that was strange

I was up in the middle of the night, and occupying my time watching a YouTube clip of a John Oliver segment, when all of a sudden the picture froze, though the sound kept sailing on. As this went on for a while, I force-closed the browser, re-started it - the tab was cued to just before the picture stopped - but it only played for a couple of minutes before this happened again. Repeat, rinse, and again.

I got through the entire video eventually, but then the browser - I use Firefox - started freezing whenever I tried doing something else. Rebooting the computer didn't help. I'd start Firefox, it'd work fine for a couple minutes, then it'd freeze - and it wouldn't unfreeze; at one point I left it alone for an hour to see what would happen.

Then it got to the point where it was freezing as soon as I'd start it. Before it got that far, I'd searched for help, and the only clear advice was to uncheck something called hardware acceleration, which I'd already done to solve some other problem. Beyond that was things I couldn't do, and I was thinking about taking the computer in to the software wizards when they opened in the morning, when all of a sudden the problem stopped, and the browser works fine again.

Well, this computer is nearing the end of its lifespan anyway, so sooner or later I'll have to do something, but in the meantime I'm just going to hope this doesn't recur. If I'd been asleep when I should have been, I'd never have noticed anything.

another day

Last week's searing temperatures have calmed down, and we're back to the merely uncomfortably warm. B. runs the fans in the bedroom all night, and this enables us to sleep - in fact, I need to keep a heavy robe on because of the moving air.

All we have to worry about locally right now is the World Cup. My interest in this is best measured with a zero, but I do have to worry that when a game is scheduled at the big local stadium, the traffic closures can extend as far as the passing highways, which I sometimes use. So I've put little "avoid 237" stickers on my pocket calendar for days that games are scheduled, one of which is today. But I don't think I'll have to go that way any time soon.

listen to Elim Chan conduct

In search of online interviews and other such publicity material about Elim Chan, the San Francisco Symphony's new music director, I found a number of full-length concert videos of her conducting various European orchestras in standard classics of the repertoire. They were all good performances - I listened to the bunch of them with full appreciation - but two struck me as particularly outstanding. They captured the fervor and intensity that these pieces had when new and bold, they were led and played with full commitment to the music, and they had me captivated on the edge of my seat throughout - an experience I find rare enough in concert and even rarer in recordings. But this is the amazing conducting that I heard in person when she led Holst's The Planets in a guest appearance at SFS a few years ago.

One of these particularly outstanding renditions was of Brahms's Fourth Symphony, his last and most experimental essay in the form, and my long-time favorite of his. Compelling and urgent.



The other was the monster itself, Beethoven's Fifth, the work that originally sold me on the heavy classics. If bad performances have led you to find this work dull and routine, just listen to this fiery attack.



The other full-length recordings I listened to of Elim Chan conducting included:

Tchaikovsky's Fifth

Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade

Shostakovich's Fifth

Shostakovich's Tenth

Beethoven's First

critical mutterings

Dave Hurwitz, executive editor of ClassicsToday.com, has over the last several years been publishing literally hundreds of videos on YouTube featuring him talking about various aspects of classical music: reviews, lists of the greatest (or worst) this and that, opinion pieces, and on. He mostly eschews music clips for copyright reasons, and I wish he had transcripts, because it's tiring to listen to him yammer for half an hour where you could read it in five minutes.

Anyway, one of his latest opinion pieces was billed as a praise of the San Francisco Symphony for hiring Elim Chan as its new music director. I say "billed as" because much of it was actually a complaint, and as often when listening to Dave (I call him by his first name because he's so personalized and intimate in his presentations) I begin to think he's yammering more than he can coherently and judiciously talk about.

Let's start with what Dave gets right. First, he's absolutely correct that picking a fairly young and well-regarded conductor like Chan was a wise choice. After Michael Tilson Thomas retired, another senior conductor like Esa-Pekka Salonen was a good idea, because Salonen had the authority and seasoning not to be overshadowed by the long and fabulous reign of his predecessor. But after a fairly short Salonen regime - and we weren't expecting a long one, just perhaps not as short as we actually got - now's the time to raise someone younger, experienced but not encrusted, up from the next tier and see what she can do.

Second, Dave is concerned that ten weeks a year will not be enough time for Chan to really put her stamp on the orchestra. A great music director has to really commit to their post; they can zoom off and guest conduct elsewhere, sure, but they can't be a jet-setter just dropping in for a couple weeks once in a while.

But what Dave didn't note is that Chan's contract says ten weeks only for the first year. Maybe she already has a lot of other commitments for that year. Starting with her second year she'll be here longer; maybe not long enough to meet Dave's standards for commitment, but it's a step in the right direction. Also, even the ten weeks is a contractual minimum; it's possible she could manage more.

My other complaint is his characterization of Esa-Pekka Salonen flouncing off in a huff because he didn't like the orchestra's policies. That's unfair. You have to remember that Salonen didn't need another music director job when he came to SFS; he didn't even want another one; but SFS sold him on it by offering him an irresistible opportunity to do things he really wanted to do. And then, because of budget concerns which really didn't make any sense, they took those things away. And I'm not talking, as Dave is, about the superfluous European tour that got cancelled; I'm talking about special programs like the SoundBox and the Collaborative Partners initiative.

And Salonen didn't flounce off; he didn't renege on his contract. He simply said that this was not what he signed up for and declined to renew his contract when it expired. I think he had every right to do that, no call to be criticized for it, and it was the right thing for him to do considering the circumstances. It was the circumstances - the orchestra's unnecessary retrenchment - which was at fault.

That's where I think Dave Hurwitz is off-base, and Joshua Kosman - former critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, whose judgments heavily informed mine - has a better take on it.

a miscellaneous Jane Yolen memory

Jane Yolen has passed on. She certainly accomplished a lot while she was among us: author of literally hundreds of books. Many of them very short children's books, but some were longer. I have about 35 of them. I probably cherish most some of the short story collections, but my strongest memories are of some of the full-length novels: Briar Rose, Cards of Grief, The Devil's Arithmetic. I am also particularly glad to have an essay collection on fantasy, titled Touch Magic.

What really sticks with me about Jane Yolen, though, is that for some years we were pretty good friends. As in, if we'd see each other at a convention we'd sit down for a long chat. I think this began as a result of her first (of two) appearances as Mythcon Guest of Honor, in 1984. I was editing Mythprint in those days, and I wanted some celebratory material on the GoH, and I recall writing her with some bibliographical questions - she was prolific even then. We had some mutual friends in the apa Apanage to which she belonged, so that was a seed for acquaintance. That must be how it started.

During that period - it must have been about 15 or more years before we fell out of touch - I visited her at her home in western Massachusetts twice I think. But what I remember most is a visit somewhere else. In the summer of 1992, I spent a week in Edinburgh in Scotland. At that time, Jane and her husband David were renting a house in St. Andrews, not far to the north, so I drove up one day to see them. The rented house was an impressive semi-Gothic structure, but my particular memory comes from Jane driving me over to a modern suburban neighborhood, to the home of friends of theirs. These friends had decided to hold an American-style backyard barbecue, complete with hamburgers fired on a grill; and I was Jane's guest. Soon after I arrived, it started to rain pretty heavily, so we all grabbed the fixings and retreated inside. But this was Scotland, where a rainy day at any time of year is normal, and despite my limited experience there I knew that. What puzzled me was that any of the natives should have been surprised at the rain.

busy day

Wow, did I have a busy day on Monday. First I had a doctor's appointment at noon to discuss the results of my test from last week. I had to take a roundabout route to get there, because there was some event going on at the Apple spaceship, which is along the regular route.

That gave me half an hour to get home before the regular starting time of my Zoom play-reading session. I made it, ten minutes to spare. This week we were finishing up Dion Boucicault's London Assurance, our latest successful venture into obscure 19th century comedy. This one features a man who convinces his father that he is not himself but a random lookalike. Then he keeps forgetting that there are things he therefore shouldn't know.

When we finished that, I had enough time to grab a hasty lunch before heading over to the other side of the urban area for another visit to the specialized dentist who is taking care of the hole where my extracted tooth used to be. Done there - uncomfortable but not painful, as my previous visits have been - I stopped by the nearby excellent tamale makers for dinner makings before heading home.

After dinner, another Zoom session. The Lamplighters, the local Gilbert & Sullivan society, were presenting an hour's introduction to Iolanthe, their next production, focused on Sullivan's music. I know Iolanthe pretty well, but I thought I might learn something, and I did pick up a little. (The oboe solo at Iolanthe's introduction is the only extended instrumental solo in the entire G&S canon.)

After that I fell asleep early, and no wonder.

venue review

Review of a new pop-music concert venue in my area, the Siesta Valley Bowl. Only it's not new, it's the amphitheater that used to host the now-defunct California Shakespeare Festival.

You know, I stopped going there long before Cal Shakes died, and the reason was the acoustics. The bowl was not focused, and the unamplified actors had to shout to be heard. That's assuming that a plane landing at or taking off from the nearby Oakland Airport wasn't passing overhead, which they did frequently, because that would rip a few pages out of the script entirely, making the actors inaudible no matter what they did.

So, all in all, this is a better venue for amplified pop music than it was for unamplified theater, assuming it doesn't bother the neighbors. Though I will say that I was curious enough to go and listen to what the review said was probably "the finest song in [the performer's] entire catalog," and all I can say is that if that is his finest song, I'm really glad I don't have to hear any of the others.

driving

B. and I had received an invitation for Saturday. Our great-niece, T., has graduated from high school - and beyond that, owing to an arrangement between her high school and a local junior college, a lot of extra classes, and four years of summer school, she also completed an A.S. degree, normally two years full-time of junior college, at the same time. So she goes off to university this fall a couple of legs ahead.

