestrone in Pittsburgh. I like wedding soup, which I'd previously only had from jars I found in the grocery. It's not a soup you eat at weddings; the name refers to the marriage of meat (tiny meatballs) and vegetables (typically spinach and others). The fresh versions were of course much better than the jars, and the best I had was at a really fine Italian restaurant whose only flaw was the malfunctioning restrooms, Pizzaiolo Primo. Despite the name, there's no particular menu emphasis on pizza; I had shrimp linguini.

The 'only in Pittsburgh' I didn't like was the idea of a deli sandwich served at a local chain whose name I remembered as Prismatic Brothers. No, Primanti Bros., that was it. The sandwiches come with huge quantities of french fries (yes, in the sandwich) and cole slaw, with the ostensible ingredients of that particular type of sandwich cowering in the bottom, in "where's the beef?" style. If that's what you want, the quality of the ingredients was good. But it's not what I want.

in the Pitt

On my trip, I did something I hadn't done in over fifty years. I attended a major league baseball game. The home team Pittsburgh Pirates defeated the Milwaukee Brewers 2-1, so all the locals went home happy.

The game was an optional add-on for attendees of the wedding, the day before the ceremony, and I figured it would be a good occasion to socialize with my fellow guests. It was also a glimpse into a world I rarely see.

Not having a smartphone to load my ticket onto, I had to stop at the box office to pick it up. (None of the team's or stadium's web material that I could find said where around the stadium's perimeter the box office was, and I couldn't reach them by phone. I presumed it would be near the gift shop, whose location was given, and I guessed right.)

Our seats were on the other side of the stadium, but instead of walking around the outside and using the gate there, I entered at the main gate by the box office, took the escalator (! - I'd never seen a sports stadium with an escalator before) up to the second level, where our seats were, and walked around the inside - in both senses: the walk around was inside the park, and it was inside the building, not open to the air.

PNC Park is, I understand, one of the new breed of baseball parks that are smaller and more intimate than old school, but it looked awfully big to me. The long, curved (so you couldn't see how much further there was to go), seemingly endless corridor was like nothing so much as a concourse at a huge airport. Tiny signs indicating the doors outside to numbered seating sections were inconspicuous; what occupied the attention was a vast sequence of concessionaires, and the crowds occupying their seating. The concessions were a bit different from what you get at an airport: frequently repeated outlets for junk food (no actual restaurants), and the same sequence of whiskey bars. The stadium opens 90 minutes before the game starts to allow attendees plenty of time to get lubricated, and judging from what I saw on quick visits to the restroom during the game, many people never bother to go out and watch the action.

When I finally got to my section, the weather outside was balmy. The seats were up a steep flight of steps, and at first I wasn't sure if I'd be able to see home plate from up here - oh, there it is - and such view outside as wasn't blocked by the giant scoreboard was impressive: the large river with downtown behind it, just like at the wedding venue, only this time it was the Allegheny, the river on the other side of downtown.

I've occasionally seen baseball on tv, and watching a game in person is different in a couple important ways. First, there's no play-by-play commentary. The PA limits itself to announcing the name of the next batter. If you don't know the umpire's signals, you have no way of telling a ball from a strike without averting your eyes from the field and looking way up at the scoreboard, which half the time isn't displaying the box score anyway, preferring pictures of the batters or animated geegaws - if a visiting team player strikes out, the scoreboard displays a gif of three cannons firing, that sort of thing.

That's the other thing about watching baseball without a tv camera to guide you - it's hard to know where to look, or when. Baseball is not like other sports. In basketball or soccer or hockey the action is nearly constant. In American football it's intermittent, but you know it's going to happen when the players line up and the quarterback takes the snap. But baseball consists of a long sequence of pitches that the batter doesn't hit, or fouls, interrupted at unpredictable intervals when something exciting happens. It only lasts a few seconds, so if you happen to be looking away you'll miss it. And you usually need to be looking at two widely separated places at once. The ball has gone out to the outfield over there, while the runners are on the base paths over here, and knowing what's going on with both is vital to following the game.

At any rate, despite having few hits and almost no runs, the game wasn't too boring as sports games go. My brother told me that in recent years, rule changes have prohibited the characteristic baseball activity of standing around not doing anything for long periods. So things proceeded on with dispatch - after the first couple innings, I wondered if the game would be over in an hour, though in fact it took more than two - and there were a couple exciting double plays, and so on. I'm not likely to do it again, but I didn't feel my time was wasted.

Tomorrow: food, transit, and birds in Pittsburgh.

radio silence

The reason I haven't posted for a week is that I've been out of town and lacked the ability conveniently to post.

I use my portable tablet computer to keep up with e-mail, assuming there's wi-fi I can access, but typing on the little popup keyboard is not conducive to writing at greater than minimal length. I did choose my hotel in part because it had a business center, guest-usable desktop computers, but I found on my first evening that both computers were frozen in awkward positions, and while the desk clerk agreed to put in a request for repair, nothing had been done by the time I left. Of course, there was a holiday weekend in there.

One of the hotel's two elevators was also out of service. Good thing that wasn't both of them, because my room was on the tenth floor.

The hotel was located in downtown Pittsburgh. The one in Pennsylvania. I was there - by far the furthest away from home I've gone since before the pandemic - on a compulsion I could not possibly resist, not that I wished to resist it. It was my brother's wedding. (He lives and works in Pittsburgh, as does his wife, who's a native of the area.) It took longer for him than it did for me to "find his person," as they put it in the ceremony, but he definitely has. I've met her a few times before, and they're ideal for each other.

The ceremony was held at the Grand Concourse, an elaborate and colorful preserved 19C train station converted into the kind of restaurant you'd visit for a special occasion, of which this was certainly one. There were about 30 guests, tucked into the corner of one small room for the ceremony, after which we spread out somewhat further for a very fine dinner in another room, one with a stunning view of the Monongahela River and downtown opposite.

It was a highly personalized occasion, and cherishable for all who attended. Among the guests were a couple old friends (i.e. since childhood) of my brother's, whom I know but hadn't seen in a long time. One of them is a rabbi, and he conducted the ceremony.

Part of the service was the reading of a modern version of the seven blessings, a Jewish ritual that was new to me. Seven people close to the couple were asked, and I and my other brother were among them. We each stood up, identified ourselves, and read a blessing as modified by the couple, and, at least in my case (I read the Wisdom blessing) elaborated on a bit by me: it seemed to fit the circumstances.

There was more to the celebration than the ceremony and dinner, and I'll say more about that, and about Pittsburgh - which I've been to before, but never deposited in downtown on my own resources - tomorrow.

things I didn't get

Two of these from my childhood happened to pop into mind almost simultaneously.

1. When my parents first played for me the original cast recording of 1776 (a musical they'd seen in the theater, and bought the record of partly because they knew I'd be interested in the history), I heard the opening song, "Sit Down, John," and turned to my mother in puzzlement and asked, "What does '40-S' mean?" Huh? "Well, he keeps singing that: FOR-ty ess, FOR-ty ess." It was "Vote yes: VOTE-uh yes, VOTE-uh yes."

2. I saw a singing group on tv billed as "Tony Orlando and Dawn." There were three of them: a man in the middle and a woman on either side. I figured that one woman was Toni (I hadn't seen the name written), the man was Orlando, and the other woman was Dawn. Realistic believable given names, right?

X solved

It's Mussolini.

"A" and "B" are British statesmen, Neville Chamberlain and Anthony Eden.

solve for X

Here is a quotation from a book I've been reading, about world leaders, with the names removed. Your riddle is, who is X?

A lamented that 'X is behaving just like a spoilt child, and it is difficult to know how to deal with him'; as B had warned, the more X asked for, the more he got, and the greater became his demands. He was not a spoilt child, merely an avaricious and now overweeningly self-confident and cynical brigand.

Sound like anybody we know?

two community orchestra concerts

I attended two concerts by community orchestras, non-professional groups, in San Jose this weekend. They don't aspire to professional levels of playing ability, but they can be fun to attend.

