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.

to the moon

So NASA has launched its Artemis II rocket to carry four astronauts on a non-orbital lunar flyby. I was a little startled by the news that this has actually launched, because the news on it has been very subdued. For something that's intended mainly as a publicity stunt, that's doing it wrong. Have there, for instance, been profile articles on the individual astronauts? Not in the news sources I read.

Leaving aside the question of whether this is what we should be spending our money on - a question raised with just as much urgency over the first lunar program - what most concerns me is a point raised by Jared Isaacman, the NASA director. He said it's not a successful mission until they safely splash down. He's right, and the same was said about the first lunar-era missions as well. But it was NASA's extreme operational competence which made those missions run mostly properly, and which saved the astronauts the not once (Apollo 13) but twice (Gemini 8) that equipment failure created potentially deadly situations. It's been over 50 years since we last sent a lunar mission, and since then we've twice lost crews in space, which never happened in the first lunar days. A lunar mission is a proposition of extreme risk requiring precision handling. Has NASA recovered its extreme competence? If the Artemis crew return safely, it probably has: it won't be just luck that gets them back. Let's hope they do.

April the first of summerfilth

Apart from reading a couple pieces about April Fool's, I managed to get through the whole day without experiencing any, for which I was grateful. Of course I spent the entire afternoon plugged in at the medical clinic, so there's that.

It's the first night of Pesach, and I've received some greetings for that, for which I am also grateful. For the occasion, I made matzo ball soup for dinner, and for a wonder the weather was cool enough to make this a seasonally appropriate meal.

And that was the first full day of my new year.

Alan Bostick

I was quite surprised to read from File 770 that Alan Bostick had died a week ago, both because, well, he was younger than I, and because I'd had hoped to have heard such news through the personal grapevine.

Alan was a long-standing member of the Bay Area/Seattle fannish nexus, having lived in both places at various times. He was, as F770 noted, first known for one of the first of a 1980s wave of "ensmalled" fanzines, short and frequent, which he appropriately titled Fast and Loose. In recent years his principal activity was playing poker - Texas Hold 'Em was his variety - at which I gather he became quite skilled.

Alan and I were friendly in our earlier years - I was on the mailing list for the entire run of Fast and Loose - but over time he seems to have found me exasperating, and consequently I felt uncomfortable with him. Nevertheless he could be friendly, waving hello when we came across each other at the eclipse viewing party at Redding's Sundial Bridge in 2012. The last time I saw him was a month ago at Corflu. He greeted me when we passed in the hallway, but alas he was wearing a full-face mask and I didn't realize it was him until too late to respond.

I'd like to offer you a sample of Alan's writing, but all I can dig up are two issues of Fast and Loose, both from 1980 and both numbered 3 for some reason, but both devoted mostly to discussion of procrastination over getting the next issue out. One of them starts like this:

"I can't do it, I can't do it," I said with my mouth. The person to whom I was speaking with the aforementioned orifice was Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who is my roomate, and the subject was her question-- "When are you going to publish another issue of Fast and Loose, 'the Frequent fanzine'?"
"I can't, I tell you!" I shouted. "Russian troops are in Afghanistan, Iran has been holding American hostages for over 100 days, Canada just raised the price of export oil 30%, and they're going to draft my fair young bod to die in Afghanistan!"

Doesn't sound much cheerier than today, does it? It didn't seem so at the time, either. Anyway, Alan's housemates (a more accurate term) eventually convince him that "There are over four billion people living on this planet right now. Statistically speaking, one of them ought to be publishing Fast and Loose."

"I said with my mouth," by the way, is I think a Burbeeism - or if not, it falls in the same category - one of a number of verbal mannerisms introduced into fannish discourse by Charles Burbee in the late 1940s, and used by subsequent acolytes to communicate that they were faanish [sic] fans, fans into fandom for fandom's sake, and not bound to discuss science fiction or anything serious and constructive like that. Instead, they'd write about whatever came to their minds, such as - in this case - not writing anything. Typical of this breed of fannish writing. Anyway, that was a bit of Alan vintage 1980: light, attempted humorous, a bit self-indulgent, but enjoyable if you were his friend or regular reader.

dining from Trader Joe's

What I like Trader Joe's best for is their frozen skillet dinners. The ones I like B. mostly wouldn't, so I have them for lunch, typically half of it and save the rest for zapping the next day. I have had success with B. with some side dishes, especially a dynamite asparagus risotto.

I've for some time been happy with the Kung Pao Chicken, to which I add just one of the two sauce packets: that's enough, and it saves on carbs. But I've added others. They have a Spicy Thai Shrimp Fried Rice which I find addictively tasty, especially after I dig out the peas which are the one thing I don't like. You're supposed to cook the shrimp first, and the packet of shrimp is deeply buried in the package, so I empty the rice out into a large bowl first so I can grab the shrimp. This also makes it easier to get at the peas.

Some time ago - I think it's no longer still there - they had a paella which was also pretty good (again, except for the peas). I told them at the time that if they got a jambalaya of the same kind, I'd buy it. Well, guess what, now they have. It's intensely popular; the second time I went to buy it, a whole double-bin in the frozen food section that was labeled with it was completely empty. I went to another TJ's where I had gotten it before and couldn't find it; I enquired and confirmed they were out, but they said they'd be getting in more with that night's shipments. So I came back the next morning and grabbed some.

The jambalaya has a few veggies - tiny pieces of onion and bell pepper - and a fair offering of andouille sausage slices. If you want chicken or shrimp, you'll have to add it yourself, and I've been doing that. A quarter pound of tiny salad shrimp is enough.

I've also bought a bulgogi rice package, but haven't tried it yet.

misc

1. Sorry I wasn't one of the 8 million protesting for "no kings" on Saturday, but standing around for hours in the sun is no longer in my repertoire. My heart, and more importantly my vote, is with you.

2. Went to see Sullivan's last operetta, The Emerald Isle (yes it's set in Ireland). Not sure why; I'd seen it before. Very sketchy production: no sets, formal dress for costumes. Couldn't make out most of the words, sung or spoken, and the supertitles were nearly invisible.

3. The Lord of the Rings: toughest quiz ever. It's by John Garth, who knows his Tolkien better than almost anyone else active today. I got 25 out of 30, not including the one I would have gotten if I hadn't had a mental glitch, but it does include one that I don't think anyone would get unless they'd already independently noticed this (I had). Some pretty knowledgeable people got as low as 14, so don't feel bad.

arriving at a concert review of the South Bay Philharmonic

So I'm reading all these books of Tolkien scholarship as part of the jury establishing the finalists for an award, and I'm not sure what to do when an otherwise admirable book makes a boneheaded error. Here's a detailed exploration of Tolkien's methodology in making his sub-creation which repeatedly uses Valar and Ainur as synonyms. The Valar are actually a subset of the Ainur, as is perfectly clear from Tolkien's writings on the subject, the most relevant of which this scholar examines in detail, but how closely did he read it? Then there's the book on Tolkien's religious philosophy which defines Methodists as a subset of Anglicans. I don't know what to do with things like this, I really don't.

I thought of that when I got the program leaflet for yesterday's concert of the orchestra in which B. plays viola, and found that it featured works by Ludwig von Beethoven. No such person, though people in Beethoven's time made the same mistake.