So T.'s parents, A. and C., decided to host a big late-afternoon party to celebrate. We've been invited to some earlier birthday and other celebrations but were not able to attend. So since we did have this day free, we decided to go.

The thing is, T. and her family live three hours' drive and a mountain range away from here, in a large and comfortable home out in the boondocks far from anything, so it's a major investment in time to go there. I drove us, we spent an hour and a half there, and then B. wanted to get back, partly to perform evening ablutions before it was too late. It took even longer to get home, thanks to a brush fire in the freeway median, but we did that too. Amazingly I got us home without feeling too tired out on the way.

Not a trip we may ever take again, at least not together, but we did get a chance to congratulate (congraduate) the honoree, and chat with parents and grandparents. It was a good outing, despite the trouble it took to get there.

automation

This is very 1963, but it's also disturbingly relevant today:

one thing about doctors

and dentists is that - I suppose depending on their specialty - is that they love looking around the inside of your body, where all the blood and guts are. (In the case of dentists, close-up views of the gums and around the tongue.) If they have cameras floating around in there, they want to show off the view to the patient, and are rather hurt if you decline on grounds of ickk.

voting for the least annoying candidate

Here's a clue, politicians. If you're running for a relatively low-profile down-ballot office, like state legislature or a county office, don't deluge the voters with endless flyers or giant ads on tv or in newspapers. Because all you'll do is make me wonder, "Who's funding this person?" and make me reluctant to vote for you.

Indeed, for one local office there were two candidates, of which I was very skeptical of the incumbent. But the challenger's ads were so glaring that I got even more uncomfortable with him. I voted for the incumbent, who won.

ok, here's the story ...

I was asked to tell about Shostakovich and the San Jose Symphony, so here it is.

This happened in 1992, after long-time music director George Cleve was persuaded to retire. Those who heard Cleve in later years may think of him as a mellow Brahmsian figure, but that's not what he was like when he was younger. Everyone agreed his music-making was inspired, but in rehearsal he could be tempestuous, even tyrannical - B. sang with the symphony in those years, and can testify to the long rehearsals and the tantrums - and eventually it was just too much.

To hunt for Cleve's replacement, the symphony held one of those "seasons of discovery" that orchestras in search of a new music director are sometimes fond of. A set of prospective conductors were invited to lead one concert each which served as an audition. One of the finalists, who didn't get the job, was Marin Alsop, now probably the most renowned female conductor around. But remember this was 1992, she was young and still little-known - it was the first I'd heard of her - and it may be a good thing she didn't get the job, because it meant she didn't go down with the ship. But I get ahead of myself.

The successful candidate was a Ukrainian named Leonid Grin (pronounced Green). His audition concert featured a dark, somber and compelling rendition of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, preceded by Grin's own brief talk about what this music meant to him. It was a stunner of a performance, and it was probably responsible for him getting the job.

Unfortunately, it turned out that dark, depressing Russian music was the only thing that Grin could really do well. His attempts at being light-hearted were particularly cringe-worthy; I remember a rendition of Ravel's Bolero that was especially pathetic. He put the snare-drummer (regular percussionist Galen Lemmon) in front of the orchestra on the grounds that this was a snare-drum concerto, and it just didn't work.

I don't say that ten years of this ham-handedness was solely responsible for the symphony's decline and eventual bankruptcy - an incompetent management was the primary cause - but it didn't help. After the orchestra's demise, an entirely new management hired most of the same musicians - nothing wrong with them - and founded a new and more successfully-run orchestra initially named Symphony Silicon Valley, now Symphony San Jose. Grin has never been seen here since, though SSV did eventually bring back the older and mellower George Cleve as a guest conductor.

two outings

On Friday, the Redwood Symphony put on another of its occasional spectacular Sondheim semi-staged productions, this one of A Little Night Music. B. came with me to this one. I was unfamiliar with the show and hadn't heard much of it, and what most struck me on this encounter was how little it sounds like standard-issue Sondheim. His usual ticks are completely absent. I enjoyed most of the music; the closest thing to a catchy song in it is "The Glamorous Life" and the most tiresome and irritating is "A Weekend in the Country," which I had heard before somewhere.

The orchestra - this was Tunick's rarely-heard full symphony orchestration - did very well, but the singers were mixed. Fredrik had a weak voice, and Anne was whiny and annoying, which undercut both the character and the plot. But Desiree (Annmarie Macry) did a good job with "Send in the Clowns," and William Giammona as Carl-Magnus had complete command of his character's infinite self-regard; he was even better than the guy on the original cast recording.

Sunday I headed out to the local area's most popular ethnic event, the Greek festival put on annually by a local Greek Orthodox church in the forlorn hope that attendees might be distracted from the food and the dancing long enough to pay regard to the religion. Instead, I spent two hours eating the like of lamb chops, dolmas, and a new offering of fried cheese (saganaki) that was quite delicious. Having arrived at opening, I was able to get in some of this before the lines became insanely long, and at that point I just left.

However, I did unusually run into someone I knew, and thus spent a considerable part of my eating time in the company of the marketing director from Music@Menlo, whom I've had a lot of professional contact with, plus her husband and two small children, whom I hadn't met before because she doesn't bring them to work. We chatted on a lot of music gossip, such as the appointments of new music directors in both San Francisco and L.A., hopeful signs both of them, and I told stories like how Shostakovich led to the fall of the old San Jose Symphony.

Bay Area Book Festival

I spent much of Saturday attending four politically-oriented panels at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley, all of them in the rented facility of the Freight and Salvage stage.

I was unfamiliar with the names of any of the participants, but they turned out mostly to be authors of books, usually non-fiction, on the topics of their panels. But the subjects interested me.

The first panel was something of a damp squib. Titled "Mindful Democracy," it was full of activists who said that democracy wasn't, or shouldn't be, a war between two hostile tribes, but a communitarian act of compassion and connection. But they offered no way to get there from here, or to solve the mutual suspicions that characterize our political world.

The second, though, was a dazzler. The topic was detention of immigrants, and the highlight speaker, buttressed by the others, was a historian from Stanford named Ana Raquel Minian, who argued that detention of immigrants is a long-standing US practice and who summarized her book tracing that history back to 1900. I was impressed enough with Minian's speaking that I went to the sales table afterwards and bought that book, titled In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention.

Moderator for this panel was a local named Piper Kerman, whom I didn't know by name but who turned out to be the author of the original book of Orange is the New Black.

The other panels, all like the second full of hard advice on what to do about it, featured the topics of press freedom (support independent journalism) and academic freedom. Particularly excoriating speakers in the latter, notably UCB professor Hatem Bazian, who ran off the rails a few times but who was most impressive saying that public education is a public good that should not leave students shivering in debt and consequently fearing to speak out because of potential damage to their careers.

on my way home

Having spent Wednesday morning of my LA trip doing library research at UCLA, I was able to get as far on my drive home as Pismo Beach to stay overnight. ("What's in Pismo Beach?" asked my LA hosts, wondering why I was going there. "Hotels," I replied.)

That gave me enough time on Thursday to do something I'd only done once before: drive along the narrow and twisty coast road, the Big Sur highway. This is often closed for extended periods because of landslides or storm damage, but it's open now. Lots of lovely scenery, visible through the intermittently intense rain that fell that day, and the number of stretches of road covered in loose rocks that had fallen from the cliffs above were notable. I stopped at Willow Creek, where you can drive down below the bridge to the tiny stone beach where the creek hits the water. Despite the dicey weather, lots of surfers plying their trade out on the waves. Also, much further north in Big Sur, the Henry Miller Memorial Library, which is not a library but a bookstore specializing in literature with moral content. Both Tolkien (The Two Towers and The Return of the King) and Lewis (The Screwtape Letters and A Grief Observed) made appearances, as did Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick.

And one more stop. I'd made a reservation to tour Hearst Castle, which I'd also been to only once before, many years ago. Checking their menu of tours, I'd found one designed for the walking-disabled, with no stairs. I am able but very slow on stairs, so that was the one for me. There were only three of us on this tour, guided by a Bryan Cranston type named Phil, who talked very fast and rather quietly. He kept leading us into rooms occupied by a much larger regular tour group (the same one each time), so he'd huddle us into a far corner and talk even faster and more quietly, so I didn't absorb much of what he was saying. I did gather two things: first, that the not particularly devout Hearst was fascinated by collecting medieval Christian iconography; second, that his expectations of what visitors should do and how behave meant I would not have enjoyed a visit here in his time.

B. would find the decorations fascinating, but I'm not taking her here. Opportunities to sit during the tour were few, and the shuttle bus going up to the castle from the visitor center took the winding and twisty road at breakneck speed. Even I was a little nauseous.

concert review: Los Angeles Philharmonic

I had wanted to hear Gustavo Dudamel conduct one more time in LA before he left its music directorship for that of New York at the end of this season. But I was in no position to visit LA this season until April, and then Dudamel was gone until late May. Of his last programs after his return, the most likely was his semi-staged production of Wagner’s opera Die Walkure. It’s a very long opera, so they divided the three acts into separate days. I picked Act 3, because that’s the part with both the Ride of the Valkyries and the Magic Fire Music. I bought my ticket for a pretty penny and Sunday I went to Disney Hall and heard it.

The orchestra was displayed on the stage, with the singers mostly up on a balcony behind them, though for part of the conclusion Wotan and Brunnhilde moved to a catwalk in front of the orchestra, very close to my seat at the front of the side terrace.