The South Bay Philharmonic, conducted by George Yefchak, is the group for which B. is a viola player. They featured Tchaikovsky's Second Symphony, a rough but thoroughly enjoyable performance which conveyed Tchaikovsky's lyricism and his varying senses of excitement, coyness, and reflection. Chosen because of the composer's use of a Ukrainian folk song as the theme for the finale.
Also on the program, the Oboe Concerto by Bohuslav Martinů, a jaggedly modernist piece featuring prominent piano doublings in the orchestral chords, giving them the crunchy sound I associate with this composer. Pamela Hakl, retired from Symphony San Jose, was the impressively skilled oboeist. Plus a brief Nocturne for strings by an early 20C Ukrainian composer, Fyodor Akimenko, played almost unintelligibly, and a rather crisp and lively arrangement by Ted Ricketts of some songs from Wicked (Stephen Schwartz, prop.).

The Winchester Orchestra, conducted by James Beauton, featured Copland's Billy the Kid and once again, Tchaikovsky, the 1812 Overture. A brave thing for a small community orchestra to undertake, with tubular bells substituting for the carillon, sort of half-heartedly, and a few mighty thwaps on the bass drum for the cannon. But just about everyone plowed in enthusiastically.
Also two darker-toned brief pieces, Barber's Essay No. 1 and a fairly new piece called Something for the Dark by Sarah Kirkland Snider. The Snider was big on curled-up crescendos and rhythmic figures both simple and complex, less so on melody or harmony, especially ending as it did in the middle of the air.
Winchester is supposed to be a more advanced orchestra than South Bay, but the sound of the cellos being altogether untogether in one of Tchaikovsky's hymn passages, or of half the winds coming in a bar early at one point in the Copland, made me wonder.

Still, both were good shows and I'm glad I went. The more so as it'll be two busy weeks before I get to another concert.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Dalia Stasevska has led some dazzling performances here in the past. So I was looking forward to hearing what she could do with Sibelius's dramatically extroverted Fifth Symphony.

So here she was, dressed as usual in yet another oddly-colored long coat, and her Sibelius Fifth was not dazzling, exactly, but Heroically Grand. Through most of the work, Sibelius builds up to brief but intense climaxes, and Stasevska emphasized their Grandeur. Then at the end, when Sibelius marshals up all his resources for a final blast, the Heroic Grandeur just topped them all. Stasevska was especially skilled at flowing it naturally into the coda, whose long pauses sometimes fool audiences into applause who can't tell the difference between a dominant chord and a tonic when they hear it. But that didn't happen this time. The conductor was in command.

A similar approach was taken to Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasia, a work you rarely hear live. The general approach was slow and worshipful, as it should be, but Stasevska built the climaxes up into some of the same sense of Grandeur that she did Sibelius.

Also on the program, and taking up a good holy chunk of it, was a new cello concerto by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, inexplicably titled Before we fall and featuring Johannes Moser as soloist. Anna (that chunk of letters, properly Þorvaldsdóttir, is not her surname, but her patronymic: you call Icelanders by their first names) is a soundscape composer who specializes in weird sonorities, and we had that here. Strange dissonant shimmerings from the orchestra began this work. There's a long cadenza filled with col legno, ponticello, and other rattling sounds. But gradually the music melted down, via some weird sinking glissandi, into deep dark low sounds from soloist and orchestra alike, punctuated by clangs and thumps from the percussion. And this might have been interesting had it been half as long.

amusing serious books

These books are both amusing, and fun to read, although they take their topics seriously.

Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History, by Simon Winder (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2010)

I reviewed here Unruly by David Mitchell, a history of England's rulers up to Elizabeth I, dealing entirely seriously with its topic but doing so in an entirely witty and amusing style. In an acknowledgments note, Mitchell points to this book as the one whose approach he was trying to emulate with that distinctive combination, so I went to read it as well.

It does indeed have the same distinctive combination of wit and seriousness. The one thing Winder has that Mitchell doesn't is a desperate need for an editor. The beginning of the book contains enormous digressions in the form of apologias for Winder's interest in German history; and the earlier part of the book, mostly on the medieval period, wanders around chronologically a lot and concentrates just as much on later Germans' reaction to and framings of their history as on the history itself. To be fair, Winder had alerted the reader that he was going to do that.

Somewhere around the Thirty Years' War, the narrative settles down and becomes more chronological, though there are lots of marked digressions into specific points of interest, for instance a section on the Jews, in which Winder seems to be arguing that the Holocaust was an aberration and not a uniquely German perversion, and proves it by pointing to earlier German pogroms. Huh? Anyway, the main narrative ends with the Weimar Republic, and that's one of the few references to what happens afterwards.

Though there's plenty of political history in here, this is mostly a cultural history, a lot from the perspective of what historical patterns and customs survive today, especially in surviving townscapes. Though many rulers are mentioned, if you want to keep track of the list of Holy Roman Emperors, for instance, you'll need another book. (Mitchell, by contrast, is clear and complete in his accounts of rulers, but that's his topic.)

To give a sample of the prose, after a long discussion of the marriages of the British royal family to princesses from obscure German states, Winder writes,

I go on about this, partly because it is funny and curious (both the facts and the names), but also because these little territories had potentially very considerable power and prestige and the most bashful beginnings could end in glory. In a sort of asteroid belt of low-grade German princesses and narrow, petty, moustachioed princes, there was enough room for something really surprising to happen. Most absolutely alarming in this respect was pretty little Sophie Augusta Frederica of the laughable territory of Anhalt-Zerbst, a place so small it could hardly breathe. Her father was a Prussian field marshal and as a helpless pawn in plans to boost Prussian-Russian relations in the 1740s Sophie was shunted off to Russia where, after several ups and downs, she married the Grand Duke Peter, learned Russian, became Russian Orthodox, had Peter killed and wound up as Catherine the Great, devastating the Ottomans, the Swedes and the Poles and carving out immense new territories from Latvia to the Crimea. Indeed, a case could be made for her being the single most successful German ruler of all time, albeit not one ruling Germany.

Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass, by Dave Barry (Simon & Schuster, 2025)

These are actual memoirs, not the 'personal tales of my everyday life' stories we're used to from the famous humor columnist. They are, however, professional memoirs. After opening chapters on his childhood and schooling, it discusses purely his career until he settles down at the Miami Herald, at which point it broadens out into a topic-oriented survey of work he did there, then narrowing back to a final chapter on his decision to retire 20 years ago, at which point it stops. It's also oriented towards his newspaper career; there's almost nothing about his books. Barry gives full descriptions in his typical amusing style, emphasizing eccentricities, of his parents - both now deceased - but all he says of his adult family is that he's been married three times, and there's a cameo appearance by his son.

But on that professional life he is clear and lucid. How he stumbled into a job as a reporter for a small-town paper and wrote his first professional humor columns there; a discussion of his seven years as a business-writing consultant, which he handles in some specific detail because of the training it provided him for his later career; how he sidled back into becoming a full-time humor columnist; why he took the job in Miami; and so on. He's a little reluctant to show his early work, which he doesn't think is very good; but once he becomes a professional he shows more of it, and the Miami chapters are tales about various feature stories and other items he wrote, much of which I hadn't known about. I'd forgotten, for instance, that Barry is the person who popularized Talk Like a Pirate Day. His greatest delight, though, is when he discovers that a celebrity he interviews has a good sense of humor.

As with Mitchell and Winder, Barry strikes a balance between serious and straightforward content and a witty and amusing way of writing about it. In his chapter on schooling (one of his classmates was Glenn Close, interestingly enough), he comes up with one sentence that perfectly encapsulates its topic - as I know, having suffered through the same thing in junior high:

At certain points of the week we boys would troop off to the shop, where we would learn, over the course of several months, how to use tools to turn pieces of wood into slightly smaller pieces of wood stained brown.

concert review: Symphony San Jose

Reviewed for SFCV.

This was a performance of The Planets in which the quiet parts had the same intensity and drive as the loud parts. I could go with that.

What I did not like was the added visuals. I thought it was going to be a special presentation of NASA material curated for this performance, but it wasn't. On checking I found that it was a film made in 2010, to accompany a recording of The Planets by the Houston Symphony, and that showing it at concerts with the soundtrack removed is a common practice. If I'd ever seen it before, I'd have been even more irritated.