Anyway, they made it fairly crisply through the abrupt opening chords of the Coriolan Overture. The Eighth Symphony was extremely hairy, full of sloppy playing and a few big clams, but fun to listen to - more than it was to play, B. says, as m.d. George Yefchak took it very fast. Also on the program, a gentle early string suite by John Rutter and a lively arrangement of that song from K-pop Demon Hunters, much more attractive than the original. Additional pieces for solo piano, string quartet, and bassoon duo made it into something of a variety show rather than an orchestral concert.

concert review: Brentano Quartet

The icon on the DW and LJ versions of this post is a caricature of Haydn, and for once that's really appropriate, for this concert consisted of 3.5 Haydn string quartets. The 0.5 was his final quartet, which he was only able to half-finish. This turned out to be about 1.0 more Haydn quartets than I wanted to hear in one concert, and I grew itchy during the last one. This was a gentle and dignified interpretation of Haydn, without much that was witty - though Haydn often demands a witty approach - and not much more that was energetic, though there was some zip in a few places, notably the finale of Op. 20/4. And that's about all I have to say about a pleasant but unexciting concert. I wonder if I'd have been able to come up with more if I'd been assigned to review it and had my close-listening ears on, though that would require that I have taken a caffeine pill to be more alert, and those are off the menu for me right now for physical pill-swallowing reasons. I fear my fine discernment may be atrophying, or at least I'm experiencing fewer opportunities to exercise it.

impatient crash resolution

We've had a resolution on the insurance question of the U-Haul driver who clipped my car three weeks ago. I'd made a statement on the phone to his insurance company, which they recorded with my permission. The driver has admitted liability, as he bloody well ought to have, so what I get is a reimbursement for the large deductible on my car's repairs. I wonder if I'd have been reimbursed if I'd had to get a rental car too. No reimbursement for the trouble of having to work out using B's car for my errands (mostly medical appointments) for a week. On the other hand, the repair shop nicely cleaned up my car above and beyond the results of the accident, so I get that gratis.

a Gilbert and Sullivan picayune point

The announcement of the Lord Ruthven Awards, named for the vampire in Polidori's pioneering tale, reminds me of another well-known Ruthven in literature, the baronet Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd in Gilbert and Sullivan's Ruddigore, and an error associated with him.

Sir Ruthven had been living in disguise as a yeoman farmer called Robin Oakapple, but at the end of Act 1 he is unveiled and forced to take up his baronetcy and the family curse associated with it, which is what he'd been trying to avoid. He reintroduces himself as a bad bart in this sung verse, which Sullivan set to sinister music:

I once was as meek as a new-born lamb,
I'm now Sir Murgatroyd - ha! ha!
With greater precision
(Without the elision),
Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd - ha! ha!

Now, Gilbert and Sullivan companies know that the name Ruthven is pronounced 'Rivven', and that fact is noted by Ian Bradley in his Annotated G&S when the name first appears in Act 1. But at this point, Bradley makes a mistake, his only one that I've noticed. He says that "without the elision" means that this one time, the name should be pronounced as spelled, and since his volume originally came out in 1984 I've noted that most G&S performances follow his advice, whereas earlier on they didn't.

But Bradley is wrong! Look at the earlier line: "I'm now Sir Murgatroyd." (A complete error on Gilbert's part, by the way - 'Sir Lastname' is never used in Britain and is the mark of complete illiteracy - but Gilbert, for all his genius, was often clumsy where scansion forced his hand.) The elision is of the entire first name and not of a letter or syllable. Accordingly it is put back in in the subsequent line, but there's nothing about how it's pronounced. If I were playing the part, I would insist on pronouncing it normally. (Although if I were good enough to play principal roles in G&S, I'd prefer to be cast as Ruthven's brother Despard, with B. as his wife, Mad Margaret, so that we could perform the song celebrating their release from durance vile, which you can watch Vincent Price with Ann Howard in here.)

more food

Mark Evanier can't think of any food he disliked as a child but likes now. I can, for myself: scallops, the shellfish. I disliked the taste, find it OK now.

That's not counting a lot of exotic cuisines I would probably have picked at if I'd encountered them as a child but didn't. College and grad school years were the great eras of discovery for me. I remember exactly when I first had Thai food: I was 25 and a colleague where I was working on my grad school work-study program took me out to dinner at what was probably then the only Thai restaurant in San Francisco. It was also one of the two spiciest Thai restaurants I've ever eaten in, the other being in Birmingham, England, a bit of a surprise since English versions of spicy cuisines tend to be very mild.

Memories of great meals of the past are giving me comfort since right now I'm not eating much of anything.

one works, the other doesn't

I went into the Social Security office this morning. As I didn't have an appointment, I had to wait an hour and a half to be seen. (During which I got a lot of reading done.) But when I was seen, the man didn't try to tell me that I could have gotten my 1099 form online. He just took my ID, confirmed my name and address on their system, and grabbed the form from the printer. Out and done in two minutes, and I didn't have to wait for it to arrive in the mail.

Meanwhile the "check engine" light came on in my car. This has happened before. It's usually a phantom alert from an emission control system; at least, the shop was unable to find anything when I asked them to take a detailed look. On another occasion, the same shop just plugged in a reader device and read off that it was the same thing. I asked them to cancel the alert and was on my way.
So I stopped into that shop to ask them to do that, and the guy was a different guy than the one I had before, and he wanted to argue with me. He wanted to take the car in for several days to run a full diagnostic (something which I didn't need; the body shop had done that last week). I asked him just to tell me what the alert said, and we'd figure out what to do next then. If it was the same phantom alert, just cancel it and I'll be on my way. But no, this guy was determined. He told me I was trying to dictate their work. That was pure projection on his part. He was trying to dictate to me, that I should leave my car for days just to find out what the alert said. He got very huffy about it.
I left. I'm not going back there again, not with customer service that rude, condescending, and dictatorial. I went to an auto parts store which can't fix anything, but which will gratis plug their device in and tell you what the alert says. Sure enough, it was the phantom. I thanked them, and I'll let it be until my next servicing.

three concerts

Wednesday, Stanford Music Dept.
The quarterly showcase of matching the students up in chamber music groups. There were a lot of pianists this term, so the concert was full of four-hand and two-piano works by Barber and Rachmaninoff. But the first one, by Mozart, turned out to be scored for two pianos and a cell phone alarm. The scherzo from Ravel's string quartet and the slow movement from Dvořák's Op. 87 piano quartet lacked oomph, but the students get credit for trying.

Saturday, California Symphony
The common thread of the three composers on m.d. Donato Cabrera's program at Lesher in Walnut Creek is that they all came from countries being oppressed by the Russians at the time. Two were contemporary "holy minimalists": Valentin Silvestrov (Ukraine) for Stille Musik, a piece for small string orchestra, beautiful harmonies but disconcertingly off-kilter; and Arvo Pärt (Estonia) for Tabula Rasa, half an hour of two violins playing overlapping hypnotic rocking figures while the string orchestra murmurs behind them. The third was Jean Sibelius (Finland) for his Second Symphony, played as if it were the anthem for Finnish independence it was sometimes taken for. That meant with all the stops out. Even the first movement sounded as grand as the finale, and the finale went totally overboard, the sort of thing that made Virgil Thomson hate Sibelius.
Recent Cal Sym concerts have been pretty full, so it was notable that this one was more sparsely attended. The Sibelius is a crowd-pleaser, so it must have been Silvestrov and Pärt who scared the hordes away.