The music making was pretty good, though the Ride of the Valkyries was too fast and lightweight. The Magic Fire Music, though, was slow and powerful, making a grand conclusion. As for the long part between, purely a dialogue between Wotan and Brunnhilde, that wasn’t too boring, mostly because I didn’t have to sit through Acts 1 and 2. I spent more of it watching Dudamel than paying attention to the singers, Ryan Speedo Green and Christine Goerke, though they had strong voices and had no trouble being heard above the mostly not very loud music. Back during the much noisier Ride, though, the Valkyries could often not be heard over the orchestra except when all eight of them were singing together, which was pretty thrilling.

Staging was minimal. The Valkyries stood in front of papier mache statues of horses, one of which appeared to be a unicorn. Costumes were fairly traditional. Wotan kept adjusting his eyepatch.

This was only the second time I’ve seen Wagner staged, the first being a college production of a semi-staged Rheingold many years ago. I could do without any more, though I don’t consider my time wasted. I enjoyed this.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

The outstanding feature of guest conductor Cristian Macelaru’s rendition of Dvorak’s New World Symphony was its clarity of form. Every section of every movement stood out as its own entity, and the whole passed on in crystalline goodness. And the solo passages from the individual musicians! Just marvelous.

And we also had Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto. According to the program notes, the original version of this concerto sounded like any other late 19C piano concerto, but the revised version, which we heard, sounds like Rachmaninoff. Well, a bit, but not as epically as the Second or Third, problematic as they in their turns are. Soloist Simon Trpceski thundered away dramatically, but to what end?

Lastly but first on the program,the premiere of a tone poem, Embers, by Tyler Taylor. How about that, another composer with the names of two US Presidents. Taylor is a horn player, so he knows the orchestra from the inside. His music featured a well-blended mixture of grinding strings (secret: they left the practice mutes on but played loudly), ghostly winds, and clonking percussion. It was a hefty chunk of chaotic tonal noise.

music director reds

Huzzah, entering its second year without one, the San Francisco Symphony has finally named a new music director, who takes over not next season, which is already announced, but the season after that.

And they've done exactly what I hoped they'd do, which is to name a fairly young conductor who's already made her mark as a guest with the orchestra. And I say "her" because yes, it's a woman, the first one SFS has ever had in this post, and one of the few in a major position anywhere in the country.

She's Elim Chan, who'll be 40 by the time she takes over. She's originally from Hong Kong, but received her higher education in the U.S. She's conducted here several times, and I've heard her once, leading Holst's The Planets, which I described as played "with the ideal dynamism and sweep, and with every exotic instrumental color exactly where it should be."

She'll be conducting next week, which I won't be attending, but I do have a ticket for the program in October that she's already scheduled for, with John Adams's Doctor Atomic Symphony. I'm looking forward to it, and to a new era of exciting music-making in SF.

interview

A fellow named G. Connor Salter has been interviewing various authors including Inklings scholars. He's gotten around to me. Here's the result.

Lewis and Clark book review

Craig Fehrman, This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis and Clark (Avid Reader Press [Simon & Schuster], 2026)

A new history of Lewis and Clark? As a long-time interested one in that expedition. I had to check this out, and it turned out to be well worth the trouble. Recent writers like Stephen Ambrose and Clay Jenkinson have painted Lewis as a psychological basket case, rendering it ludicrous that he was appointed to command the great western expedition. Fehrman finds a balance between this and the traditional view of Lewis as a great explorer, specifying his weaknesses but also emphasizing his strengths. Some of the other white men staying with the Mandans and Hidatsas over the winter of 1804-5 thought Lewis and Clark completely incompetent at dealing with the Indians; but you don't find that view here, though mistakes are acknowledged. Fehrman accepts without comment that Lewis was a suicide; this is possible but not historically established as certain, though most writers now treat it as if it were.

What makes this history "new" is the viewpoint. Chapters on various chunks of the expedition are told largely from the viewpoint of specified persons; sometimes Lewis or Clark (very different men), but just as often York, Clark's slave - so there's a lot of background information on the practice of slavery in this period - or Sacajawea, the Shoshone woman brought along as a translator. It's no longer necessary to rebut that she "guided Lewis and Clark across the continent," so Fehrman wastes no space on that, while emphasizing how resourceful and useful to the expedition she was. Strangely, though many of the men kept journals, the only subordinate who gets chapters is the lead sergeant, John Ordway.

But there are also chapters from the point of view of Indians, mostly chiefs, whom the explorers met, and this gives of course an entirely different view of the story. Most interesting is one from the view of Wolf Calf, one of the Blackfoot warriors with whom Lewis and a few hunters had an at first wary, then violent, encounter on the Marias River in July 1806. In later years, Wolf Calf left a brief description of the event, which Fehrman has uncovered (and prints in full in an appendix) though most previous scholars were unaware of it, though it had been published. It quite contradicts parts of Lewis's account, but Fehrman has noticed that Lewis was still asleep for much of the early-morning violence and is relying on the testimony of his hunters, who had probably fallen asleep on watch and had good reason to prevaricate.

This careful reading of the journals to observe things that had passed previous writers by is Fehrman's principal value. For instance, it's long been claimed that Sacajawea was close only to Clark among the explorers, but Fehrman finds plenty of evidence that she had friendly and mutually rewarding relations with Lewis and Ordway as well. He also digs up other evidence, not just Wolf Calf's memoir. Clark nicknamed Sacajawea's infant son "Pomp" or "Pompey," and so he is usually called. But Fehrman has interviewed Shoshone women, and declares that "according to Shoshone tradition" his mother had nicknamed him a Shoshone word, Pahmpi, which Clark had adapted into a condescending classical reference. Fehrman gives no further source for this, though his source notes are extensive, so I can't tell if this is an actual tradition, passed down through the generations, or if somebody had just noticed that there was a Shoshone word that sounded like "Pompey" and assumed that was the baby's real nickname.

This book can be rewardingly read by people previously knowing little about the expedition, though they may find the beginning a bit of a slog, as there's four chapters on preparations before they ever set off up the river, and another four before they get to territory unknown to whites. The emphasis is on relations with the Indians, which is the interesting aspect of the early part of the journey, though geographic discoveries later on, which are what most interests me, are not neglected. Overall, an intelligent and rewarding book, and the best account of the expedition alone, as opposed to as part of a biography of Lewis or Clark, since an intelligent abridgment of the journals like Bernard DeVoto's.

tv review

I saw a favorable review for Legends, and it was on Netflix, so I could get it. If you like British cop shows, and I know a lot of people do, this is a good one. It's a 6-episode mini-series, so it functions as a really long movie. The heroes of this one are Customs agents, not previously trained at undercover investigations, so they are perhaps a little easier to identify with than the typical pro hacks.

The story is that it's 1990, and Margaret Thatcher has decided to crack down on heroin importations. That's Customs' department, so they set up a training and filtering program to test and train volunteer agents who want something a little more exciting than riffling through suitcases. After a three-week program, they're down to four agents who look qualified to do the work.

"Legends" is Customs' term for cover identities, but only one of the four is destined to go deep undercover. He's maneuvering himself into the position of being the drug dealers' transport guy, who moves the heroin from Pakistan to the UK. Of the other three, one becomes the computer whiz backroom girl, and the remaining two spend most of their time watching over the other batch of drug dealers than the ones the transport guy is working on.

Most of the show jumps back and forth among the agents and their handler, who is played by Steve Coogan in a serious role, though there are flashes of humor in the show here and there. The undercover guy is married with a small daughter - unusual for undercover agents, who are usually unattached - so he has to balance work and family, and being two different guys at once, in an odd and stressful way.

It's a highly dramatic show, and well directed and acted, and I recommend it for those inclined to such drama.

two concerts

Because I was going up for the evening anyway, I added to my schedule the afternoon Peninsula Symphony concert in San Mateo. I learned that long-term (40+ years!) m.d. Mitchell Sardou Klein is retiring at the end of next season. Perhaps it's time, because it seemed to me the orchestra has deteriorated since I last heard them two years ago.

The concert opened with Wagner's Flying Dutchman Overture. This was energetic and perky enough, but the Wagnerism of it was in full cry and it was consequently very tedious. Then, the Viola Concerto of the early-20C modernist Rebecca Clarke. Clarke didn't actually write a viola concerto; in 1919 she wrote a sonata for viola and piano, and this was orchestrated about 20 years ago to be used as a concerto for an instrument in desperate need of more repertoire. Soloist was Pearl de la Motte, a Juilliard student who won the string player competition here two years ago, prize of which is customarily playing a concerto with the Pen Sym. Her tone was a rich viola tone, distinct from both violin and cello, satisfying to hear despite the fact that the music itself seemed to wander meaninglessly, rather in the mode of one of the concertos that Elgar was writing at the same time.

Lastly, Brahms's Second Symphony, played in a blatty style reminiscent of the SFS in the bad old days of the 1970s. The horns were particularly coarse, the colors from other instruments blared out in an un-Brahmsian fashion, and interpretive oddities of strange emphases and pauses, especially in the first movement, didn't help. Well, I'll be hearing the BA Rainbow Symphony in the Third next month, and maybe that'll wipe out the memory of this one.