The conductor having to wait for the opening credits to end before he could start the music provoked much amusement in the audience.

I explain in the review why I didn't like the movie, but my editor removed my description of what the movie contains. Perhaps he thought you could pick that up from the rest. At any rate, what I'd written was, "The visuals were a collection of film clips, some from nearby space, some closeup of surfaces, some of moons of the gas giants, of whichever planet Holst was depicting at the moment."

retooled Freight

The Freight & Salvage, music venue & coffeehouse in Berkeley, has sent out an announcement that it's retooling itself. Basically the problem is that it needs to increase and broaden its audience if it wishes to remain financially viable. And so it's undertaking the sort of things that organizations in such a fix traditionally do.

First, it's changing its name. People already call it just "The Freight," so that's going to be the official name from now on. This "formally signals our readiness to grow and evolve—without losing sight of where we came from." And to go along with it, new logos, colors on the marquee, etc.

Second, a new Mission Statement and Vision and Values. The old Mission Statement read, "The Freight's mission is to be a world-famous venue for traditional music, rooted in and expressive of the diverse regional, ethnic, and social cultures of peoples worldwide." The new one reads, "The Freight is a vital home for music with deep roots from around the world that celebrates cultures, connects communities, and inspires creativity." So it's no longer a world-famous venue, it's a vital home. It no longer plays traditional music but music with deep roots. It is no longer expressive of the diverse ... cultures of people worldwide, it celebrates cultures.

The announcement also says, "While we are strongly rooted in a profound respect for the varying traditions of all cultures, we acknowledge that some of our institutional practices over the years have perpetuated a system that caused some people to be excluded, silenced, or neglected." I would like to know what those terrible institutional practices are.

I'm only interested in a relatively small part of what the Freight offers, but that includes its recently rather extensive classical chamber music program. On top of which it's far from home and requires some work to get there, so I don't go that often and usually have to be tempted pretty hard. So I await to see what they're going to do with this, whether it means anything at all and, if it does, whether it means they're going to throw out the old despite denying they're going to do this.

auto in the shop

I spent most of last week carless, as mine was spending its time in a repair shop. I could borrow B's car for a few errands, but because there weren't very many (which is why I picked this week), there was no need to rent a car.

I wanted to get a persistent problem solved before we go off on a long drive next month.

The 'check engine' light has come on repeatedly over the last year or so, and every time I have someone run a diagnostic, it claims to be a leak in the system that keeps gas fumes from escaping outside the fuel line, but nobody could find a leak.

This time I asked them to dive in with more detail, and they did find a couple misfunctioning parts and replaced them. It may not solve the problem entirely - there appears to be a short in an electrical wire somewhere that's contributing to the festivities, and those are even harder to track down - but for the moment the warning light is off.

Also, the car's horn had stopped working.

Turned out that somehow it had gotten unplugged.

visit, with cheesecake and books

Our nephew and niece from out of town were in town, on a rare visit, with their two daughters, aged 11 and 9. They suggested lunch with us, B. and myself, and they proposed the Cheesecake Factory in the big regional mall. We never go to the mall, but it's not far from us, so we said OK, and all was well until we got there. There were plenty of spaces in the garages, but the sheer number of cars trying to get in was causing huge backups at the ticket-dispensing machines. Time was pressing, so I found a way in around the lines, and then navigated a walking route through a large department store to the restaurant.

After ordering lunch, we asked the girls if they were still as big readers as they were when we last saw them some three years ago, and they were. "So," I said to their Mom, knowing her to be a bit of a Tolkien fan, "have you read them The Hobbit yet?" "Not yet," she said, "but soon." "Do you have a copy at home?" She looked at her husband with uncertainty. "I'm not sure."

"So here, have one," I said, reaching into my book bag and pulling out one of my extra hardcover copies. They were delighted. 9-year-old took it and, at Mom's suggestion, undertook to read the opening aloud. "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit," she read. "Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole."

"And?" prompted Mom.

"That's all we're reading today," 9-year-old said decisively.

I then reached again into my magic book bag and pulled out one more book for each; favorites of ours and these stories, unlike The Hobbit, are about girls. For 9-year-old, Wren to the Rescue by Sherwood Smith; for 11-year-old, The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages. And we did not omit to mention that we know both authors personally. They were even more delighted. 11-year-old got particularly excited when I told her that her book is about a girl her age living at the lab where the atomic bomb was being built during World War II. She's specially interested in WW2, it appears, and it's gratifying to find a young person so interested in an event from 70 years before they were born.

concert review: Master Sinfonia

So, as previously reported, last Saturday I went to a concert with Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. And on Sunday afternoon, I went to a concert with his follow-up piece, the Great C Major Symphony. And that is the "Great C Major" Symphony, not as often called the Symphony in C Major "Great". As I wrote, "It’s sometimes thought to be called “Great” because of its sheer size, but in fact it’s so called to distinguish it from an earlier work which is the “Little C Major” Symphony."

And I wrote that in a review - finally published today - of the concert, which was by a local group called the Master Sinfonia. This was in fact the first time I've reviewed this piece, which gave me the chance not only to correct the nickname but point out the confusion in its numbering and emphasize how much it's a weird piece that doesn't sound remotely like any other symphony that had previously been written. (I think it took until Dvorak, 50 years later, for somebody else to write sort of like that.)

Although the programming was pretty standard, this was in fact the first time I'd reviewed any of the pieces in the concert.

And immediately after the concert was over, I dashed up to Kohl Mansion to review, for my other outlet, the string quartet concert I previously mentioned. Busy day.

a Tolkienian miscellany

1. If you've heard a rumor that yet another new book by JRRT is coming out, it's true. The Bovadium Fragments will be appearing in the UK in October and in the US in November. "First-ever publication" as it says in the blurb is true, but "previously unknown"? Not a chance. As with some other posthumous Tolkien publication touted as "previously unknown," its existence was first revealed in Humphrey Carpenter's biography nearly 50 years ago. The Bovadium Fragments is mentioned there in a footnote as "a parable of the destruction of Oxford (Bovadium) by the motores manufactured by the Daemon of Vaccipratum (a reference to Lord Nuffield and his motor-works at Cowley) which block the streets, asphyxiate the inhabitants, and finally explode." Which makes it something of a pair to an almost incoherently angry alliterative poem about motorcycles, written probably over 40 years earlier, which is no. 63 in the Collected Poems published last year, and which I think was previously unknown.

2. A collection of brief memories of Tolkien at Oxford's Merton College, where he was a fellow for some 14 years and then returned to live in a college flat in his widowhood long after retirement, from dons and students there. Anecdotes include a revelation of why Tolkien gave up his previous professorship for one attached to Merton (he liked the food), and a related explanation of why the other dons had no particular interest in Tolkien as a famous author: "Fellowships resemble a zoo in which beasts are largely kept in separate cages, yet at feeding times they mix amicably enough."

3. A recurrence of one of the most obnoxious lies about Tolkien. Adam Roberts depicts Tolkien putting the name "Lúthien" on the tombstone of Edith, his wife, as a personality-erasing appropriation. He imagines Tolkien saying "when you are dead I shall put on your gravestone not your actual name, not even my name, but the name from a mythology I invented." Roberts says Tolkien put it instead of her name, and that's a lie, not just an error, because it can be easily checked. The tombstone looks like this:

It has both names, the legal and the mythological, and for him as well as her. (And yes, despite Roberts' sneering innuendo, "Tolkien" was Edith's surname, even though it's not the one she was born with. That was the standard custom of her society, and still is. Don't believe me, ask the nearly 80% of US women married to men who've taken their husband's surname and now have to worry about not being able to vote because it doesn't match their birth certificates.)

4. Charles Wiliams's The Place of the Lion as a specific influence on Tolkien's The Notion Club Papers. That NCP is Tolkien's Williamsian novel is obvious enough, but here's suggestions on how the plot resembles this specific Williams novel.
Lots of interesting stuff in this blog, notably an explanation of exactly what Tolkien disliked about allegory.