Sunday, Marea Ensemble
Ensemble consisting of a string quartet (four women) and a soprano (Lori Schulman), presented by the Santa Cruz Chamber Players at their usual church in the hills behind Aptos. What attracted me to this one was the theme of "a journey from despair to hope" bookended by Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet, probably the most suicidal piece in the repertoire, and the "Heiliger Dankgesang" from Beethoven's Op. 132 quartet, probably the most luminous piece in the repertoire.
In the event, the Shostakovich was solemn and deliberate, avoiding slashing vehemence, which more matched it with the equally solemn and quite graceful Beethoven than contrasted with it.
The four pieces in between were all by contemporary American composers, three of them vocal. My favorite was "And So" from Caroline Shaw's song cycle Is a Rose, for its imaginative, varied and sweet accompaniment, but then Shaw is one of my favorite living composers. A cycle by Eliza Brown employed varying styles depending on the nature of the poems, but favored shimmering chords of light dissonance. Source Code by Jessie Montgomery, the instrumental piece, consisted of fragments taken from or evoking spirituals embedded in a soup of dissonance.
Local composer Chris Pratorius Gómez, who shows up on SCCP programs a lot, set "Sonder," a purpose-written poem by local writer Kristen Nelson about shared humanity under crisis. I like patterned poetry, and this was made even more effective by the composer's choice to give some of the lines to the instrumentalists to be spoken, like this:

Singer: Here hawks still circle and screech
Quartet: For now
Singer: Here owls still hoot at night
Quartet: For now

Afterwards I was able to speak to Nelson and compliment her on the poem. A long series of patterned triplets addressed "to a photo of the kids I love / their guts intact in their bellies" included

May they never fear the sky
May they never fear the sea
May they never fear the cops

A rear gut-kicker, that one, I told her, and she said, "Oh good, you got it."

petty annoyances of the week

1. It was still officially winter until Friday, but the weather out here skipped spring and went straight into summer. Temperatures were around 90, hotter in LA. The cats were lying on the linoleum.

2. My car was in the shop for repairs after the stupid U Haul driver clipped me a couple weeks ago. They said it was a 4-day job, so I brought it in Monday morning, but I wasn't able to pick it up until literally ten minutes before they closed for the weekend on Friday. I'd been able to survive the week without a rental (which I'd have had to pay for myself), making necessary errands in B's car, but I'll need my own this weekend, so it's good that's over. The shop did do a very nice job, and cleaned up the interior too.

2a. In the shop's waiting area were magazines to browse, some of them issues of a body shop trade journal called Fender Bender. Most of its contents were about the economics of the trade, but each issue has a puff profile of a shop. One of these is in San Francisco, and the article said it had a branch in Moraine County. That's "moraine" as in what a glacier leaves behind. It's actually Marin.

3. I can't get into the Social Security website to download my 1099. They've changed their login to require a smartphone to jump through the hoops, and like a lot of older Social Security recipients, I have a dumb phone. They don't tell you that you need a smartphone, of course. First is the two-factor ID, so they text you a code. That a dumbphone can handle, but it's the last thing. Then they want you to snap a photo of your ID, but there's actually an option at the bottom, "I don't have a smartphone." That's the last time you'll see that. It offers an upload. So off to FedEx to make a PDF. Then when you try to upload it, they tell you it doesn't take PDFs, only JPGs. Find a site that converts them. Then they tell you your files are too small. Find a site that promises to increase the size of your files. Discover that it reduces them instead. Find another site that actually does as it promises. Upload the files. Then you have to click on a verification URL the site sends to your phone. I can't do that, I don't have a smartphone, remember? I already told you that. Painstakingly copy the long link text to my desktop browser. Get in and answer the questions, but then it says the link has expired because I took too long.
At this point I give up, having not even gotten to the promised final step, which is "a brief video call." I can do video calls, I do them all the time on Zoom, but by now I suspect it will only accept your cell phone number, and I can't do video calls on a dumb phone.
Go to the pre-login part of the SSA website. Tells me I can get the 1099 online. No I can't. Get address of local office. Will go in on Monday morning.

wtf, Cesar Chavez?

The news broke locally a few days ago, and has now percolated out to the general media: charges have been made that Cesar Chavez, the revered farm labor activist, was a sexual molester. Dolores Huerta, his long-time colleague, has said that he both raped and seduced her, and was the father of some of her children. Huerta revealed this in support of two other women who report that Chavez molested them when they were in their teens and he was in his forties. And more have come out.

I didn't write about this earlier because I needed time to process this disturbing news. Chavez has been considered a secular saint at least since his death in 1993. His name is all over buildings and plazas and sidewalks and such like around California and probably elsewhere. Parades are held in his name. His home is a national monument, also with his name on it. There's a near-hagiographical bio-pic starring Michael Peña. His birthday - which is also mine, so I feel a kind of granfalloonish personal connection to him - is a state holiday in California.

Are we to erase all of that? It would be like taking Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson out of the South, wouldn't it? (Something which has not been very comprehensively done.)

Huerta has been sitting on this charge for some 60 years. She says she never said anything about it earlier because it would have harmed the farmworkers movement. Or maybe nobody would have believed her, though perhaps that block has been removed since the Harvey Weinstein case. But that was less than ten years ago, and Chavez had already been elevated to secular sainthood long before that.

The thing is, though, that it's long been known that Chavez was "no angel," as cops like to say of the people they murder on the streets. Chavez was a cruel authoritarian boss, he enforced stereotyped gender roles, he indulged in anti-semitism, he neglected his family, he was pals with Ferdinand Marcos, he was already a known adulterer. We named things for him while overlooking or ignoring these facts. Some of this - notably some shocking misogyny and the neglect of his family - even pop up in that hagiographical bio-pic. As with others of this kind, he was considered a good man - or maybe a great man, which is not the same as "good" - despite his flaws.

But now it turns out ... such a shame, such a horror. Wtf, Cesar Chavez?

more than it seems?

Is Alysa Liu actually happy to be posing with this police officer?

She's giving the British version of "the finger."

breakfast

As a small boy I ate cold cereal for breakfast. I liked sugary treats like Frosted Flakes and Cocoa Puffs, but some cereals like Cap'n Crunch I found over-sugared and would not eat. I also wouldn't touch anything with marshmallow bits in it, so no Lucky Charms.

I ate these dry. At the age of 9 I started finding the taste of milk to be sour and spoiled - I had probably developed a slight allergy - so I simply stopped using it.

As an adult my tastes changed to more boring cereals, like Special K and Product 19. I never much cared for corn flakes, though.

On special occasions, or when eating out for breakfast, I'd go for an omelet or scrambled eggs and sausage. But whatever the breakfast, I never ate very much in the mornings, preferring a large early lunch.

Eventually health reasons led me to give up cereals and I turned to fruit. For a long time this was apples, and I developed a taste for tart but crisp and sweet apples, like Fujis and Braeburns. Occasionally I'd spell these with pears.

But after a while I started finding apples too heavy to eat. I tried other fruits. I liked kiwis, and they're supposed to be good for you, so for a while I ate that. But I found, to my surprise, that while a kiwi as a special treat is great, as a regular diet they quickly palled. I eventually settled on a can of mandarin orange slices. No peeling or tearing up, simple to eat.

That worked fine until I started having trouble swallowing. Oranges would not chew up into mush that I could get down. When I was in the hospital and they put me on a liquid diet, I was surprised to find for breakfast cream of wheat. Did that count as liquid? But I could get it down.

On coming home, I settled on packets of instant cream of wheat. B. has a little kettle that boils water in a jiffy, and a small measuring cup used only for water, so I can fix it easy with a little salt substitute and a lot of margarine added. My dietician approves; she wants the fats and the calories in my otherwise meager diet.

The first time I stopped in at the grocers to buy some more cream of wheat, I discovered to my delight that there was also instant grits. I'm a northerner but I've always had a taste for southern US food, and I love grits. They're basically cream of wheat except with corn (maize). So now I alternate between the two, finishing one box of packets before turning to the other.

And that's my breakfast these days.

context!