Then, off to the Freight in Berkeley for another Terry Riley 90th birthday celebration. The Bang on a Can All-Stars, a 6-member touring ensemble, have been going around playing a Riley celebration, and this was their Berkeley stop. They played two long pieces by him. First was A Rainbow in Curved Air, but it didn't sound much like the version on overdubbed electric organs that Riley improvised for a record in 1969. For one thing only one of the performers was on electric organ (also covering as an electric piano), the others being clarinet/sax, electric guitar, cello, string bass, and drums/percussion. That turned the minimalist noodling background into more of a muddle. The tunes coating this on the other instruments seemed original and not copies of Riley's, and at times, especially in the long string bass pizzicato solo, the rest of the ensemble pretty much dropped out to enable it to be heard.

After that, the performers were joined by 4 or 5 (hard to see how many were onstage) local musicians, one of them a vocalist, for a full performance of Riley's minimalist classic, In C. This was enchanting as every live performance I've heard of it has been. The pulse rhythm was played on xylophone. The other players took full advantage of Riley's permission to drop out occasionally, and hushes to only one or two players besides the pulse were frequent. But also they'd build up to tremendous climaxes at other times. This sounded coordinated, but I didn't see any signals as a leader gave for switches during Rainbow. The whole lasted 47 minutes, a typical length for this work. We were out at 9:30, early for a Freight concert, but I was thoroughly satisfied with my evening.

concert review: South Bay Philharmonic

A typical symphony concert has three works, two of them fairly long. This potpourri of a concert had eight works, all of them pretty short. The unifying gimmick was that they were all in some way referents to time. The keynote work of the program, probably the longest selection, and definitely the best-played, was Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours." I also enjoyed a piece by frequent South Bay contributor Ron Miller, "Overture to a Summer Afternoon," a rondo featuring a bustling American modernist recurring theme. Miller is not usually this good. Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain" was played OK, but somewhat clunkier, and "Sunrise" from Grofé's "Grand Canyon Suite" was squeaky. The grinding conclusion to the program was a suite from the music to the Back to the Future films, which meant nothing to me as I've completely forgotten the first one and never saw any of the others. Less imitation John Williams than imitation Elmer Bernstein, it was loud, crass, and extremely repetitious. B. who plays viola in this orchestra was not happy with this mixed bag program and especially not with this piece.

news of the day

1. Author gets in trouble for quoting Sturgeon's Law.

2. California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer is paying online "influencers" to boost his campaign. They're writing posts praising him without revealing they've been paid to do so.
I'm not much of an influencer, but that only means I get less crud e-mail than they do. I wonder how Steyer's campaign contacted these people. If I'd gotten an e-mail from someone claiming to represent him and offer me money to boost his campaign, I'd probably have thrown it out with the spam. If I'd recognized it as real, I'd probably have posted "Can you believe it? Some nut wants to pay me to praise Steyer."
I'm leaning towards supporting Becerra. He may be incompetent, but he's less corrupt.

Tiptree on Tolkien

From a 1974 essay, "Harvesting the Sea," by James Tiptree Jr. (only later revealed as Alice B. Sheldon), reprinted in the collection Meet Me at Infinity (Tor, 2000), p. 265:

The main thing I've been into is a serious study of Tolkien's Ring and reading H.G. Wells for the first time. I will spare you my conclusions beyond saying I take both very seriously indeed. One of the aspects which they share is that they are both strategies for handling almost unbearable grief. In Wells's Days of the Comet, the fantastic, gut-tearing paean of hope reveals the wound beneath; it is the blinded crying for light. In Tolkien the held-back cry of bitter loss becomes lacerating; it is interesting to read that his first memories were of the ravaging of his childhood lands by the devastations of the railroad, and that in his youth, by 1918, all but one of his close friends had been killed in the war. His prescription is go on, go on; it stinks, it hurts, but go on. Somehow go on. Wells goes on, too; both men are, well, sturdy. Brave, one might have said in a simpler age. Both tremble toward sentimentality, are saved at each last moment by their brilliantly observing eyes, their regard for what is, no matter how dismaying. And of course with Tolkien, the rich airy landscape of words, his almost magical grasp.

I don't recall this unusual, interesting, and observant comment being quoted in the Tolkien literature before; so here it is.

more dentistry

Monday's the day I finally saw the periodontist about my fractured tooth. He said it needed to come out, soon, but he wanted an endodontist to have a look first, especially to confirm the neighboring teeth were secure. Fortunately I was able to get to the endodontist (I had to look up all these dental specialties) on Tuesday. He said the neighboring teeth were fine, but the fractured tooth needed to come out right away. He'd do it, right then, and I wouldn't have to wait for the periodontist to schedule an appointment.

So I said OK, and he did. It was uncomfortable but not painful; it's the aftermath which is more difficult, involving some pain, a lot of gauze to staunch the bleeding, and severe restrictions on eating. There's also the cost, since apparently my insurance covered none of this, but I have the money. What I don't have so much of is agreeableness over the physical effects.

The other exciting part is that both appointments required consultation with my physicians over whether there'd be any medical complications to this. Reaching them is challenging, especially as there's three of them, only two have direct office phone numbers, and one is away right now though someone is covering. That required an hour's wait on both days, and a quick visit by me to one of the offices when phone contact proved insufficient.

I hate the Los Angeles Philharmonic customer service department

I went to the LA Phil website to print out my ticket for the concert I'm attending later this month. When I got to the "show barcode" command, I clicked on it, and it said "Please wait" and continued to say that for the next five hours. I tried a different browser; same result.

Eventually the customer service number woke up for the day and I called them. The agent responded to my attempt to print the ticket by saying we don't advise printing tickets; the barcodes might not be legible to the scanners. I said, "In that case, why do you enforce this by making the website hang up on 'Please wait' for five hours?" And instead of responding, "We don't; I don't know why you're having trouble with this, but it's not our intention and I'm sorry it's happening," which would have been both true and kindly, she said, "I'm not responsible for any problems." I said yes you are; you are a person designated by the LA Phil to answer the phone with customer problems, so therefore you are responsible for dealing with them. That forthright answer may have been the reason why she shortly hung up on me.

Bad move. That only makes me call back in towering anger and demand to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor promised to listen to the tape of the previous call and have a talk with the responsible agent; but he also said that the LA Phil feels no obligation to facilitate printing of bar codes because these days most people have smartphones. I said "most people" leaves out the large number who don't, and is a studied insult to their existence. He said he didn't mean to insult anybody - if true, that's a greater condemnation than if he did intend to insult them - but he's had lots of experience and not allowing printing is not a problem. I said I've had plenty of experience with other venues, and they all offer printing out tickets as an option. I said that maybe we're not as technologically advanced in the Bay Area as you are in L.A. (a truly sarcastic remark, coming from the heart of Silicon Valley where I live), but we manage to allow printing of tickets and have no problem scanning them on the day. Maybe he should see about fixing the website so that it offers a printable ticket. Perhaps not very many people will need that option, but they do exist and will be grateful. I doubt I got my point across.

He did come up with a technical reason for probably why I'd had trouble accessing the bar code, and then offered to switch my ticket to will call, waiving the added fee usually associated with this. He said that option should have been available when I bought the ticket, but it was not. A list of possible ways to get your ticket was one of the steps, but that list had only one option: online download. So I was stuck.

a day out in the East Bay

Since I was attending a concert in Oakland Saturday evening and another in nearby Walnut Creek on Sunday afternoon, I decided to stay over in the neighborhood overnight, finding a hotel room which didn't have a "hot" setting for the shower, ugh, and whose "breakfast bar" was both useless and overpriced.

That did mean I'd have time Sunday morning to visit the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site in Danville. This takes planning to get to. The site, O'Neill's retreat home at the top of the mountains, is now accessible by road only through a gated private community, which means you have to make a reservation for the NPS van to take you up there by car. (It's also possible to hike in from the regional parks which abut the other side of the property, and a large party did that on our tour, but you have to reserve for the tour to do that also.)

I'd been to this home once before, but it was years ago. O'Neill and his wife had wanted to get as far away as they could from Broadway, where he could just write in peace and privacy, so they built this home in an isolated spot and deprecated visitors. They designed it according to their amateur understanding of Chinese philosophy and aesthetics, and named it Tao House. The plan worked for a few years, and O'Neill wrote some of his most renowned plays, including A Long Day's Journey Into Night, here. But then his increasing hand tremor made it impossible for him to write (with pencil, the only way he could get his ideas down), and the coming of WW2 made their servants go off and get war jobs - neither O'Neill drove, or cooked or cleaned for that matter. So they sold the house and left. So it was interesting to see the house's design and the earth-sky color scheme, and the private study where Eugene did his writing, made up into a simulacrum of a merchant marine captain's quarters (he had once been in the merchant marine, and now he was the captain of his soul).

And the concerts? Saturday was pianist Sarah Cahill playing works of Terry Riley, a celebration of his 90th birthday last year (he wasn't there; he's living in Japan). It was a very tiny concert in an industrial warehouse in West Oakland, in a room rented by a new-music proprietor as rehearsal space. Four rows of chairs on risers on the side of a big room otherwise empty except for a piano in the middle. Only one piece, from 1964, was minimalism as we'd know it. Since then Riley has been exploring jazz, ragtime (one piece was a ragtime reinvention of "I Am the Walrus," recognizable only in the rhythm), improvisation, and various other techniques. Pieces that Cahill has commissioned in honor of Riley by Samuel Adams (very quiet) and Danny Clay (very hypnotizing) were also included.

As for Sunday's concert, it was the California Symphony at Lesher. I drove in about 90 minutes before concert-time (pre-concert lecture is at 60) only to find the next-door parking garage was, unusually, full. Oh yeah, it was Mother's Day and everyone was in downtown Walnut Creek eating brunch. I wound up parking on the street 1/4 mile away up at the top of a hill.