5. I am translated (with permission) into Italian. Topic: the Christopher Tolkien memorial conference. Link to the original near the end.

white smoke

That was a lot less work than it took to choose Kevin McCarthy.

concert review: Alexander Quartet

I went to review the local farewell concert by a string quartet that is disbanding. (You can read here of the depressing reasons why.)

But this wasn't a depressing occasion, but a real celebratory one.

In the old days, I was never a big fan of the Alexander String Quartet, featured local artists though they were. I found their playing rather dull and dutiful. But gradually, over the years, I've heard them showing more grit and verve in their performances. This predated the recent changes in personnel, so that wasn't the reason, or the whole reason. I've come to appreciate them more.

This concert, though, was all grit and verve. Haydn, who's a witty composer, was all wit. Brahms, who's a mellow composer, was all mellow.

I particularly liked that Haydn. I've heard this particular piece several times at the Banff String Quartet Competition, home of truly spectacular performers. This performance would have been the highlight of a Haydn round at Banff.

The one other thing I can add that wasn't in the review is that the tiny hall was absolutely packed. Everybody wanted to say goodbye to this esteemed and loved ensemble.

the Pat and Ellen show

On my way to the Cal Sym on Saturday, it was easy enough to pass through the City (the one Not Long After) and attend a event at a small branch library by the always-entertaining tag team of Pat Murphy and Ellen Klages.

The occasion was the publication of Pat's first novel in some years, The Adventures of Mary Darling (Tachyon Publications), which was available on a side table from Jacob Weisman, its publisher. You can get it, and a lot of other good stuff, here, or at the online or brick retailer of your choice. But I didn't, because B. had already bought it electronically.

When B. had told me the title of Pat's book, I responded, "That sounds like something she'd do." Pat spent most of the occasion talking about the book and reading from it. She'd always been interested in Peter Pan - from the novel, mostly; she's never seen the Disney version - and wanted to take the children's mother's viewpoint of their vanishing off somewhere. (Cue in my mind thought of Sherwood Smith's "Mom and Dad on the Home Front.")

So: it's Victorian London. Your children have mysteriously disappeared. The police don't seem to be much help. Who you gonna call?

Sherlock Holmes!

And the story is off and running.

(What, you say? Holmes is a fictional character? Well, so is Mary Darling. If she can exist, so can he.)

A lot of this sounds like fun. (Where is Neverland, anyway? And why does it have American Indians? All is explained.) I'm saving this one up to occupy my next tedious wait.

concert review: California Symphony

This is the kind of program I like to hear: two big, dark-toned, heavyweight symphonies from the major repertoire: Schubert's "Unfinished," and Bruckner's Ninth, which is also unfinished.

Both were certainly intended by their composers to be standard four-movement symphonies, but only parts of the works got completed: two movements in Schubert's case, three in Bruckner's. Owing to different placements of the slow movement, both symphonies end with it, quietly in a dying fall. There have been attempts to finish both of them off, but they don't work, because you need the original composer's genius to do it. (And that is the same reason I'm not interested in Tolkien fan fiction.)

Schubert's "Unfinished," which gets played fairly often, received a pretty standard basic run-through here. This is the symphony with which Schubert, previously a chipper Mozartean in his symphonies, got with the Beethoven program of heavy dramatic works. Pre-concert lecturer Scott Foglesong opined that Schubert actually went beyond Beethoven here and essentially brought the Gothic cultural movement of the day into the symphony. And I've certainly heard it played that way, but there was nothing Gothic looming over this performance. The strings were strong and full, enough so that wind solos sounded slightly lost in the breeze.

Bruckner, though - here the orchestra was ideally balanced between sections and the music was played with full passion and dedication. The Ninth isn't played very often. I most recently heard it in London, before the pandemic, from Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. I wasn't terribly impressed with that performance. Is Bruckner just not Rattle's thing? I wondered. So I was pleased to be able to tell a couple of the Cal Sym musicians - you often run into them after a concert, because they park in the same adjacent garage that the audience does - that they gave a more effective performance of this than the Berlin Philharmonic did.

It felt as if conductor Donato Cabrera was taking this pretty speedily, though it was not a briefer than standard performance. Where Foglesong had cautioned that Bruckner's music exists in a timeless space, you're not supposed to expect anything to happen, Cabrera falsified this one by focusing on the flow and the events of the music. I found it dramatic, eventful, and riveting of my attention all the way through the 65 minutes. Especially fine were the way he ramped up the end of the first movement to its shatteringly intense ending, and then ramped down the conclusion of the slow movement from the climax to its gentle finish.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

I knew Giancarlo Guerrero as a bold and vigorous conductor. Here he led a program featuring music by two of the 20C's most colorful orchestrators, Igor Stravinsky and Ottorino Respighi (both of them pupils of Rimsky-Korsakov, the greatest orchestrator of his day).

From Igor, the full text of Petrushka, his second ballet, which came across as familiar nuggets floating in an uncharted soup. But it was sharp and colorful.

From Otto, two big colorful tone-poem suites, Fountains of Rome and Pines of Rome. The former has been overshadowed by the latter, but on its own it's an excellent work which deserves airing. What makes it fall behind is a tactical mistake, of putting the triumphant procession in the middle instead of, as in Pines, at the end.

Both were well played, not the most dazzling renditions I've heard, but good enough. Except that the extra brass players for the end of Pines, usually placed in the audience balcony for an interesting antiphonal effect, were here put in the terrace just behind the orchestra, where their impact was minimal.

Guerrero pointed out, introducing the pieces, that Pines is the first work of electronic music ever composed, requiring as it does a recording of a nightingale's call during a peaceful interlude. At one time, if you got a copy of the score it came with a 78-rpm record. "Anybody remember those?" he said.

Also on the program, a very short introductory piece by Kaija Saariaho, inspired by an earth-grazer asteroid named Toutatis, one of several pieces commissioned as supplements to Holst's Planets. It doesn't sound in the least as if it belongs there.

Canada resurgent

When a political party is in deep trouble in the popularity stakes as an election looms, switching their leader to a new and shiny model rarely works. If you look at the list of Canadian prime ministers, you'll see a couple from the 1980s and 90s who served derisorily short terms. That was the reason.

It worked this time, though. And, weirdly, the person responsible for that was Donald Trump. Old PM Justin Trudeau from the Liberal Party had already announced his impending retirement when DT pulled his "be a bully to Canada" routine, and it got everybody's back up. You'd think a guy who wrote The Art of the Deal would know better than to antagonize people he's negotiating with, but then Trump didn't really write his own book, did he? Anyway, Trudeau denounced all of this in his quiet Canadian way; his successor Mark Carney denounced it even further in his even quieter Canadian way, and just about everybody in the country agreed with them. (As do I, though I'm not Canadian.)

Even Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the opposition, chimed in, rather awkwardly both because "me too" isn't a fervent campaigning posture and because Poilievre's personal style is rather Trumpian. He's also even more alarmingly right-wing than Stephen Harper, the noxious previous Conservative PM. Canada dodged a bullet by not electing him. Voters decided that Carney, a sober banker who's led major financial institutions out of crises before, was a better bet to stand up to Trump.

But this didn't mostly happen because of Conservatives changing their minds. It seems to have been mostly supporters of the third major party, the New Democrats - a social democratic group rather similar to what Bernie Sanders and AOC want to lead here in the States - who decided they couldn't risk letting Poilievre into office and turned over en masse to the Liberals. They weren't willing to do this before, but they were with Trudeau out and Trump looming. As a result, the NDP - which 14 years ago actually outpolled the Liberals at their pre-Trudeau nadir - won the fewest seats ever in its history. But that's what happens to third parties in a first-past-the-post system.

concert review: Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra

I was less than excited to be sent to review a concert with Schoenberg and Mahler in it. But the Schoenberg was Verklärte Nacht which is tonal and was not played too goopily; and the Mahler was a brief cycle of very early songs, and hence as unobjectionable as Mahler can get. And to go with this, Beethoven's Seventh, an old favorite played with the tires squealing as it rocketed down the street.

This was not just the concert. The performers were here for a week to work with students, so I enriched my experience by going to the public events on Wednesday. This included a long concert of mostly very dull music by Mahler and the Second Viennese School; a talk with Verbier Festival administrators, who explained how and why the festival works and what this touring orchestra has to do with it; and, in the morning, a master class with the orchestra's conductor and some of the groups that would play that evening.