A friend wrote about a vehicle service appointment where they recommended some future work which she did not want to do at this time, and I replied:

I put off some non-urgent matters at my last car service appointment, and now I'm getting regular automatically-generated e-mails (I almost wrote "auto-generated," which would be misleading in this context) reminding me that I need this stuff.

a pair of concerts

I attended two concerts last weekend, Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon. Both were nonprofessional groups I've heard before, so I was prepared for the playing to be a little dicey, but the choice of programs interested me.

The Saratoga Symphony featured Saint-Saëns' Piano Concerto No. 1, which conductor Jason Klein said is never played. Maybe not, but I'm sure I'd heard it before, I don't know where, but it sounded awfully familiar. It's a rather declamatory work, opening with a proclamatory call for horn, repeated in trumpet, which proceeds to dominate the first movement. Fortunately, if you can call it that, we had a declamatory soloist in Natalya Lundtvedt, so the result wasn't imbalanced.

Also on the program, a set of tone poems by Max Reger, no more uninteresting than usual for Reger, a rather fetid overture by Cherubini, and an unsatisfactorily airy orchestration of Debussy's "The Engulfed Cathedral."

The tiny string orchestra Harmonia California had a bit of a hit with a Serenade in E Minor by Robert Fuchs, one of those obscure late 19C German composers who play bit parts in biographies of Brahms and the like. The Allegretto movement of this one was both stately and stealthy, had real charm, and was played quite well.

They did well enough in short pieces by Gershwin and Granados (misspelled in the program, I notice), but struggled in the muck with Carl Nielsen's "Little Suite." However, the Bach Third Brandenburg as a closer worked very well, the more impressively as it was without a conductor, director Kristin Link having picked up an instrument and disappeared into the middle of the violins.

Oscar the semi-grouch

I didn't watch the Oscars, I just brought up the results afterwards on a news site. Having only seen two of the nominated films, I didn't have much stake in the outcome, but I was kind of curious.

As expected, it was a showdown between One Battle After Another and Sinners for the big prizes, and they split the two screenplay awards. Sinners is said to be a horror movie, so I'm not going to see it. No argument, no discussion, I'm just not.

I did, however, see One Battle After Another, and to my surprise I rather liked it. This is a surprise because I've seen three previous Paul Thomas Anderson movies, I didn't much like one and detested both of the others. But this one was good, and rewatchable.

The movie is in two parts, the first and shorter part taking place 16 years before the other. This part was a little hard to follow on first watching, as the characters are dumped on you before they're introduced, so it's hard to figure out what's going on and who's doing it. But on a rewatch, when you can recognize them, it's clear, especially with the help of subtitles.

Part 2, however, is crystal clear from the beginning. It is essentially one long chase scene, though as there are breaks in the storytelling and the identities of chased and chaser do sometimes change, it could be called one chase scene after another. But it felt to me like one long chase scene. But a very exciting and well-paced one as well as clearly told. It wraps up very well, too. That the father and daughter, who have been the object of most of the chasing, are finally at ease with one another by the end, so much so that they're comfortable going off and doing separate things, was particularly heart-warming.

This movie is not for everyone (I wouldn't recommend it to B.), but for what it is it's a good one.

a guide

I wrote to Pat Murphy. I said we all liked her book, there was just one small error. She asked for more information. I sent her an explanation. Rather than being put off by this core dump, she thanked me for it and asked if she could copy my e-mail to another author who was interested. I said don't bother, I've put the whole thing online. Pass it along to anyone who's interested.

So here it is, "A Guide to Terms of Address for British Nobility." Let me know if there's anything wrong, or anything left out you think is necessary.

review redux

A few days ago, I reviewed a performance of Aleksey Igudesman's The Music Critic. I didn't like it very much. Today, Joshua Kosman slammed it more than I did.

Like me, he noted that it's "essentially the live-music version of" Nicolas Slonimsky's book The Lexicon of Musical Invective but without any credit to Slonimsky. But Kosman would go further than I would. He says that "to imply that [Beethoven's contemporaries] were buffoons for not understanding that music on first hearing is craven nonsense." No, what they're buffoons for is ludicrously inaaccurate denunciations of it. What's fair, if you don't understand the music, is to express your wonderment and bewilderment, like Berlioz's composition teacher who said that, at the end of the concert where he first heard Beethoven's Fifth, he went to put on his hat and could not find his head.

Imagine having that reaction to this now-best-known of all classical works! That's the kind of feeling I'd like to recapture.

Igudesman's subtext is that critics are only there to complain about music they don't like. Unfortunately in Kosman's case that is often correct. He'd rather spend a review complaining about Carmina Burana than judging whether it's a good performance whether he likes the work or not. I try not to do that.

Kosman left at intermission, judging that he wouldn't be missing anything worthwhile. He didn't. I stayed till just before the end, when I finally got fed up, and I could just as well not have gone at all for anything I got out of it.

books with erorrs

The Adventures of Mary Darling, Pat Murphy (Tachyon, 2025)

This book does to Peter Pan what Wicked does to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: entirely deconstructs it. In this story, when the children disappear, their mother goes on a quest to find them. She's well-equipped to do so, having - it turns out - been with the Lost Boys in her youth; so was the children's father; so was Captain Hook. Captain Hook is a good guy, almost the only admirable male in the story. Peter is not a little boy who wouldn't grow up, but an entirely amoral and very dangerous though not entirely wicked spirit. That last is derivable from Barrie, but he doesn't emphasize it.

The first thing Mrs. Darling does is enlist the help of her Uncle John. That's John H. Watson, M.D., so his famous friend immediately jumps in. This book is a Sherlock Holmes story to which Holmes is entirely superfluous. He doesn't solve the mystery or do much of anything. In fact he's shown up as something of a patsy. Towards the end, there's some hasty backtracking by other characters in which they explain that Holmes is actually very talented in his limited sphere of expertise, but it is so very limited. The problem is that Holmes comes from a world with the same physical rules as our primary world, but he's stumbled into an alternate world with spirits and fairy dust in it, so his rules no longer apply but he doesn't know it.

The story actually made enjoyable reading, so where's the error? (Yes, I misspelled that deliberately above, damn you.) Murphy makes clear in the afterword that she aimed for historical accuracy in anything she didn't make up, but she made a huge clunker that fiction authors writing about British history make constantly, and that is ignorance of the nomenclature of British nobility. There's a character sometimes called Lady Hawkins and sometimes Lady Emily Hawkins. She can't be both at the same time. They mean entirely different things. "Lady" or "Lord" are not free-floating terms that can be used wherever you want. She is, like many wives of British peers at the time, an American heiress by origin, so she cannot be Lady Emily, which would make her the daughter of a high-ranking British peer, like the daughters of Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey, who are all Lady Firstname Crawley. That her husband is called both Lord Hawkins and Lord Robert Hawkins is equally impossible; if he is Lord Robert Hawkins, then his wife's proper style would be the bizarre but real Lady Robert Hawkins. (See Sayers' Busman's Honeymoon, where Harriet Vane, by now married to Lord Peter Wimsey, gives her style correctly as Lady Peter Wimsey.)

Victoria: A Life, A.N. Wilson (Penguin, 2014)

This is a readable and interesting book, so why is it filled with so many clunkers? On p. 166, Wilson says that Lord John Russell served as Foreign Secretary in the 1852 coalition headed by the Earl of Derby. No he didn't. He was Foreign Secretary in the following government, a coalition headed by the Earl of Aberdeen. Derby's government was not a coalition. Since Wilson goes on to tell us about Derby, this isn't just a glitch in name. On p. 192, Wilson says "A child was born to the marriage," but he had not told us who got married. Prince Albert died on December 14, 1861, as the text makes clear, but on p. 259, Wilson tells us that "A year on, in 1862, the Queen prepared herself for her first Christmas as a widow." Say there, Wilson, what day is Christmas?

impatient crash

Where the small access street to our development meets the main artery, there's a traffic light, and the exit direction of the small access street splits into two lanes.