The concert featured a new piece by resident composer Saad Haddad, five minutes of Arab-inspired dissonance. Then the Rach Three. Pianist Sofya Gulyak was highly popular with the audience, but all I could think of was how the piece kept going on and on long after it had run out of anything to say, and it was so tedious. After that, Borodin's Second Symphony, which doesn't get played much. I've heard this piece come out sludgy and dull, but not this time: crisp and dramatic under m.d. Donato Cabrera's direction, a delight to hear.

the ecstasy and the agony

B. wanted to hear the Winchester Orchestra in Vaughan Williams's cantata Dona nobis pacem, but only if I could drive her. I judged this more appealing than the SF Symphony, so we went. "We are a nation at war," wrote conductor James Beauton in the program notes, "which is why this evening's performance feels especially relevant." It was a fine performance, solid orchestra, strong and well-directed chorus, and soprano Amy Spencer's calls of the fading "Dona nobis pacem" were under tight control and exquisitely done.

But we should have left at intermission, because the second half was a "symphonic suite" (actually full of the chorus going "ahhh") of music from the series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which I've never seen nor heard of. Composer Sunna Wehrmeijer created the music digitally, so it had to be painstakingly scored so that an orchestra could play it. Was it worth the trouble? No! A lot of overloud off-the-shelf movie music, full of whooshing sounds and clanking effects. B. put in her earplugs and read from her tablet to pass the time. As for me, my watch said the piece was 40 minutes long, but it didn't seem so long, so I suspect that B. was right in saying that I did nod off for parts. Which she found amazing due to the Awful Dynne.

home electrician

Last night while stumbling to the bathroom I knocked down a framed drawing from the wall while fumbling for the bathroom door. In the morning, B. discovered that the falling frame had knocked the toggle off the ancient light switch. This was the switch that controlled the overhead lights for the bedroom as well as the outlets where we plug in the fans that keep the room cool in hot summer nights, nights which are expected to resume this week. So we needed the toggle fixed, and fast.

I could have called in an electrician for much money, but there was nothing else for him to do right now in terms of home repairs. I decided to see if I could do it myself. I bought a new light switch from the local hardware store and gathered the tools. Not knowing which breaker controlled the room, I turned off the master breaker for the house.

Detaching the old switch from the wall and unconnecting the wires was one job; stripping the wire that needed it, connecting them to the new switch, and installing it in the wall was quite another. B. had found a useful illustrated article (not a video, blessed be) on how to replace a light switch. I found I already knew most of it, which was encouraging regarding my competence to do the job, but it had some useful information, such as that it doesn't matter which connection you attach each of the two hot wires to, which was relieving because the layout of the old switch and the new switch was different, so if it had mattered I wouldn't have known how to map the old one on to the new one. Unless the article had explained it, which it probably would have.

The big problem, not addressed by the article, was attaching the plate to the wall. The long screws could go through holes in the switch but couldn't fit into anything in the wall, so how was the whole (plate + switch) going to attach to the wall? I suspect that the old plate was original to the house and wasn't screwed in to the wall at all, but had been stuck on the wall paint when it was still wet; some prying had been necessary for detaching it. So I fixed the plate to the wall with a couple of pieces of transparent duct tape. One more thing to alert the landlord to whenever we do move out of here.

prime ministerial memoirs

David Cameron, For the Record (Harper, 2019)

The question posed by this enormous book (703 pages of text) is, does David Cameron really get how much of a disaster he inflicted on the UK by holding the Brexit referendum and then losing it?

And the answer is, sort of. This book is full of regrets at things not done or done not well enough, but mostly they take the form of regrets at not expressing himself clearly enough, with the implication that he must have failed because, if he'd succeeded, his perfectly formed views would have commanded universal assent. Uh-huh. I do wonder how much of the book's lengthy exposition of issues came from speeches that Cameron gave at the time, and if not, if he should have given them as speeches.

As for Brexit, Cameron defends holding the referendum on the grounds that the pressure to do so was so great that, had he resisted it, it would have broken out even more virulently later, and would be even more likely to have gone Leave than were the chances with the actual referendum. As for why it was lost, Cameron blames increased immigration, and for that he blames the UK having the best economy in Europe at the time, making everyone want to come there. So for losing the referendum he blames his own brilliant economic policies. What a guy.

For me, the most surprising and dismaying aspect of the book was the enormous amount of time Cameron had to spend arguing with other national leaders at EU summits. Usual scenario: the UK wants one policy, all the other countries want something else.* Requirements for universal assent ought to prevent the UK from getting run over, but the EU staff usually find a way around that. This happens over and over again, leaving me a lot less puzzled than I had been as to why Leave won the referendum, but despite everything Cameron wants to Remain, on the grounds that it's better to have a seat at the table than not, regardless of how badly you're losing. But then at the end he undercuts this by looking on the bright side of Brexit by seeing it as an opportunity to forge a new relationship with Europe.

But the book is more than detailed accounts of issues and negotiations, wearisome though they are. Cameron puts in a fair amount about his personal life, notable especially for the illness and death of his small son, and how he felt about things, beginning with a description of his becoming PM (he then flashes back to his earlier life) focused on how he reacted and thought about what was happening. There's only so far he can go in that direction, but it's an attempt. Generally, Cameron thinks he was a pretty good PM who got a lot done, and I guess he was broadly competent in a way denied to all his successors to date: five of them in a mere ten years, an unending succession of clown cars, though May and Truss he considers to have been competent subordinates of his own, and perhaps they were. He is critical of a few subordinates, notably IDS whom he keeps not firing from Work and Pensions because he's afraid of the right-wing backlash if he does, and Steve Hilton whose description as "one part brilliant to several parts bonkers" I've already quoted. At one point, and one only, I cheered, and that's when Cameron quotes himself defending same-sex marriage as a conservative policy if properly viewed, a perspective I share.

However, the main lessons of this book seem to be 1) Cameron's hopeless optimism about Europe; 2) his terror at offending the right-wing rebels, so extreme that he'll do anything they want to keep them quiet. Neither of these policies actually work very well, so perhaps a different approach might have been superior.

*At one point Cameron has one ally, but as it's Viktor Orbán it doesn't do him any good. The question, "Uh-oh, am I on the wrong side?" doesn't occur to him.

1 1/2 concerts

Saratoga Symphony, Sunday: This community orchestra gave a fairly rarified program under Jason Klein, the best-known piece being the Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 by George Enescu, played with sufficient liveliness and drive. Plus A Fugal Overture by Gustav Holst, which wasn't very fugal, and two unusual turn-of-the-20C tone poems, neither apparently ever played in the U.S. before: The Witch of Atlas by Granville Bantock, a character which in the Shelley poem it's based on is more of a benevolent angel than a witch, and which was accordingly represented in peaceful music with a lot of solos for violin and English horn; and The Isle of the Dead by the Swedish composer Andreas Hallén, one of numerous tone poems based on the Arnold Böcklin painting, but unlike any of the other composers, who treated it as dark and ominous, Hallén preferred to depict the consolatory aspect of death, and after a mournful beginning his composition turns gentle and even incongruously lush in a slightly Wagnerian manner.

San Francisco Conservatory Orchestra, Saturday: I attended this, or rather part of it, by livestream. Student conductors led Beethoven's goofy King Stephen Overture and Revueltas's Sensemayá, the latter with firm enough rhythm but nevertheless sludgy. Music director Edwin Outwater, a former assistant to MTT, dedicated the concert to MTT's memory, pointing out that all the pieces were ones he'd play, and led the orchestra in John Adams's Absolute Jest, his concerto for string quartet and orchestra, much better-balanced than the last time I'd heard it, but at which the Esmé Quartet were wasted as soloists, their exquisite approach to Romantic music having no role in Adams's jerky and rigid postmodernism. But I was too tired to sit in my work chair and listen to the concluding piece, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, so I skipped it.

movie not finished

The Power of the Dog (2021)

An article on the best movies on Netflix said that this was "not just one of the best movies on Netflix right now: It’s one of the best movies ever." Unfortunately it turned out to be great only in the sense that some of those "great novels" I had to read in literature class were great, i.e. totally wretched.

The main characters in this one are a pair of brothers who are cattle ranchers together in Montana (played by New Zealand) in the 1920s. One of them, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a hard man. Though they've worked together for decades, he considers his brother George (Jesse Plemons) to be something of a wimp. George is sweet on the widow lady (Kirsten Dunst) who runs a cookhouse where the ranchers often eat. Phil doesn't think much of her, the more so as her late husband had committed suicide, which Phil evidently considers a rather wussy thing to do. As for the widow's teenage son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who has artistic leanings, Phil thinks he's a total pansy. This is all played out as if it were written in neon signs.

George is incredibly awkward courting the widow, the more so after they suddenly up and get married, which George doesn't even tell Phil about until afterwards. Uh-oh, there's trouble ahead, forced on the story by the contorted plot. I stopped watching at this point and consulted the Wikipedia plot summary, which I'd previously avoided. Yup, there's trouble ahead. I'm glad I didn't have to watch any more of this tortured pretentious mess.

eh

I made one more stab at trying to find a Terry Pratchett novel I might like. I read somewhere that Night Watch is considered one of his very best, perhaps the finest fantasy novel of the then-nascent (it was published in 2002) 21st century, and more serious than Pratchett's wont - which was encouraging, as I generally find his humor tiresome and unfunny.