The conductor's accent was almost impenetrable (yes, this was the same guy who read the Verklärte Nacht poem aloud before the performance, with results as you might expect), but I tried my best to follow him. When the high school string quartet played the Webern Bagatelles, he told them they were very good (which they certainly were) but that they were too intellectual; their performance needed more emotion. He said that composers encode the emotions they want to express in the score, and that performers need to bring those out and convey them to the audience - gesturing to those of us gathered to listen to the session. He took the leader's violin and showed what he meant. Essentially it amounted to adding more variation in dynamics and tone color to the playing.

And I thought: what good is it to 'add emotion' to music when there's no emotion to be had? This is Webern! The driest, most dessicated and cryptic composer in the western repertoire. Maybe a few connoisseurs will appreciate it, but there is no emotion in Webern that can be conveyed to a general classical audience. No matter what you do, it doesn't come across as emotion. It's eloquence in an alien language. Try this on something that actually has some emotional content.

Anyway, I didn't hear any effective difference in the performance afterwards, although I hear master classes entirely reworking students' playing styles all the time.

dramatic review

Here There Are Blueberries, conceived, directed, and co-written by Moises Kaufman (Berkeley Rep)

This is a documentary play. By which I mean it records historical events in plausibly accurate language, with genuine historical material inserted. Here that material is projections of photographs.

The play is mostly set in the US Holocaust Museum. They've recently acquired a donation, a photo album that a US intelligence officer found in a ruined house in Germany just after the war and has kept ever since. There's no name, but some of the captions say they were taken at Auschwitz.

They're not of prisoners. They're of SS officers and clerical staff, enjoying themselves at after-work parties and such. Oh, look, there's Dr Mengele, laughing it up among his comrades. One set of photos shows the SS officer who's clearly the man who compiled the album - later identified by the museum staff as the adjutant to Auschwitz's commander - serving food to the young women of the office staff. "Here there are blueberries," says the caption in German.

The Holocaust Museum staff ask, do we want this album? Our focus is on the victims, it shouldn't be on the perpetrators. But they decide there's value in knowing more about how the Holocaust happened, and emphasizing that it was people who did this, not alien monsters.

The innocent-looking young women on the staff, for instance. What did they do? They ran the message office. What messages did it send? The museum tracked down an interview of one of them, after the war.
Witness: Every time a train came in, we'd send a message off to Berlin. So many men to work camp, so many women to work camp, so many men S.B., so many women S.B., so many children S.B.
Query: What did S.B. mean?
Witness: Sonderbehandlung. Special treatment.
Query: What did 'special treatment' mean?
Witness: Gassing.
They knew.

So did the officers, including the one whose album it had been (nothing is said of how he lost it), who claimed they knew nothing, nothing of what was really going on there. But the photos show them touring the extermination centers.

And then, at the end of the play, after we're assured that we have almost no photos of the prisoners, some do show up. It's another album, photos taken the day the train arrived that held the very prisoner who found the album in an abandoned SS barracks after the camp was liberated. She sees herself in the photos. She sees her family, the ones she never met again after she was sent to work camp and they were all marked for S.B.

I was not just stunned, I was thrown for a loop. Why does this only show up now? The whole play should have been about this album, instead.

This was powerfully done - the small cast played varied parts. The creators are the same people behind The Laramie Project. But the switch at the end ... I dunno why they presented it this way.

concert review: Chamber Musicians of the San Francisco Symphony

The particular reason I like chamber music concerts sponsored by symphony orchestras is the opportunity it allows for performing works for unusual combos. Where, for instance, but at a symphony orchestra would you be likely to be able to assemble a nonet (one each of all the standard string and wind instruments)? Or - this was really stunning - four men* on bass? (If you thought three was the maximum, that's baseball.)

The Nonet was by Bohuslav Martinů, and was a substantial piece in his lively, angular post-neoclassical style. Lots of group exchanges back and forth between the strings and the winds.

The piece for four basses was by 19C Italian bassist Giovanni Bottesini. Melodic in a bel canto style, it was so high-pitched (a preference of Bottesini's) that it sounded more like cellos under some weird straining stress than it did anything distinctively bassish. At least it was consistently in tune, which I don't expect to hear in exposed bass music by players from anywhere less distinguished than SFS.

The concert also had two more conventionally instrumented works.

Café Music by Paul Schoenfield, which is a piano trio disguised as a romp through early 20C popular music, was played with what I'd expect of orchestral musicians tackling it: well up to the technical demands but lacking that last deposit of wild abandon needed to make this piece really go. The elegant ballad in the slow movement came out well, though.

Shostakovich's Third String Quartet - one of his most often played, and one of his best - started as a cool and objective reading, but gradually the emotion that Shostakovich keeps locked up came out, especially in the desolate finale.

All around, a really interesting afternoon out.

*and they were men

folk music between covers

An Evolving Tradition: The Child Ballads in Modern Folk and Rock Music, by Dave Thompson (Backbeat Books, 2023)

This is some 500 pages absolutely packed with information. Its topic is the performing and recording history of the Child Ballads (click on the link if you don't know what that means: there's always someone), so mostly British, American, Canadian. And other British folk songs get a mention here and there.

And it's thorough, thorough. Occasionally it's a little difficult to follow what Thompson is saying, but mostly the info is densely packed and, as far as I can tell, pretty reliable. Near the beginning are accounts of composers who wrote accompaniments to the tunes (Haydn and Beethoven: yes they did), lots about folk song collectors in the field from Cecil Sharp on down, eventually getting to early recordings ("Phil Tanner, the first folk-singing superstar"), more composers (Benj. Britten, Ruth Crawford), gradually into folk singers you've heard of (Jean Ritchie, Judy Collins), a chapter on folk songs that influenced Angela Carter, then through Dylan and Baez to the folkies I listened to in my youth, going through Martin Carthy, the Incredible String Band (yes, they did Child ballads), Pentangle, etc., and finally arriving at Fairport Convention in chapter 37. Steeleye Span gets two chapters, chapter 40 which has a brief overview of their early work, and chapter 41, a fuller discussion of their Golden Age. Thompson says that Steeleye's real innovation was the almost brutally heavy rock arrangements on the likes of "King Henry" and "Alison Gross", at last giving these songs music that was as menacing and vicious as the lyrics. The "haunted and eerie" arrangement of "Long Lankin" also falls in that category. There are a few more references to Steeleye later on, suggesting that "The Prickly Bush" and "Lord Randall" are their two best later songs, ignoring their amazing "Tam Lin".

As the later chapters (there's 48) drift off into newer performers I don't know but who sound tempting from Thompson's descriptions, I looked some of them up but none wound up appealing to me at all. I'm a child of my time, I guess. But I enjoyed reading about the performers I knew and the earlier ones I didn't.

However, the best thing, the very best thing, in this book is the dedication, which reads like this:

To my beloved cousin Jane Thompson Dua, 1971-2022. As a child, she heard me playing "The Wee Wee Man" (Child 38) one day, and completely misunderstood what the song was about. Her interpretation still comes to mind when I hear that ballad.

civics education

A few days ago, one whom I read was asking for childhood experiences in being educated in US civics. Generating a response caused memory to bring up some things I had half-forgotten:

I was educated in California, but that was all more than 50 years ago. I do not remember what kind of civics education we got in elementary school, but I do remember the lineup of specific classes after that. We had a dedicated civics class in 8th grade, I was taught it by one of the school's best teachers, and it went into a lot of detail, with a lot of informal argument on civics principles led by the teacher. One specific nugget I remember from this class was students doing a table reading of a skit from the textbook depicting Gen. Scott offering Col. Lee command of the Union Army. So this got into some pretty esoteric historical detail. I also remember a polemic in the textbook describing a pure libertarian government and asking, is this really want you'd want? (And this was a decade before the heyday of the Libertarian Party.)

Which in turn reminds me that, the same year in English class, we read the play Inherit the Wind. Again a full table reading, with the entire class participating, and also much discussion of the content.