Therein lies the rub, because the left lane of those two is a left-turn-only lane, clearly marked with an arrow on the pavement. That leaves the right lane, which has no markings, for both going forward and turning right.

I was in my car at the front of this lane, waiting at a red light, because I was going forward. Behind me was a U-Haul truck whose driver wanted to turn right. He thought I had to turn right too - which I could have done safely, had that been my intent - and got impatient. So - since there was nobody in the left lane - he decided to go around me.

At that moment the light turned green, and - not seeing this truck pulling this dangerous maneuver - I started to move forward. And he came around and clipped me, wrecking my left headlight cover and a bunch of other stuff. So, instead of saving 3 seconds, he wasted half an hour, because that's how long it took to settle things after we pulled over.

"Why didn't you go?" he asked me.

"The light was red," I replied.

"You could have turned right safely," he said.

"I wasn't turning right. I was going forward," I replied.

"Then you should have been in the other lane," he said.

"That's a dedicated left turn lane," I replied.

He then went over and looked at it, and what he thought after seeing the arrow on the pavement - which he could easily have seen when he was behind me - I don't know.

I got very angry with him and he responded by calling the police. The cops were bemused by what was a civil dispute, not a criminal matter, and mediated our exchange of information. One of the cops advised me not to get angry, with an implication that I did so as some kind of negotiating tactic. I said I expressed anger because I was angry. He said it wasn't a big deal, insurance will cover it.

Well, it won't. I have a large deductible, my insurance doesn't cover the cost of a rental car while mine is in the shop, and that doesn't count the nuisance and fuss of dealing with all this. My usual body shop has abruptly gone out of business, to my surprise, so I had to get the insurer to find another one on their approved list. I hope the insurer agrees that I wasn't responsible for this. That the other driver tried this tight going-around maneuver in a large truck is what seemed most to impress my insurance adjuster.

concert (sort of) review: San Francisco Symphony (sort of)

I heard an ad for this on the radio, and it sounded interesting: something called The Music Critic - ok, my latter-day profession, so I'm curious already - apparently some sort of one-man show starring John Malkovich, but at Davies, the SF Symphony hall.

It wasn't a one-man show. It was two men and an orchestra. Essentially it was a musically-illustrated version of Nicolas Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective, "written and conceived" by violinist/conductor Aleksey Igudesman, who conducted the SFS in various pieces while Malkovich, miked at a music stand with his script on it, read aloud critical denunciations of the composers over (and occasionally under) the music.

Not necessarily old ones, either (Slonimsky published his Lexicon in 1953), though there were a few classics, like Tchaikovsky calling Brahms "a giftless bastard" or César Cui's description of a Rachmaninoff symphony as the product of "a conservatory in Hell." (No credit to Cui, though, or to most of the other critics, and certainly not to Slonimsky for having thought of this idea first.)

But there were also newer ones, e.g. several claims that Beethoven is a barrier to contemporary appreciation of classical music, or even that he's unappreciable by LGBTQ+ people. At one point Malkovich read negative You Tube comments on Igudesman's videos, enabling Igudesman to respond with Max Reger's famous dismissal of criticism as if he, Igudesman, had thought of it - though, as it refers to paper, it makes no sense in an online context.

At the end, the program fell apart. Igudesman coaxed Malkovich into reading critical reviews of Malkovich's own stage performances, after which Malkovich left the stage and Igudesman announced he was going to play something evidently as a quick encore, but then Malkovich came back on stage to interrupt with incoherent critiques of the way Igudesman was playing. This was supposed to be funny but was witless and annoying. The second time it happened, I just got up and left. I'd had enough.

the evil dex

The late blogger Kevin Drum was under treatment for many years for multiple myeloma, which eventually killed him about a year ago. He wrote often about his medical adventures, and had particularly strong feelings about a medication he was on, a steroid named dexamethasone, which he called "the evil dex."

What exactly was evil about it he never made exactly clear, but it seems that it prevented him from sleeping, leaving him groggy all the time.

I do not have myeloma, but I have been taking intermittent courses of dexamethasone - one to four days each - and have to report differently. It doesn't seem to have caused any disruption in my sleep, which has actually been getting less disrupted lately, and though that may be because I was taking the dex in the mornings, I've had it in the afternoons with no further effect.

What it does cause is a spike in blood sugar, which has to be watched over carefully. And either it or some of the other medications I've been taking at the same time has been causing constipation, about which the less said the better.

mystery solved

At Corflu, where the banquet was catered at our hotel meeting room from a Puerto Rican restaurant nearby, I was pretty sure I'd been to that restaurant before. Having gotten home, I went to leave a review on Yelp and discovered that not only had I been there (nine years ago, a wonder I remembered it) but I'd reviewed it.

Had I checked my review, I could have been definite on something I was trying vaguely to recall during conversations at the banquet. The food line offered two kinds of plantains, green and sweet. What I recalled was getting a mixture and liking one but not the other, but I couldn't remember which one. Turned out that what I'd written back then was, "The fried green plantains were fairly dry and crunchy, the sweet ones far too intensely sweet and got over anything they touched."

That was in contrast to general opinion at the banquet, which is that the green ones were inedible while the sweet ones were quite good. (I didn't have either this time.)

convention report: Corflu 43

Although I still receive a few fanzines, I consider myself retired from fanzine fandom, which is pretty much why I hadn't been to a Corflu, the annual convention of that small and elitist fraternity, in 15 years. But this one was to be in Santa Rosa, easily accessible from home, and the membership list was full of people I knew and would like to see again. So why not.

It felt like I'd never left. Conversations were resumed without any hitch. Only the visuals were startling. Many of us, and I don't except myself from this, have aged so much as to be hardly recognizable at first after a long time gap. And the number of physical infirmities and mobility aids was impressive. It's a sign of the times that, when 14 of us headed out on a group expedition to the Charles M. Schulz Museum (which I'd been to before more than once, but it's an excellent museum well worth revisiting), we all qualified for the senior discount but one, and she was given it by courtesy.

The hotel was a comfy Marriott just outside of downtown, with plenty of restaurants within walking distance, though because of my dietary restrictions I refrained from joining in. But I did risk the convention banquet, which was catered at our hotel meeting room from a Puerto Rican restaurant nearby, a favorite of Rich Coad, the convention chair. I was able to nibble at the ground beef picadillo, and some seasoned rice and beans, all delicious. It was an excellent choice of venue, at least for all of us, and the convention was altogether superbly run, so kudos to Rich and all the committee.

Interesting programming, too, curated by Jeanne Bowman. A couple panels on Bay Area fannish history, one on the Magic Cellar, which as moderator Deb Notkin aptly described it, was a nightclub that felt like home to the fans who frequented it; I was lucky enough to be one of its denizens for the last year of its existence in 1977-8. And a panel on local fandom of the 80s, which while it paid notice to the local clubs, the Little Men and PenSFA, which I frequented, concentrated on a circle focused in San Francisco some of whose members I knew well but which as a group I had no connection with.

Panels also on contemporary fan editing and APAs. I haven't belonged to an apa in 20 years, so some of the discussion of their migration away from print was news to me. I agree with the general opinion that an online discussion community isn't an apa, but the production of apazines as PDFs and their distribution over email, saving both the expense and time of physical mail - especially for international members - seemed a good idea, despite a song by Sandra Bond poking fun at the whole idea of efanzines that was sung lustily at closing ceremonies.