Well, I actually enjoyed the first couple pages, about an assassination student who's incompetently trying to tag the hero. It was funny, which the rest of the book isn't. The hero is cast back in time 30 years, and for reasons unclear takes on the identity of his own mentor, whom he doesn't know has died at the time he first uses the name. The scenes in which someone or something - it's not clear who or what this entity is - explains at length to the hero how time-travel works were extremely overlong, tiresome and tedious; I skipped over much of it. The hero is a policeman, and once the time-travel stuff is over, it looks like the book is going to settle into a serious novel about the hero instructing his callow younger self in how to be a good cop. I'm not interested in a police procedural about instructing cops, so I'm quitting here, about a third of the way in, though that's a lot farther than I've gotten in any previous attempts at reading Pratchett.

ticket purchasing follies

I've written before about strange experiences getting tickets. Here's another one.

I wanted to attend a concert being given by a small new-music outfit. A news release linked to their concert page. But there was nothing on it about buying tickets.

At first, I assumed they'd be selling tickets only at the door, and I prepared to get there early. But then one day while I was looking at the page again, I noticed that the name of the venue was a link. I clicked on it, and found a list of concerts, every one of which had a ticket-buying link except for this one.

Uh-oh. So I called up the promoting outfit. I had to leave a message, but a man called back almost right away. I said there was no ticket-purchasing link on the concert page; he went to look at it and was surprised that I was right. I said I'd been afraid the concert was sold out. He said, "No, we've sold very few tickets, and I guess now I know why." He said they'd put a purchase ticket link on the page (they have) and he e-mailed me a direct link.

I bought my ticket, and I'm going to this.

decoined

Another reason I lost interest in coin collecting is the decreasing use of coins in our society. As recently as the end of the state quarters program in 2008 I would always have a fistful of coins in my pocket, and could search through any new arrivals for state quarters.

But now I rarely have coins at all, and I tend to decant any I get on arriving home. I just don't need them any more.

This is partly because of the decreasing value of coins. It's been years since you could buy anything, except maybe an hour on a parking meter in a low-congestion district - and they're mostly coin-free now - for a quarter. If you use coins at all, they're just markers on the way up to a greater value.

But just as much it's the move to cards. I was at the Freight & Salvage on Saturday for a concert by a Scottish folkish band called Gnoss (silent G) - it was all right, typical fiddle-driven fast music with occasional slower songs - and I stopped by the food counter for a snack. I picked up a bag of peanuts, $1.10 with tax. I remembered I had a dime in my pocket as well as a dollar bill, and I was reaching to pull them out when the clerk said "We're cards only." So, I now have a credit card charge for $1.10. Sheesh.

coined

My late grandfather was a coin collector in a small way. His usual technique for collecting was to sort through the coins in his pocket, looking for issues that he didn't already have. The oldest coin in his collection was an 1878 silver dollar, which I doubt he found in his pocket, but I don't know how much business with coin dealers he may have done. Probably not a lot. He kept his main US collection in Whitman coin folders, and none of them were complete.

He also had a miscellaneous box of foreign coins, which he'd picked up on world travels in his later years, and some varied currency notes of both US and foreign issue, as well as a number of US proof sets, mostly encased in plastic shells.

I showed some interest in this coin collection, and so when he was downsizing his possessions in the 1980s, he gave it to me. What I liked about collecting coins was the serried arrays they came in: otherwise identical coins with heads of presidents on them, marching down, distinguished only by year of issue and mint mark - mustn't forget the mint marks, of such vital interest to collectors. This is why I never got interested in collecting stamps. Though much prettier than coins, they didn't come in serried arrays.

For some time after receiving the collection, I kept it up by sorting through my own pocket change, but gradually I gave that up, mostly because the new clad coinage was less interesting than the old silver issues. My last spurt of interest came with the state quarter series of 1999-2008. I had great fun looking for those in my change - to my mind, buying one from a dealer would have been cheating - and eventually I got them all, and bought a folder to keep them in. But I discovered that collecting them had been more fun than having them. I rarely looked at the complete set, and if I was interested in the designs I can see them more clearly displayed on websites.

So now that I in turn am downsizing my possessions, I decided that selling the coins would be a good plan, a decision facilitated by my recent discovery that my once-keen eyesight had deteriorated in detail to the point where I couldn't read the mint marks and sometimes even the dates on the smaller coins. I once had a device that would magnify a coin but it never worked very well. If I were still interested in keeping up coin collecting I could look for a better one, but I'm not.

Just last week, then, an ad turned up in my mail that one of those antiques roadshow outfits would be setting up shop in a nearby hotel conference room for a few days to buy coins and jewelry. Perfect. I went down on the first morning to find it nearly empty: three buyers and no more than two other customers at a time (one of whom looked disconcertingly like the late Dave Rike). They carried the heavy box - which I'd put in the car in installments - in from the car and sorted through the contents. The buyer was especially pleased to find a couple of late 19C silver dollars with Carson City mint marks, plus an item my grandfather had been particularly proud of: an uncut sheet of six $5 bills of National Currency bank notes, series 1929. The buyer said this form of uncut sheets was rare. He paid a pretty penny for that and the lot of miscellaneous stuff, even taking my collection of aluminum tokens from the Shell gasoline presidents and states coin games from the 1970s. And so all that has found a home.

not just Cupertino

There's an article in the Mercury News, the local paper, on the effect that Apple Park, the giant ring-shaped "spaceship" headquarters, has had on the city of Cupertino, where it's located, since it was completed nearly a decade ago.

The thing is, though, that - though other cities are barely mentioned - it's not just Cupertino. Tax revenues - the small part that goes to cities - does indeed go to Cupertino and affect it. But housing prices and especially traffic have more effect on the neighboring cities.

Apple Park is located in a tab of Cupertino that sticks up to the north on the east side of the city. The houses immediately to the north and west of it are in Sunnyvale; the ones to the east are in Santa Clara. They're the ones most directly affected by Apple Park. There's a photo in the article of the spaceship looming up behind what the caption says is "a home on Lorne Way in Cupertino." Lorne Way isn't in Cupertino. It's a block north of the spaceship in Sunnyvale.

What is in Cupertino? The only housing in Cupertino in the immediate area is an apartment complex to the sw that was already there. My mother lived there at one time, but she was glad to be out before construction of Apple Park literally tore up the entire neighborhood.

South of the spaceship is its parking area, and behind that the freeway. On the other side of the freeway is a shopping district. There are homes in Cupertino not far away, but they're not directly under the spaceship's shadow, and access to the neighborhoods is mostly detached from the roads that Apple traffic backs up on.

I'd like to know more about what impact Apple Park has had on Sunnyvale - where I live, about a mile further west - and Santa Clara. But no, it's in Cupertino, we have to talk only about Cupertino.

concert review: Philharmonia Baroque

I don't often get to Philharmonia Baroque concerts, even when the traveling program does get down the Peninsula, which it doesn't always do. However, this one, which landed at the Concrete Tent in Palo Alto, I couldn't resist. It consisted of works by and inspired by C.P.E. Bach, and as C.P.E. (often called that to distinguish him from his colossal father J.S.) is one of my favorite 18C composers, I figured I had to go.

The C.P.E. work was No. 3 in F of his four Hamburg symphonies (Wq. 183), here being conducted by Philharmonia Baroque's former music director. It is, as the program notes point out, a quirky symphony both structurally and harmonically, but to my mind it's the tense and dark quality of the outer movements, a style called "Sturm und Drang" when other composers like Haydn took it up, though I suspect that C.P.E. invented it, that most appeals to me.

And this performance emphasized that. Led from the violin by guest conductor Shunske Sato (that is, though standing in front, he played along with the first violins for the whole concert, and let the orchestra pick up his directions from that), it was heavy, intense, even vicious, despite the small size of the orchestra.

Much the same quality was brought to the rarely-heard Mozart work, the entr'acts from his incidental music to the play Thamos, King of Egypt, and a bit even to Beethoven's Symphony No. 1, a work as quirky in form and harmony as C.P.E.'s symphony. The work that didn't quite fit this format was Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in D Minor. This is the other Mendelssohn violin concerto, not the famous one, the one he wrote when he was only 12. It's partly like a Baroque concerto, evoking the generation before C.P.E., and partly like the Mendelssohn to come.

Anyway, a good concert.

so you want to vote for Steve Hilton?

I swear this was a coincidence. I was browsing through the memoirs of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, both of which I own and have read before, when I remembered that I'd never gotten around to reading the memoirs of their successor, David Cameron, though that was published seven years ago. So, having another errand in that direction, I went to the library and checked it out.

What's coincidence is that that same day I looked up all the major California gubernatorial candidates on Wikipedia to learn their background. Where I learned that Steve Hilton, one of the Republican candidates, though by now a U.S. citizen with something of a mid-Atlantic accent, started out as a Brit who was a political aide to David Cameron.

So what does his former boss have to say about Steve Hilton? Brace yourself:

Steve Hilton's ideas continued to be one part brilliant to several parts bonkers. However, his relationship with people in government wasn't working. He was no longer excused as a free spirit when he was late for meetings - he was seen as someone who had disregard for others. His antagonistic style was no longer helping him advance his cause - it had started to hurt it. And the relationship between the two of us became strained, too. Steve is a real ideologue in a way I'm not. He thought I was losing my radical zeal and falling for the trappings of prime minister. But I knew that to be a successful radical you have to play the game. And he wasn't interested in playing the game, just tipping it over and throwing the pieces all over the floor.