So we were well drilled in civics before high school. In high school itself, graduation requirements included 1) a full-year course in US history; 2) a half-year course in US civics. No specific grade level attached, though I think most took these in their last two years, if only because they were more mature and better able to handle them. (This was one of the few, if not the only, state graduation requirements. Most of my attention in this matter was focused on meeting requirements for eligibility for admission to the University of California, which were stricter.)

I did not take these classes; I took the 2-year AP US history course, which was deemed to cover both topics. This was 11th-12th grade. We had an excellent teacher, one of the two best I ever had, who rambled his way from the War of Independence down to about the Truman administration before we ran out of time (and remember this was during the Nixon administration). It covered all sorts of topics in political-economic history (rather less on social history). Highlights included an unrehearsed classroom debate between the teacher and the school principal over the merits of the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian principles of government, and a whole unit on immigration settlement of the Northern Plains.

There was no textbook; our reading was individually directed by the teacher. Most of mine went to the two major research papers I wrote in this class. These were college-level papers, and this is where I learned how to write one. We chose our own topics in consultation with the teacher, and one of mine was on a historical civics topic: the writing of California's first state constitution. I did most of the research for that one in the Stanford University library, which I had access to as family of an adjunct professor.

At the end of our second year, the teacher selected three of his best students and entered us in the AP US History exam. We all got 5, the best grade.

I felt really well equipped by high school to handle the work of reading history at a major university, UC Berkeley. Rather to my surprise, because I'd been warned repeatedly how tough college would be, especially at that level, I found my courses fun and rather easy.

concert review: Geneva Lewis, violin

Violin and piano recital at Herbst.

Geneva Lewis has a violin tone that's light and soft, but with a strong bite to it. It gives the effect of a small bird chirping, if the bird could chirp classical music. The sound was highly appropriate for the delicate, fragmentary Post Scriptum Sonata by Valentin Silvestrov, and impressively effective in the Romances by both Robert and Clara Schumann, and Mozart's K. 301 sonata.

Evren Ozel on piano matched her with lightness of touch. He has the softest and most pillowy of rolled chords.

You wouldn't think that the Franck Sonata would work well with this approach, but listen again: most of the first and third movements, and even part of the fourth, work well as light, delicate, and quiet. But both Lewis and Ozel could ramp up to strong and loud dynamics, just not exaggeratedly so, when Franck calls for it.

While I'm on music, a note on the recent death of Joel Krosnick, long-time cellist of the Julliard Quartet. They were among the groups whose records first taught me the string quartet repertoire. Already retired from there, he was at the Banff String Quartet Competition to teach student masterclasses in 2016, the first time I attended. I met him when he sat next to me for one of the competition concerts.

I won the lottery

Oh, relax, it was only $50; but nothing like this has ever happened to me before, and I've never seen a description of what actually happens when you do, so I'm writing about it here.

At Easter, our niece passed out scratch-off lottery cards as a kind of party favor. I got two of them. One of them I couldn't figure out the instructions for, so after scratching off most of its surface in a futile attempt to understand it, I threw it out. The other made sense, though. It had two 4x4 squares showing various occultish tokens - The Rooster, The Mermaid, The Hand, The Cello, etc - and another section which you'd scratch off to reveal a list of 14 more tokens. Match those up with the ones in the squares, which you could scratch off to keep track, and if you got four in a row on a square you win the amount printed at the end of the row.

According to the lottery's website, 1 in 44 tickets in this game win $50, so it isn't that rare. The instructions say take a small-win ticket to any lottery agent to redeem. So Monday morning I went to a local 7-11 that sells lottery tickets.

What would they do? Would they painstakingly verify that the tokens I'd scratched off on the square matched the ones in the list? Would they demand to know where I'd bought the ticket? (I don't know where she bought them.) Would they make me fill out the name/address/phone/email form on the back of the card?

No, none of those. The guy scratched off an unmarked section of the card, which I guess confirmed it was a winner, and also revealed a barcode which he scanned, probably to let the state know he was on the hook for the money, and then he handed me $50 in cash from the register. That's it. No ceremony, no Bob Barker or anything like that. I gave some of my largess to the homeless guy on the stoop outside.

I've never bought a lottery ticket, but I'm willing to try one if it's given me. This is about the fourth time that's ever happened, and the first one that's come up a winner however petty. These tickets cost $10 each, and I'm sure our niece spent a lot more than $50 to acquire her stash. So that explains where all that lottery money comes from, and that's why I'm not buying any tickets.

traveling broccoli chef

Most weekends that my days are both busy are because of concerts. Not this last weekend. No concerts. But Saturday was the last night of Pesach, and my friends who invite a bunch of their friends to their family Seder did that on this date this year. Sunday was Easter, and B. and I always spend that with her family. So I get two holidays for the price of one.

Pesach and a family Easter are both food-oriented celebrations, and my contribution to both is usually to bring along my trademark and favorite veggie, broccoli. The question is how to cook it. At home for a dinner side dish I usually just steam it, and I've done that for holidays. But usually I look for something fancier. Most of my specialty broccoli dishes are roasted, and have rather complicated recipes. So when I do those I usually make them in advance and bring them along to be heated by microwave just before serving. The problem is that reheated roasted broccoli is a rather sad thing compared to the fresh stuff.

This year, however, browsing through my recipe collection I found one which uses steamed broccoli and also cashews, which both B. and I like a lot. And the recipe was not complicated to prepare. So I made it twice, putting all the sauce ingredients together at home and packing everything up, altering the procedure for circumstances.

At the Seder, the hosting couple split duties this way: the wife organizes the invites and the table seating, while the husband and one of the sons do all the cooking. They're really well organized and prepare lots of dishes, so (with prearrangement) I figured they could add this in. When I arrived, I gave them the instructions:

This is a four-step recipe.

One, steam the broccoli. [Holds up large storage bag full of cut-up broccoli pieces.]

Two, melt 1/3 cup of margarine or butter or whatever you have in a small saucepan.

Three, stir this in - it's mostly soy sauce and garlic - and bring the mixture to a boil. [Holds up small sealed container of the sauce ingredients I'd mixed at home.]

Four, remove from the heat, stir in the cashews, and pour it over the broccoli. [Holds up small bag of cashew pieces.]

And I left them to it. They did a splendid job, and the dish got raves around the table despite being served following three other excellent veggie dishes that others had brought.

For Easter, where prep is more relaxed and there's much more room in the kitchen, it seemed best to steam the broccoli beforehand and bring it in a serving dish - steamed broccoli reheats in a microwave better than roasted broccoli does - and asked our niece who hosts for a small saucepan, cooking spoon, a free burner on the range, and the butter, and did the cooking myself. Also a successful dish.

Plans to repeat this next year are definitely on.

concert review: Ariel Quartet

I crammed a lot of detail into my review of this concert, enough to make me feel disappointed in the roughness and lack of sophistication in the writing. For me, the hardest part of concert reviewing can be finding the right words to describe the strong experience of reacting to the specific performers' styles and abilities.

I wasn't sure if my editors would let pass my rather cheeky comparison of this concert's repertoire with that of the previous Ariel concert I reviewed, but it got through. However, though I provided one, the published article has no link to that earlier review.

The big difference between those two concerts was something off-topic enough for this one that I didn't mention it this time. The previous concert had been held to show off the Violins of Hope, instruments rescued and restored from the Nazi Holocaust. As I mentioned in that review, being played by such excellent performers pushed against the limitations of the Violins of Hope's limited qualities as musical instruments.

After this week's concert, I got a chance to talk about this a little with the group's cellist. She said it was so much easier to play this time on their own instruments, whose natures and capacities they know well. And the extreme aptitude of the performance confirmed that.

Another thing there was no room to mention was the pre-concert masterclass, something I don't always have time to attend. At Kohl, the guest artists usually hold a masterclass with local high-school students. This time the ensemble was a string quintet rather than quartet, playing the scherzo from Schubert's work for that ensemble. The most interesting part of the teaching was the request that the students sing passages from the music, to help them appreciate matters of balance and flow.

to see the giant woman

As long as I was going in to the City for the Isidore String Quartet concert on Wednesday, I decided to add a little extra time so that I could see the piece of public art that's currently roiling the place in controversy, "R-Evolution" by Marco Cochrane, a 45-foot-tall statue of a giant (did I say that?) naked woman planted in the plaza in front of the Ferry Building. Photos I've seen of it there don't seem to capture it very well, but it looks sort of like this:

Apparently it's supposed to "transcend outdated perceptions of the female body and celebrate it as a symbol of strength, beauty and empowerment" or something like that, but perhaps it could convey that message a bit more clearly if it had a few appropriate clothes on. And was not quite so gigantic.