Of lighter programming, charades based on fanzine titles was a little dubious, especially as many of the attendees, including those tasked to do the charading, hadn't heard of some of the titles, and having them be ones we recognized was the whole point. On the other hand, slam storytelling - you get the microphone for five minutes, tell an amusing anecdote from your life - worked very well. The convention theme was pickles, so the storytellers worked that in somehow. In only a couple cases did that involve physical pickled cucumbers, but all the rest told of being in a pickle. Mostly stories of travel or of animals, or both. Tom Whitmore and Karen Anderson's story of transporting pet cats by car was perhaps the most amusing.

The Guest of Honor, name picked out of a hat as customary, was Jerry Kaufman, and his GoH speech at the banquet, on the embarrassing circumstances long ago which is why he never gives speeches, could have been another entry in the previous evening's storytelling. Past president of fwa, an honorary position chosen by acclamation, was Jeanne Gomoll. Geri Sullivan and Pat Virzi showed around the current draft of a book of Corflu memorabilia they're editing. Next year's Corflu will be in Vancouver BC, run by some of the same people running this one plus sundry.

I had a good time. I picked up a bunch of interesting-looking fanzines. I'm glad I came. Health permitting, I should resume going more often.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

The problem with Mozart's Requiem is that he didn't live to finish it (ironically, since it's a requiem), and the substitute composers drafted in to complete the commission were not, frankly, very good. As a result a complete performance trails off awkwardly in the last few movements.

Various ideas have been tried to rescue the work from this problem. Today we had Manfred Honeck, music director from Pittsburgh, in to conduct his version. His plan is simply to cut out the parts Mozart had nothing to do with, and beef up the work by inserting other material. Sticking Ave Verum Corpus, a brief motet Mozart had written not much earlier, at the end was the conventional part of the plan; I've heard that done before, and it's a fine motet, so that works well. Also stuck in here, mostly as prelude but some as interludes, were other appropriate Mozart pieces, a movement from a Vespers and the Masonic Funeral Music, some Gregorian chants sung offstage by an almost inaudible male chorus, and some spoken readings, including the bit from Revelations about the Dies Irae, instantly followed by the music plunging into that movement of the Requiem.

The intent was to frame the work as a memorial for Mozart himself (highlighted by one of the readings being his letter to his dying father on the consolations of death), which was abruptly turned into a memorial for Joshua Robison, former SFS music director Michael Tilson Thomas's husband, who died last week. What it meant musically is that this was a very heavy, almost dragging, performance especially of the slow portions. I didn't find it very compelling artistically. That's a pity, because the performers (at least the ones onstage) were excellent, notably the Symphony Chorus which was as strong and rich as it's always been since Jenny Wong took over direction, and the soloists who don't get a lot, but of the four of them, all vivid with fine voices, the great Sasha Cooke stood out most.

Also on the program (the rebuilt Requiem took about an hour), works by Mozart's fellow Vienna classicists: Haydn's lively and quirky Symphony No. 93, and Beethoven's imposing Coriolan Overture, both more effectively put across than the main event.

three concerts in three days

It would have been four in four, except that a bad side-effects reaction to medication I'd been taking laid me out for a few days including Thursday's SF Symphony all-Beethoven concert. But I was feeling better by Friday.

Friday, Stanford Department of Music
All-Mendelssohn program by recent graduates. The Octet in full, the first two movements from the Op. 49 piano trio (in the opposite order. Why? Because they think it works better that way), and the first movement from the Op. 44/1 quartet. That last item was the best: dicey technically, but brought vivid soul to the music, especially the second theme.
Held not in the usual mini-auditorium but in the rehearsal hall, where there is little space. Already there was a small crowd there when I arrived half an hour early; by showtime the audience was bursting out of the room.

Saturday, Palo Alto Philharmonic
My niece's orchestra. Audible pizzicato thumps from the string basses, which she plays. Half Debussy: Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, Nuages, Fêtes. Surprisingly technically proficient, and fairly crisp in the execution, which does Debussy more credit than he deserves. Half Tchaikovsky: the Pathétique. Rougher, without much grace but gotten through effectively.

Sunday, Junction Trio
Noe Valley Ministry concert in the City. Worth it for an exquisite Schubert Op. 99, Conrad Tao's piano merging perfectly with the strings. A little less notable for Beethoven's "Ghost" Trio, not as charming and, alas, disfigured by having alien music inserted between the ghostly Largo and the finale: an equally spooky piece by contemporary composer John Zorn supposedly inspired by the Beethoven but sounding nothing like it, instead being an entry in the "bleeps and whispers" school of ultra-modernism. Plus some early fragments by John Cage in the ethereal wispy style he cultivated when still writing conventional scores.

the reference formerly known

Why aren't people referring to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor as "the Andrew formerly known as Prince"?

evens

You know the theory for how to get a piece of cake or some such cut evenly between two people? Ask one of them to cut it and the other one to pick. That will give the cutter an incentive to cut evenly and not cheat.

But what if - I was thinking while slicing brussel sprouts in two for B.'s dinner - what if the person doing the cutting isn't very good at slicing exactly in half? Then the cutter will be cheating him/herself.

your favorite Le Guin

A couple weeks ago I reported on a survey of readers' favorite Tolkien novels, and since I was focusing on Le Guin for my trip to her museum exhibit, I might as well consider favorites in that area also.

I found a Reddit thread and another on this topic, and toted up the results. Much more widespread than with Tolkien; I found a total of 17 books chosen, not counting a few people who preferred to choose individual short stories. But the favorite seemed to be The Left Hand of Darkness, followed by The Lathe of Heaven and The Dispossessed. I'm pleased to see The Dispossessed high up; for a while back there I considered it, if not the best, the most under-rated major Le Guin novel. As for Lathe, I rather have the distinct impression that it got a lot more attention after the 1980 PBS dramatization than before.

But while I like all these books, my favorite is Always Coming Home. Like just about everybody on the Reddit threads who named it, my reaction on first reading it was to be blown away in amazement.

New work by an author or artist who's already a favorite of yours can be a challenge. The existing work you've absorbed, you know it well and it's a part of you. The new work you haven't, and my experience is that it often seems a bit inferior at first, even if on absorbing it fully you conclude that it's their best yet.

Only thrice in my experience with a currently-working author or artist whose work I already loved passionately, have I encountered a new work which so dazzled me on first encounter that I immediately concluded that this was their masterwork to date, better than anything that preceded it. Nor have subsequent events changed my mind. One of these was Steeleye Span's setting of "Tam Lin". One was Donald E. Westlake's Kahawa. The third was Always Coming Home.

I've written before, for instance here, about how, when I headed the local group to run Mythcon three years after ACH's publication and had Ursula as Guest of Honor, we constructed the entire convention around a celebration of that book, so I won't go into that more here.

Instead, I'll note some supplementaries. The books which originally sold me on Le Guin as an author I'd like were A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan. I picked those up in a library, I think, and saw the map of Earthsea and the diagram of the tombs (only in early editions, I find) and recognized their similarity to maps I'd drawn myself to occupy tedious hours in the classroom. "This author has seen within my soul," I thought, and that began a permanent association.

I also have a sneaking fondness for The Beginning Place, because I think I'm one of the few readers to have figured out the real purpose of that book. It's often criticized, but what the critics cite as a flaw is actually the point.

As for Le Guin short stories, I think my favorite is "Direction of the Road," for the sheer unusualness of its viewpoint.

Grant in the west

Having recently read a biography of U.S. Grant, I was primed to visit the sites of his western service in the Army, both of which sites were on the route of my driving trip.

Having graduated from West Point and done courageous and enterprising service in the Mexican War, Lieutenant Grant spent the first few peacetime years at posts on the eastern Canadian frontier, where he could have his wife and children with him. But in 1853 he was transferred to the Pacific Coast - time-consuming, dangerous, and expensive to get to, so he had to leave his family behind.