Michael Tilson Thomas

Well, it happened. Michael Tilson Thomas died yesterday. He'd been very ill and wound down his conducting career entirely a year ago, so it's not a surprise though it remains a tragedy. The San Francisco Symphony has announced that its performance of Beethoven's Ninth in June - led by the now-unavoidable James Gaffigan - will be dedicated to MTT's memory. That's appropriate, as the last time I heard him conduct was in Beethoven's Ninth in October 2023. He was scheduled to conduct another concert on my series later that season, but had to bow out due to frailty and illness. But his Ninth was well-appreciated. What I wrote at the time was:

Michael Tilson Thomas, music director laureate, returned to lead the SFS in the Big One, Beethoven's Ninth. What he did for SFS while stationed here was incalculable, and the love and affection that poured forth from audience and performers alike on his arrival onstage - and even more when the piece was over - was tremendous. The more so with his increasing health problems since his retirement, including a cancer operation two years ago that had him off work for months. If we never see him again, we want him to know that the last was the best. This was as fine and assured a Ninth as we've heard, particularly cherishable in a smooth and layered slow movement.

MTT served as music director of the SFS for 25 years (1995-2020), the longest service they've ever had, and he was probably the greatest director they've ever had, politely eclipsing Pierre Monteux, his predecessor in both distinctions. His arrival was announced with some hoopla, which turned out to be deserved. Taking up the orchestra rebuilding of his two immediate predecessors, he turned SFS into one of the world's great orchestras, and it's not fallen far since his departure, despite the crises of the last couple years. Beethoven's Ninth, which I think he led here several times, was one of his specialties; so was Stravinsky; so was American music when he could dub it as "maverick" whatever that means; so was Mahler, which I appreciated from him a lot less than from others. So it goes. I did appreciate him in a lot of other music, remembering especially some exquisitely burnished Sibelius, the Third in September 2016 and the Sixth in June 2018.

California gubernatorial debate

Matt Mahan: I'm the mayor of the third largest city in California!

Xavier Becerra: I've sued Donald Trump and won!

Katie Porter: I've sat down and talked with suffering Californians!

Tom Steyer: Let me repeat the question, slowly. Also, I'm the Change Agent!

Steve Hilton (or was it Chad Bianco?): All of California's problems are the result of Democrats running it for 16 years.

Chad Bianco (or was it Steve Hilton?): Yeah. Also, regulations are bad!

dentistry

Because I've been ill, my dentist requires before dental surgery of any kind - even something as non-intrusive as replacing a crown which fell out, my current concern - a verification from my physician that I'm OK for such procedures.

If you go through the medical center's formal procedure for such verifications, the medical records department will send out (with the patient's HIPAA approval) a long list of all the medical procedures you've undergone, but without anything saying that it's OK to go ahead. They're just the records department, after all, and apparently judging that your procedures aren't counter-indicative to dentistry is left to the dentist. But the dentist is no physician; how would she know?

Fortunately, my primary-care physician - who isn't actually much involved in my current treatment, though he's following its course - is willing to bypass the formal procedure and fill out the form himself. However, this time it took three attempts to fax it to the dentist before it came through.

Meanwhile, a pain while chewing, elsewhere in the mouth, is revealed as a probable fractured tooth, and a periodontist will have to look at it to see if it can be saved. It's three weeks until I see the periodontist, and another week before I get the temporary crown, so patience is a virtue.

book review

The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem, Julie Phillips (Norton, 2022)

I hadn't known that Julie Phillips - author of that fabulous biography of Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree - had published another book until I heard her mention it in the course of reading an entry from Ursula K. Le Guin's blog, an online project that's going to involve a lot of guest readers.

It's an analysis of how women writers and other creative artists have balanced their work and the practical job of being a mother, mostly illustrated by example. There's a full chapter on Le Guin, which is why I immediately sought this book out. Phillips is working on Le Guin's biography, and this is the third article I've read of hers on that subject, all written with the same assuredness and insight into character that characterized her Tiptree book.

Each of the featured subjects took an entirely different approach to the problem addressed by the book. Phillips describes Le Guin's method as separating out her two jobs. Once her children were in school, she could write during the day, and taking care of the children and household tasks the rest of the time could be handled because, while her husband had a full-time job, when he was at home he was fully involved in household tasks. For instance, he took the children to all their appointments because Ursula didn't drive. She writes that, while one person can't do two jobs, two people can do three.

The other full-chapter subjects are the writers Doris Lessing, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Angela Carter, and the painter Alice Neel. Interstitial chapters bring in other subjects, including the likes of Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood, and Shirley Jackson whom I'd like to have read more about. Unfortunately there's no index to enable the reader to dig these nuggets out.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Simone Young, from Australia, guest conducted. So was the living composer - from Australia, I mean. 35-year-old Ella Macens offered The Space Between the Stars, depicting what it's like to lie on the ground at night and contemplate the titular view. Unsurprisingly, the music offered sheens and broad melodies, often for strings, sometimes over quiet pulsations. Despite a few Ligeti-like chords, it was mostly so intensely consonant as to resemble movie music more than anything contemporarily classical.

Gautier Capuçon soloed in the Cello Concerto No. 1 of Camille Saint-Saëns, a brief work in one movement in ABA form, where the B section is a charming Tchaikovsky-like chipper waltz.

Lastly, about an hour of "bleeding chunks" as they're called, orchestral excerpts from Wagner's Ring, also including the Siegfried Idyll, which is not part of the Ring cycle although many apparently think it is. Apparently the titular opera doesn't have any bleeding chunks worth excerpting, although the other three in the cycle certainly do, so Young put this in instead. Wagner is much better as a tone-poem composer than he ever was writing operas, though his tendency to beat the listener over the head with his Leitmotivs remains irritating in any form.

concerts review: two quartets

Two of SF Performance's chamber music series wound up in the same week, and as a subscriber I got to both of them. The Danish String Quartet on Tuesday had an interestingly unusual program: first, their own arrangement of Stravinsky's Suite italienne, which in turn was Stravinsky's own arrangement for violin and piano of excerpts from his Pulcinella ballet music. This came out very Stravinskian. Then, Alfred Schnittke's Quartet No. 2, four movements of unending extreme dissonance, some of it Very Loud, some of it Extremely Quiet, and strangely captivating throughout. A lot of composers who like being dissonant could learn from this how to do it effectively. Lastly, a series of pleasant Nordic folk songs and dances, mostly Danish and Faroese, though when it was announced that one piece was from Greenland, the audience broke out into spontaneous applause.

Quatuor Ébène on Thursday was a more conventional program of 3 canonical 19C quartets by Beethoven (Op. 18/2), Debussy (his only), and Brahms (Op. 51/2). For an encore, a bit more daring, Britten's Divertimento No. 2. All were played in a style very typical of their composer. This worked well with the Beethoven, his most lively and perky quartet, but though the sound quality in the Debussy and Brahms was pretty awesome, they were rather duller to listen to. This is the sort of thing that stood in the way of my appreciating string quartets for a long time.

A big shutdown of the approaches of the Bay Bridge for repairs this weekend is already being prepared for, and driving out of the City at night was difficult both evenings even if you weren't going in that direction.

women composers

Having poured praise over Caroline Shaw in my last post, I want to say a little about women composers in general. Last week, Joshua Kosman (bottom part of this post) reported on a performance of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel's only string quartet, which he found "phenomenal ... ingenious, hearty and often ravishingly beautiful."

Maybe he heard a particularly good performance, because I've heard this work and found it an OK composition, creative enough and particularly delightful for its scherzo, but it's sometimes rote and a little thin on the development side, certainly not, as some YouTube commenters on its recording have claimed, a match for the quartets by her brother Felix.

Hensel is one of a number of women composers of the past whose work has been resurrected and promoted specifically because they're important composers who have been neglected up until recently. I've heard a lot of this stuff, and I can say that, of the pre-20th century composers (I'll get to the 20th and 21st ones later), that many of them are perfectly good second-level composers, but with the exception of Hildegard of Bingen, none are a match for the best male composers of their time.

Why is that? Is it because, as is sometimes stated, "men are better composers than women"? Of course not. You can't classify an entire sex that way. Most men can't compose worth a jot, and mediocre male 18th century composers are heard every day on KDFC radio. It might be more accurate to say that the best composers of the pre-20C period are men, but again, why is that?

It isn't because the best women lack genius. I'll demonstrate their talent later. It's lack of opportunity. The kind of musical training, and even more the chance to put it to use and develop your talent, was only spottily available in pre-modern times. It was hard enough for men to get it, and it's luck as well as an eagerness to learn that was responsible for its landing on as many male geniuses as it did. For women it was even tougher, and it's a tragedy that no female genius of those days got the opportunity to show her talent. Because they must have been there, somewhere. Mute inglorious Miltons, the lot of them.

Even the ones who did get training were somehow stifled. My understanding is that both Hensel's brother and her husband encouraged her to compose, but she wrote very little. Not only did this deprive us of much to judge her talent by, but it also robbed her of the job of working at her art and developing it to become a better composer.

An even clearer case is that of Clara Schumann. Her best work that I've heard is a Piano Trio in G Minor that she wrote in her mid-20s, and that is up to the quality of comparable works by her husband Robert. But she never followed up on it: no more chamber ensemble pieces followed from her pen. Earlier on, she had written a piano concerto, but that was in her early teens, and the best that can be said of it is that you admire the composer's talent but hope that she grows up fast. It's not surprising that such a young composer's work is immature; even Mozart wasn't writing immortal masterpieces at that age. (Clara Schumann did embark on a second piano concerto in her late 20s; she didn't get very far, but the movement she completed is much better than its predecessor.) Being the mother of many children and the wife of a difficult man may have had its effects, and when she was older and freer she might have felt herself just out of practice. Whatever the cause, it's a shame; she was the best of them.