This is not (fortunately) a permanent thing. It's going to be there for six months. Apparently it's been going around on a world tour for about ten years now. Here's a bunch more photos in various locales.

The giant naked woman is made of a steel inner structure with a wire mesh framing to give her a female shape. That makes her fairly translucent. She has short hair. She has very long fingers. She has toenails, which I mention because you can get close enough to see that. She has no sign of any genitals whatever, which is relieving but a little dishonest.

There are a number of rude comments online - "dumb" "disgusting" "inappropriate" etc - but she's there and I didn't regret the little extra time it took to see her.

concert review: Isidore String Quartet

This is the group that won the latest Banff String Quartet Competition, three years ago. I only saw videos of that, which is not at all like being there in person, so I was eager to hear this group live and up close.

A very light, bright, and chipper sound, I thought. Normally we think of Beethoven as the big brusque composer while Mozart is smooth and graceful. This was almost the other way around. Beethoven's Op. 127 was delicate, even hesitant at times, while Mozart's K. 465 was more robust - if only by contrast, for it was certainly also graceful, and there was no attempt to make anything horribly modernist out of the work's infamous 'dissonant' introduction - which is unlike anything else in the piece.

There was one small bit outside of the classics, a brief recent quartet by Billy Childs, one of a contingent of jazz players who also dabble in classical. Nothing jazz-like about this piece which was largely of the 'four voices wandering around' school of composition. Isidore played a different quartet by this composer at Banff and I didn't find it very interesting either.

Tolkien Society awards

The Tolkien Society (the UK-based fan organization of which I've been a member for many years) has announced the final ballots for its annual awards. Any member of the Society is eligible to vote; the deadline is April 25.

This year the Society has introduced a new method of picking the finalists out of the long list of initial nominees: panels of 5-6 expert jurors, one for each award. And I, perforce, was on the panel for Best Book, the books being full-length scholarly monographs or collections of articles.

The eligibility winnowing process (a complex matter in itself) had left ten candidates to be considered. The 5 of us on this panel were sent links to PDF copies of all the nominees (arrangements having been made for this with the publishers), and to a Google Docs spreadsheet to cast our votes on. We were given about a month to read them all and make our choices, by putting checkmarks in cells under our names on the spreadsheet.

I'd already seriously browsed through 3 of the 10 books in hard copy, but I had a lot of reading ahead of me. I loaded the files onto both my desktop computer and my tablet, and did a lot of the reading on the tablet while taking transit to and from concerts. Still, I pushed the deadline pretty close, but at least I had strong clear reactions, positive or otherwise, to all the nominees.

The panelists were asked to cast between 3 and 5 votes for the worthiest books. In the end, all of us picked 4. Our choices were not all identical, but there was a general consensus. There were 6 books which received 2 or more votes, and those became the finalists. I'm pretty pleased with the list: everything I picked is on it, and even the ones I didn't pick I thought were decent and worthwhile books.

And that's what we're presenting for the members to vote on.

crisis averted

We signed our tax forms - prepared by our accountant - electronically on Monday. There was a notation that the money we owed the IRS would be withdrawn by it on Tuesday from B's checking account - which we've used for that purpose and for refunds for many years.

But it wasn't withdrawn on Tuesday.

At this point I got slightly worried. Maybe the IRS was just running slow, but also: B's bank had been eaten by another bank (a common thing with banks) and the routing number was changed. They'd told her that the old number would still be valid, but what if something had gone wrong?

I tried contacting the accountant on Wednesday, without success - maybe he was still recuperating from tax season - and was going to do so again Thursday morning, when B. checked again and the withdrawal had been made. It was just the IRS being slow.

At any rate I've put a note in the folder where I'm keeping documents going into next year's taxes, to inform the accountant of the routing number and have him change his records.

on a rover

Our play-reading group having made its way through most of the Shakespeare we wanted to do, and a number of 18C plays both English and French (the latter in translation), I suggested we venture into Restoration comedy, English plays from when the theaters reopened after 1660. I don't know anything about Restoration comedies - they're not much done today, and I've never seen one - but I found a list of major works, noted that the principal female author was Aphra Behn, and that her most prominent play seemed to be The Rover, so I suggested we try that.

We've just finished it, and my word. It's my understanding that Behn did not create the plot for this one, but merely entirely rewrote (and the writing is very good) an older play. I would hope that's true. It features exiled English cavaliers during the Commonwealth, cavorting in Naples. I thought Shakespeare was full of bawdy, but this handily outdoes it. It gets worse. I found myself in one scene reading a character who spends the entire scene as a drunken rapist. I had to ask for a break after that. Later on, there's an attempted gang-bang. Apparently, the urgent question in these cases is whether the victim is a "woman of quality" or not. (The female characters spend a lot of time in disguise, so it can be hard to tell from their dress.) If she is a "woman of quality," it's not OK to rape her. If she isn't, it apparently is.

There is no way this play could be staged today. You couldn't even cut it: there would be nothing left.

memories

Having spent Friday evening at a concert recital of emotionally intense contemporary musical theater songs for female voice, and part of Saturday looking up other performances on YouTube, I shouldn't have been surprised when another such song floated into my mental ear. But I don't have a lot of such songs in my regular listening, so I was startled by having another showing up. At first I could just hear tiny fragments, and it wasn't for a while that they coalesced enough that I could identify the song. It was Mirabel's song from Encanto, "Waiting on a Miracle."

Walking through SF's Chinatown, where I've taken to having my pre-concert meals, I saw a sign for a restaurant which I suddenly realized must have been the one where my class had lunch on a school expedition to Chinatown when I was about ten. We visited a fortune cookie factory (not the one you'll see if you go to Chinatown today) and had a dim sum lunch, table-served on a lazy Susan. Perhaps my first experience with Chinese food, close to my first experience with chopsticks - I remember somebody showing me how to hold them, but I don't think that was the occasion - and my first experience drinking what I did not realize was tea. Years later in a conversation I said I'd never had tea, to which the reply was "You have it all the time in Chinese restaurants" and I said "That's tea?" I'd never known what it was.

How did I realize it must be the same restaurant? From the name. It's the Hang Ah Tea Room. I remember noting it at the time, and noting the name because it encodes how to get there: you go up Sacramento Street and then Hang Ah right.

From which I realize that my propensity for making puns predates my supposed introduction to the art form, by my high school science-fiction club, by about ten years.

a little stage music

I should have been doing something else, but never mind: a senior recital at Stanford by a soprano whose repertoire lay entirely in contemporary musical theater was an attractive enough idea that we both went, being as usual when we do something like this probably the only attendees who weren't personal friends of the singer.

She was talented but had a small voice and not much stage presence, so I could understand why she said she's pursuing a career in backstage work and management instead of performing, but she chose a good selection of songs I'd mostly never heard. Much better than the bleak and dull material that I've found from too much recent musical theater. A couple of the songs - from Next to Normal and Newsies respectively - stuck with me enough that I dug out recorded performances of them.



Now, if our student had brought the same crispness and rhythm that she gave to that second song to the Baker's Wife's song from Into the Woods, she would really have had something. One other thing the above performance has in common with the recital I heard last night: the piano was too loud.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Has Marin Alsop ever conducted SFS before? If so I can't recall it. She's one of the great conductors of our time and SFS is still one of the great orchestras, so the two major works on this program were both pretty sizzling.

Gabriela Montero played her own Piano Concerto No. 1, which is subtitled "Latin" as in Latin America - she's a Venezuelan expatriate - but this was just a hint of flavoring, nothing of the "tourist music" air to it. The piano part is very active and continuous without being florid; the sound was attractive but not goopy; and the work had real heft, enough to make it fascinating to listen to all the way through. At times, Montero's playing reminded me of Rachmaninoff, at other times of Bach, without actually sounding in the least like either of them.