Lonely without them, bored by his routine quartermaster duties, depressed by the damp and gloomy weather, and not getting along with his commanders, Grant began to drink heavily - or not, depending on which authorities you believe. At any rate, having been promoted to Captain in the interim, after a year on the coast he resigned his commission and returned east, to face even greater personal failure as a civilian until the Civil War arrived and he found his true metier as a commanding general.

Grant served at two posts in the west, and I visited them both. There's little relic of his presence.

Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, on the Washington state side of the Columbia River opposite Portland, is built around the Hudson's Bay Company fur-trading post of that name, but it now also includes the US Army's nearby Vancouver Barracks, still a military post when I was last here. But most of the row of impressive Victorian officers' houses that now dignify the site weren't present when Grant was here. They were built by General O.O. Howard, of passing Civil War note, who was sent out here by President Grant to improve the facilities. Grant remembered having lived in crude wooden cabins, now long gone, elsewhere on the property. One full house which was here in Grant's time is called Grant House, but he didn't live in it. The site museum says a little about all this; I learned more from conversation with the curators.

Fort Humboldt State Historic Park, on a hilltop above Eureka, California, is mostly rebuilt buildings on an open lawn. Plenty of placards but no museum. The site had been saved from housing development in the late 19C by Grant fans who wanted to preserve the site, though the original buildings had been torn apart by Grant-worshipping souvenir hunters. The placards are mostly about camp life; passing note is taken of Grant's presence, but the main one on him concerns past Grant hagiography. There's still a commemorative plaque erected by the DAR; and the placard has a photo of a now long-gone ridiculously giant statue of Grant.

garden in Portland

Another thing I did in Portland was visit the Lan Su Garden, which was enthusiastically recommended in some guidebooks I consulted. Portland is sister cities with Suzhou, China, a city near Shanghai which is known for its classical scholars' gardens. So about 25 years ago, Portland imported a crew of artisans and a whole lot of Chinese building material to create this garden in the authentic style.* It occupies an entire city block, and it's not all or even mostly plants, though there are plenty of those. There are pathways paved with stones arranged in the shape of various flower petals; there are fish ponds and little bridges over them; and mostly there are what are called pavilions, free-standing buildings mostly about the size of a western living room, intended for various purposes. One is intended as the resident scholar's place; it has one smaller room for his study and workroom, and a larger one as his reception area, with furniture in the Ming dynasty style. An even larger one, with two stories, has been set up as a teahouse.

It's all quite charming - you can see a video tour at the above link - and the guided tour was informative. There's also a gift shop at which I bought a pair of golden butterfly earrings as a Valentine's present for B., which is why I am writing about it today.

*Meanwhile, artisans from Portland built a rose garden in Suzhou.

museum report: A Larger Reality, Ursula K. Le Guin

OK, I'm back from my trip to Portland, I'm beginning to be rested up from the rigors of the drive, and it's time to tell you what I went for.

About three months ago I learned of A Larger Reality: Ursula K. Le Guin, a major exhibit on one of my favorite authors, being held in a museum in Portland. "Well, that's nice, pity I can't get to it," I thought, but then I determined that, health permitting, I would. I'd driven to Portland before. The first weekend in February was the closing dates of the exhibit, and it appeared the ideal time to go. So, subject only to a health scare that nearly canceled the trip at the last minute, I went.

Oregon Contemporary, as the museum is called, is tucked away obscurely in a corner of the Kenton district in north Portland. Its roughly two-and-a-half rooms of exhibit space were occupied entirely with this one exhibit. The captions, I was told, were written mostly by UKL's son, Theo Downes-Le Guin, and they were fabulously informative about her background, her writing habits, inspirations and motivations, and much more. I told the curators that I hope this information winds up in a book sometime. There was an associated book with this exhibit, but it was an anthology of UKL's writings, not a catalog.

By the entrance hallway are three cases with personal artifacts ranging from her own drawings of her childhood homes (the house in Berkeley and the ranch in the Napa Valley) and a childhood teddy bear (one of many stuffed animals about which, the caption told us, she wrote stories), magazines in which her stories were published, including that one issue of Playboy, her protest-march handbag festooned with buttons like "Question Authority" and "Reality is a Crutch," on to her Nebula for Left Hand (no Hugos on display) and her Library of Congress "Living Legend" medal.

Beyond this in the main room was a large section devoted to maps. That she made maps first and constructed invented worlds by exploring the map was a major point in her creativity. Wall displays showed many maps that had been seen before and some that were new to me: a map of Orsinia (published only in the Library of America Orsinia volume, which I hadn't seen) confirms its resemblance to Hungary, which I always found more of a model than Czechoslovakia, the other preferred candidate.

On a table lay computer tablets loaded with videos about UKL's map making, with headphones to listen to the narration (which also appeared on the screen). These told of everything from her inspirations - among them, her father's maps of Indian lands in his anthropology books - to her map-making techniques. One video showed a glimpse of a different version of "Some of the Places and Peoples Known to the Kesh" than was published in Always Coming Home; expressing regret to the curators that it wasn't on the wall led to the revelation that it's on UKL's website.

Other videos discussed artists inspired by UKL's maps, including Michael Everson, who found two unpublished maps in UKL's papers at the University of Oregon, one of the planet Athshe from The Word for World is Forest, the other of an unknown land labeled in an unknown alphabet. Everson has redrawn these in a more professional style, but if the result has been published I didn't find out where.

A cubicle set up in the middle of the room contained UKL's original manual typewriter and another of the same model as the hum-less electric typewriter she eventually got. Attendees were encouraged to sit down at both and write their own compositions. I didn't do so, feeling too humbled by UKL's work to attempt to compete, but I did give advice to some younger attendees flummoxed by how the manual typewriter worked, especially its lack of a number 1 key. I advised that custom was to use the small l in its place rather than a capital I. Also in the cubicle was a binder of replicas of numerous rejection letters, mostly of the early version of Malafrena she sent out in the 1950s, including the oft-referred-to but never previously seen letter in which Alfred Knopf said that 15 years earlier he'd have published it, but couldn't afford to do so now.

Two other items enlivened the main room. One was a tree, a model construct built of wood, on whose branches and roots were perched copies of almost every book UKL ever published, including a few translations, which attendees were invited to peruse; alas places to sit and read were lacking, although some younger people did settle on the concrete floor. And in a corner, which did have some seating, was a video display giving continuous runs of an hour-long film, "Views from Open Windows: Conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin." This was made by Arwen Curry, but is not the documentary I'd already seen; it was Curry's own interviews with UKL interspersed with clips from speeches and earlier interviews, including her appearance at the 1975 World SF Convention. Curry's interviews were both at UKL's home in Portland and at Kishamish, the family Napa Valley ranch. Lots of choice quotes; and at one point when the Blue Angels fly overhead at Kishamish, Ursula gives them the finger, on camera.

In the other room, a series of display cases showing her drawings and paintings - all of real-world places; books that inspired her (a vast selection, along with a card with a quotation to the effect that all the books she read inspired her), and a series of manuscripts and letters showing the editorial process at work on The Tombs of Atuan. Also in this room were a number of artworks by others inspired by Le Guin, including an animated film showing kites (or possibly balloons) in the shape of cats gazing hungrily on others in the shape of fish.