Turning to American composers, a lot of attention has been focused recently on Amy Beach. She wrote some good music, especially in her later years - her string quartet is particularly fine - but much of the music she's known for strikes me as dull and rather routine. She's no better, albeit also no worse, than her male compatriots in the Second New England School, and she doesn't deserve to be feted while the men are mostly ignored, just because she's a woman.

After Beach, chronologically, come Rebecca Clarke and Ruth Crawford, whom I find it hard to judge because I don't much care for their idiom, but they appear to be somewhat better.

But to my mind the first great American woman composer is Florence Price, the Black woman who flourished in Chicago in the 1930s. Compared to the flurry of white male American composers who were coming to prominence at the same time - most of whom were a decade or more younger than she - she wasn't as brilliant as Copland or Barber, but she was every bit the equal of the rest of them - Cowell, Piston, Sessions, Harris, Hanson, Thomson and Thompson (yes, there were two of them, just like in Tintin). These are all (well, except Sessions) composers I like a lot, and Price's symphonies, concertos, and chamber music are just as appealing.

And since then, the list of great women composers has only grown. Can there be any doubt that it's greater opportunities for them to be trained and get performed and learn thereby that has been responsible? When I list the great composers of today, more than half of them are women. Caroline Shaw, Anna Clyne, Jennifer Higdon, Gabriela Lena Frank, Lera Auerbach, Jessie Montgomery, Missy Mazzoli, and more; even lesser-knwon ones like Belinda Reynolds and Stefania de Kenessey, not to mention deceased 20C composers like Price and Grazyna Bacewicz, Galina Ustvolskaya and Sofia Gubaidulina. Women's talent is out there, and always was; it just didn't get the chance to express itself. Blame the more virulent sexism of the past, not any lack of female genius.

concert review: Attacca Quartet

This was something special.

Taking place in the smaller theater on the top floor of the SF building whose main venue is the Herbst, it consisted of a single 90-minute set of string quartet music by Caroline Shaw. For three pieces which were art songs in format, Shaw herself - a founding member of the vocal ensemble A Roomful of Teeth - came onstage and provided the vocals.

I first heard of Shaw in 2013 when she won the Pulitzer Prize for a vocal piece she'd written for her ensemble. I heard it and was quite taken with the bold but winning composition. I began looking forward to and seeking out her music. I've heard some of the pieces at this concert - "And So," "The Evergreen," "Valencia" - before.

But I hadn't heard the Attacca Quartet play them. They're so taken with Shaw's music they'd be happy if they could arrange to play nothing else. They took a strong and precision-oriented approach to this music, which served well its intricacies and cutting edges, but was perhaps not always the best approach for conveying the emotional winningness of the music. But it was always vividly arresting. The most striking moments came in "Blueprint," which features frequent fortissimo unified attacks after long pauses. These were always, uniformly, precisely aligned so that all four players were as one. A lot of good ensembles can't do that.

Elsewhere, though, squeaking the bow across the strings was striking the first time it happened, but after twenty repetitions I'd had enough. This was the only time I've ever gotten tired of what Shaw was writing. The precision uniformity of Attacca's approach didn't help here.

I find Shaw's music to have wholeness and healing in it despite a style emphasizing stuttering and fragmentation. If this concert didn't emphasize those first qualities, it was nevertheless an arresting and exciting performance of a lot of music by one of the finest composers currently out in the world.

I arrived in the City early enough to attend half of a free certificate recital by a student at the SF Conservatory. This was up in the recital hall near the top of the Conservatory's new high-rise, which I hadn't been in before. The glass wall behind the players provides a striking north view of the dome of City Hall. Anyway, the student was Ruisi Doris Du, playing on viola an arrangement of one of Bach's cello suites. It was a bit stiff and formal, characteristic of people less than seasoned professionals playing Bach, but as far as I could tell she was completely technically adept. B., who plays viola herself, would have enjoyed it, but she's not going all the way up to the City for a viola recital.

Unfortunately time pressure meant I couldn't stay for the second half, which featured Rachmaninoff (also an arrangement from cello) and Rebecca Clarke (not).

updating credit

My new credit card came yesterday. This was slightly unexpected because the old one doesn't expire for two months. It was also noteworthy, because this is the card I use for all my online transactions, including recurring charges. That meant I had to go online and update them all, with the new expiration date and (where they stored it) the 3-digit thingie that supplements the card number for verification. (While the card number stays the same, the 3-digit thingie - I forget what it's called - changes with each reissue, but fortunately my new one is memorizable.)

And that proved a bit of a challenge. I don't keep a list of the recurring charges, but since they are recurring I can find them on my bill. First stop was my web and e-mail hosting service; that was pretty easy. The next one was unrelated to it, but I found it had somehow picked the change up from the web service.

After that, however, came a bunch where I was dashed if I could find the page to make a credit card change on. If I did eventually stumble on the page of links that included it, it was easily identifiable, but stumbling upon that page was a doozy. At one site I typed in a help search box "how do I update my credit card" and it instructed me to find the link on a particular page, but it didn't say how to find that page. Typing a query on how to find that page produced no useful results.

Then there was my gym membership, which I don't use any more. I was just going to let it run out with the credit card, but I decided to try to contact them online or by phone. Ha-ha, you can't do that, though the online instructions say you can. The phone number, which the online system assures you can reach membership services, asks for your member number, confirms this, and then says goodbye and hangs up. It says elsewhere you can visit your local club. Well, ha-ha, my local club has been closed - news to me, but I told you I didn't use it any more. My membership was only good there, so I doubt I can get anything done at some other outlet. Maybe I'll just let it run out with the credit card - assuming it hasn't picked up the update, but I don't have an online account there, so I can't check.

thoughts while reading

the April 6 New Yorker

1. Here's some info: The scientist who invented the term "alpha male," who was studying chimpanzees, used it to mean "not necessarily the strongest or most intimidating but, rather, the ones who excelled at coalition-building," keeping the peace and consoling. He was very annoyed at it being applied to humans who were, in his word, bullies.

2. Why are people finding it so difficult to grasp that one can support Israel while opposing the policies of its current government? That's my position regarding the United States as well.

concert review: Catalyst Quartet and friends

I've heard a lot from the Catalyst Quartet at SF Performances in recent years. A while ago they did a whole series of concerts of the work of Black composers, for instance.

Tuesday's was kind of different. The main item on the program was the song cycle Sea Pictures by the canonical Englishman, Edward Elgar, with the original orchestral accompaniment arranged for piano quintet. Terrence Wilson at the keyboard joined the Quartet. The singer was Nikola Printz, whose dark mezzo unleashed a lot of power when Elgar called for it, but pompous grandeur and drama are not the highlights of this cycle. Elgar was at his best being coy and charming in the two best settings in the bunch, "In Haven" and "Where Corals Lie," where Printz's voice could be surprisingly intimate.

Now watch the chain of connections (not the order in which the pieces were played in the concert). A suite for quartet, Fantasiestücke by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, something of a protégé of Elgar's. Coleridge-Taylor was Black, and when he visited the U.S. he met with Henry Burleigh, the Black pupil of Antonín Dvořák who introduced Dvořák to Afro-American spirituals, which inspired the Largo of Dvořák's New World Symphony. So we got Printz singing a setting of "Going Home," the spiritual that was later made out of the theme of that Largo, and (for quartet) the Sorrow Song and Jubilee by the contemporary Libby Larsen, a tribute to Burleigh and Dvořák incorporating fragments from another spiritual, "Swing Low Sweet Chariot." From her program notes, Larsen evidently thinks Dvořák incorporated "Going Home" into his symphony rather than the other way around.

It was a bit of a challenge in my current state going up to the City for a concert (and I have five more in the next week, so I'd better gird myself), but this one for all its oddity turned out to be worthwhile.

from the moon

Some of those photos the Artemis II crew have sent back from the far side of the Moon are really impressive. (Too bad none of the Apollo 8 astronauts, who first explored that region, are still alive to see it.) Too bad, also, that we can't just sit back and enjoy it, but have to deal with a maniac at the same time.

Eatster

Quiet Easter with B's family at her nephew L's house. His sister T, our usual hostess, is recovering from an arm injury and decided to pass. There's only so far that being Super Mom can take you.

That did mean that T's friends who usually enliven our gathering weren't present, so it was just family and their ailing dad's caretaker. Moderate amount of food. I made my cashew broccoli, discovering that it will reheat nicely instead of having to be cooked on the spot. Asparagus soup, made by L's wife E, was the treat I liked the most.

Afterwards B and E, mostly, put together a fairly simple jigsaw puzzle. We got home in time to feed the cats before they began meowing too loudly.

This morning, equally quiet when I went to the grocer's to pick up some blueberries, B's favorite which somehow got left out of our pickup order last week. I guess everybody's still sleeping off their Eastern dinner.

Tolkien Society awards

The finalists for the Tolkien Society awards have come out. I'm not linking because either you're already a TS member and have access, or you're not and it's of no concern to you. I was on the panel for Best Book (scholarly), as I was last year, and this year my choices were rather different from the rest of the panelists'. As a result, only two of the books I voted for made it to the five-item shortlist, and the other three are ones I didn't vote for, two of which I emphatically wouldn't have voted for. Meanwhile, three books I thought as good as the other two didn't make it. It's frustrating: there's not a one among my five that I didn't find flaws in, but they were also all blisteringly insightful, whereas the two I wouldn't have voted for seemed to be scrounging around trying to find something worthwhile to say. I won't identify any of these; if you're a voter read them for yourself and see what you think.