Then Alsop led a dramatic and atmospheric performance of Samuel Barber's dense and compact Symphony No. 1. Really brought this work to vividness - same condition as the Montero - and emphasized the extent to which its one movement contains seeds of the standard four. In this performance it sounded more like an ancestor to the Korngold Symphony than anything else.

Also on the program, Antropolis by Gabriela Ortiz, and this was tourist music. Had the same jumpy nature and constant percussion battery of other Mexican dancehall-inspired pieces like El Salon Mexico and Danzon No. 2 and Huapango without being anywhere near as attractive or tuneful as any of them.

Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, just because, I suppose, followed immediately by Joan Tower's Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, which is nowhere near as memorable and was probably there just for its cheeky title.

two more concerts

1. So I've occasionally mentioned before about TACO, the Terrible Adult Chamber Orchestra, an ensemble intended to let musicians not ready for prime time have fun playing where nobody has to listen to them. B., who is about as good a player as this group ever gets, belongs because it gives her a chance to play without the rigor or speed of even a nonprofessional community orchestra.

That being the situation, why did TACO's director commission (and pay for) a new composition by a respected local composer? But she did. Then the composer died just after delivering the piece, and then the pandemic happened, so it wasn't until now that TACO held one of its very rare public concerts and played the music. At the director's request I persuaded my editor at the Daily Journal to let me review it. He consented because he was sure I could make it entertaining to read about. If the DJ's website will let you access the review you can decide for yourself if you agree with him that I succeeded.

Amazingly, TACO gathered all its skirts together and did a pretty fair job for an amateur group at playing the new composition, so I didn't have to dissemble on that. They were less effective on the other orchestral composition, but that was a piano concerto carried almost entirely by the soloist, and he was a professional pianist so that was all right. The rest of the concert - the whole thing was a memorial to the same composer - was chamber music by professionals, except for one piece over which I decided to draw a curtain and just mention that they played it.

2. The Palo Alto Philharmonic is the, oh, third-tier (i.e. pretty good) nonprofessional group for which our niece E. plays double bass. So along with E's husband and his mother (E's parents don't live around here), we showed up. Surprisingly lusty performance of Copland's quiet and melancholy Our Town suite, and a successfully winning rendition of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Symphonic Variations on an African Air, more pleasing than when I've heard it before. But Dvorak's Symphony from the New World is too familiar a piece for this group to bring anything special to the table, and it was just a decent average run-through - with, I noted, no repeat of the first movement exposition.

what else

As long as I was going up to Berkeley on Friday to see a play, it was the ideal occasion to spend part of the afternoon doing something else.

The idea came to mind a couple weeks earlier, when I read an article in the AAA magazine on places to see wildflowers without crowds. One of them was nearby: the Jepson Prairie Preserve, a chunk of land trust in the ranching flatlands of the lower Sacramento Valley, east of Fairfield.

I could drive out there easily, and Friday was the perfect time to go: three days after the last rains ended, not yet too hot (the temp turned out to be 75F at 3 pm when I was there), the wildflowers should be well in bloom. There are docent tours on weekends, but I'm not up to that much walking, so I went on my own.

Near the end of the dirt road leading into the preserve, there was room to park on one side of the road and an enclosure with picnic tables, informative plaques, and a portapotty; and on the other side a gate leading to a nature trail which is the only part of the preserve open to visitors.

Off in the distance I could see sheets of yellow among the green fields, but none by this end of the nature trail. Feeling disappointed, I nevertheless walked in and found that I merely needed to look more closely. There were flowers everywhere, just not in giant sheet-like profusion. In just a short walk I saw at least seven different kinds of flowers, some yellow, some purple, also blue ones and white ones, mostly in colonies near others of their own kind. I found more after I drove over to the other end of the trail, a bit of a way down the road by the large vernal pool, as the plaques informed me this kind of lake is called. (Dry in the summer, it was full of water now up to its marshy shores.) Some of the flowers I saw are among the ones pictured on this page. The Goldfields and Yellow Carpet were the most common yellow ones. I'm not good at taking photos, and even if I had, I don't think they could have captured what it looked like to walk among the flowers only visible close by.

They're blooming now, and should still be until the lake dries up in May or so. If you're in the area and you like wildflowers, go now.

saw a play

"Art" by Yasmina Reza, translated by Christopher Hampton, directed by Emilie Whelan

I saw this play in London in 1998, a couple years into the run of the first English-language production (the original is in French). I thought it'd be worth seeing again, especially after Kosman gave it a good review (halfway down this page). This was by Shotgun Players, a Berkeley troupe whom I once saw in a production of Hamlet in which the actors pull slips of paper out of a hat (actually Yorick's skull) at the beginning of each performance to see who'll play which part.

Nothing so avant-garde this time. "Art" was well-performed, but I didn't like this production as well as I did the London one. This was mostly because the director took the emphasis away from one theme - what is art, what makes it valuable and how do we know what we like? - and on to another, the nature of male friendship, a depiction completely alien to anything in my experience of friendship, but whatever.

In this play, a moderately successful man drops a large load of money on buying a painting by a fashionable modern artist and shows it off to his two closest friends. The painting is pure white, supposedly with features and highlights that only the connoisseur can see. One of the friends is offended, less by what he sees as the artistic worthlessness of the painting than by what it says about his friend's taste. The other tries to be agreeable to both of them in turn.

The third, who is the youngest and least well-off, illustrates his haplessness with a long monologue about being caught in the middle of an argument between his fiancée and his mother over the wording of the wedding invitation. The London performer (I no longer remember who was in the show at the time I saw it, sorry) delivered this as an evenly-paced steadily rising hysteria. This one did it in rising and falling outbursts. He did, however, at one point deliver a golden piece of advice I didn't remember from the previous showing. He said, "'Calm down' is the worst thing you could say to somebody who's lost their calm." And this is true. It will anger them further because it shows you don't care what they're angry about, you just want to exert control over them.

Anyway, the art side of it interests me. Are there actually painters who produce blank monochromatic paintings that are considered great art? Yes there are. I've been to this display of fourteen featureless black paintings and sat there for a few minutes pretending to be moved by it. I have never felt more ripped off by an art museum, despite the fact that there is no admission charge.

And do their defenders actually make the desperate argument of pointing to minute variations in the texture as where the value of the art lies? Yes they do and my thoughts on the value of modernist art are there. It's also my answer to the question the painting's owner asks his critic: how can someone who doesn't claim any expertise in the subject judge the work? The answer is that if it has any value, any viewer should be able to pick that up. Crikes, why do people with no technical training in music whatever listen to symphonies? They must be getting something valuable out of the aesthetic experience or else there would be no point in performing for them.

imported children's books

I got into a conversation about which British children's books beloved there also became American favorites and which didn't. This came through an experience I've had before, a reference by a Brit to some children's story or character that I'd barely or never heard of, but which context showed was universally known there. I'm making the assumption of what's known in the US from what's known to me, a leap I'd hardly take for current material, but children's lit from the early to mid 20C ... I'm pretty confident that if I hadn't heard of it, it wasn't widely known in the US.

So what's the score?

Winnie the Pooh made it in the US.

Peter Rabbit did.

The Hobbit and Narnia did, of course.

Just William didn't. The first I ever heard of that was reading that these books were favorites of John Lennon's in childhood.

Worzel Gummidge didn't. The first I'd ever heard of this character was years ago when somebody wrote that Michael Foot looked like him. "Do you not get scarecrows over there?" I was asked when I said this. Of course we do: and the nameless Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz is one of our most beloved characters. What we didn't get was Worzel Gummidge.

Enid Blyton didn't. The first I ever heard of her was a British critic making the comparison in a blithe dismissal of Tolkien's early chapters.

I'm sure there are others I just haven't seen references to, or have forgotten about.

Then there's the mixed cases:

The Wind in the Willows made it. I don't think it's as widely beloved in the US as it is in the UK, but it's certainly known.

Swallows and Amazons ... I think that became sort of a special interest. It didn't become well known, but is cherished by a measurable number of Americans in a way that other less well-known ones are not.

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.