But the reason I wanted to come on this weekend is that Saturday evening, Todd Barton, composer of the Kesh music in Always Coming Home was giving a special presentation. This was in a hall to the side of the exhibit space. He talked about the process, how Ursula had secretly auditioned him when hearing the music he'd written for plays as house composer for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; how she sent a poem for his first setting, and he wrote back asking, "Do the Kesh speak English?" which led Ursula to take six months off to create the Kesh language; how they created the nonexistent instruments electronically; how LC at first refused to copyright the music on the grounds that they thought it was field recordings. He played recordings of some of the songs, recordings of the background material for others while he played or sung live; and he had the audience join in to sing the "heya" chant, but though it was a large and packed attendance, it didn't have the heft or moving quality of the time we did it at Mythcon. Barton did mention the Mythcon celebrating Always Coming Home at which he also performed the music, though he didn't remember the group's name. But this did give me the opportunity to introduce myself after the program. I walked up and said, "Todd, I wanted to say hello," and gave my name. "I was the chairman of that conference you mentioned." He was astonished to see me, and we spoke warmly of the memories. I was relieved, though, that he didn't ask after the woman on our committee who did most of the Kesh cultural lifting, because then I would have had to report that she sadly died in a traffic accident some years later.

Withal, this was a highly satisfying exhibit and program, and it was worth the trouble of driving to Portland for it.

in Portland

At last, on my way home in the third hotel of this trip, I've finally found one with a working guest-usable computer, so I can cross-post to all the versions of my blog at once, because copying and pasting is beyond anything I can do on a tablet.

But I'm going to leave the reason I was in Portland, Oregon - for the Le Guin exhibit at a local museum - aside until I get home, and write now about my thoughts about Portland:

1. Not a sign of the hellhole that some people claim the city is. I saw a busy and prosperous city.

2. And the people are cheerful despite the weather. The regular Saturday farmer's market downtown was happy and bustling despite the cold and rain.

3. Powell's Books has changed utterly. They've moved a lot of sections around since I was last there, but the big change is this. It used to be a used book store with some new books salted in. Now it's a new book store with some used books salted in. The only part I saw where the used books outnumbered the new ones was the small section for books on comic strips.

4. Millennium Music long ago abandoned its separate classical store, but now the classical section has been reduced to one long row. Still, there was a lot of interesting stuff in there.

5. Portland specializes in road signs that point in the wrong direction, e.g. left where it should be right.

6. And its slower drivers prefer to be in the left lane.

7. The commuter-time traffic is really grim. I stayed out near the airport (it's cheaper there). where a hidden back road (Columbia Blvd) gave me a straight shot to the museum, but to get anywhere else at those hours was a puzzle.

concert review: Oregon Symphony

Yes, I’m in Portland, and this concert in the large and old-fashionedly ornate (it doesn’t have restrooms, it has “lounges”) Schnitzer Concert Hall downtown turned out to be the perfect way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon. Music Director David Danzmayr led his crackerjack orchestra through Anna Clyne’s Color Field, a typically imaginative Clyne work with some evocative open harmonies, and concluded with a thoroughly robust rendering of the Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, in which the tuba struggled a little in “Bydlo, “ but there were otherwise no problems. The orchestra has newly acquired a custom-made bell, and this clanged out like nothing you’ve heard before in the grand conclusion.

But the highlight of this concert came in between: the Bruch Violin Concerto, and it wasn’t the highlight just because the estimable Gil Shaham was soloist. I just heard this concerto last month from San Francisco, and the soloist was smooth-toned but rather characterless, while the orchestra was even bland and dull. Not this time. Here we heard why this is one of the most popular concertos in the repertoire. The orchestra was as burstingly robust as they would be in Pictures, and Shaham, though I’ve heard him perform wonders before, was simply amazing, a standing rebuke to plainer soloists. Every note had character, and his mostly high and dry tone varied tremendously, including some of the tenderest soft passages that could still be heard over the orchestra. Thrilling.

Lee Speth

One of my oldest friends died a couple days ago. He was in his early 80s. You can read the factual details about him on the File 770 website, in entry 4 in the miscellaneous post for February 6. I am away from home and posting on my pokey little tablet, so I can’t provide links or even write much, so I shall just say that Lee and I became friends about 50 years ago when we were both single and were regularly cast together as roommates at Mythcons.

Our friendship was not much about serious mythopoeic literature, but centered on politics in which we were both interested, him professionally as an elections supervisor. Lee also enticed me, and later B., to attend the Oz conventions which were a regular part of his schedule. For many years they were held annually at Asilomar near here. Lee and Dolores, whom he had delightfully married, would fly from LA to San Jose or Monterey and I would pick them up. We’d have dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey and then proceed to the conference center. I also visited them regularly whenever I ventured south. Neither of them drove, not as much of a rarity in Angelinos as you might think, but having a driver at his disposal didn’t alter Lee’s invariable preference for eating at the same burger/pasta/salad place a block from their apartment, where he was an esteemed regular.

As he was also in the Mythopoeic Society, where he handled back issue orders for many years and spent Mythcons mostly sitting behind the Society sales table. I shall miss his acute intelligence and occasional wicked sense of humor.

dissing on sf cons, again

Here's yet another characterization of sf cons as unwelcoming and elitist. I find that a very strange charge. In my youth I was stepped on by all sorts of elites, but I never had any trouble finding sf cons welcoming and joyous.

But I know why this is. It's because I didn't go to sf cons with a chip on my shoulder. I had figured out that literary sf cons are about written sf literature. If you go to a focused special-interest con, you have to focus on what interest you have in that, and put other interests in abeyance for the weekend. I once went to a festival celebrating Peter Jackson's Tolkien movies. I'm famously excoriating on those, but I shut up about that for the weekend and accepted the celebration of what's good about them (and there are good things about them, just not anything having to do with Tolkien). Last month I went to a Clark Ashton Smith conference. I'd never paid more attention to Clark Ashton Smith than the length of time it took to read one or another short story by him, but for that weekend I focused on Clark Ashton Smith - and learned a lot.

And the reason these small specialty conferences are hostile to other interests is because they feel beleaguered. They're a community and they have an interest. There's a lot more comics fans than there are literary sf fans, as the size of comics cons will reveal, and they've got plenty of conventions of their own. Same with movies. If they come in to the small specialty cons, they'll drown out what the con is there for. Decades ago there was a joke in the Mythopoeic Society that Star Wars was the black hole of conversation; that once it came up, it took over the discussion.

I don't expect these cons to change their focus for me. I don't march into a literary sf con and demand to be taken as a comics fan, as the poster did. They're a community; you can join that community if you have any interest in its subject. (Some of the Clark Ashton Smith attendees had barely begun reading his work, and they weren't denigrated by the hoary old specialists, because they were showing interest; they weren't demanding the con be about something else.) Blend into the environment you're in, if you have any interest in it at all. There'll be a chance for a different environment next weekend.

PS: Kayla Allen corrected a small factual error in the post.

in the files

John Scalzi found himself in the Epstein files. (It was a reference to his "Lowest Difficulty Setting" essay in an article included there.)

It occurred to me to look up Tolkien, because I'm historically beholden to look up Tolkien in everything. And besides a couple of references in clippings included there, he's quoted in an e-mail sent to "undisclosed recipients" by someone named Will Ford. I don't know who that is; probably not William Clay Ford Jr. of the eponymous motor company, as according to Wikipedia he's called Bill, not Will.

Anyway, it's from a daily "tidbits & quotes" e-mail, and among the entries is: "The road goes ever on and on..." - J.R.R. Tolkien. Probably one of his better-known lines (the poem it comes from has been set to music an amazing number of times), but what it means in this context I can't say.

your favorite Tolkien

I missed this when it was published a year ago, but in a list of File 770's best articles of the last year I found Cat Eldridge surveying a bunch of authors on the question, "What's Your Favorite Tolkien?"

Most of them picked either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, indeed some hadn't read anything else by him, and a few who picked one of those two didn't like the other. A few went for the tale of Beren and Lúthien or The Children of Húrin.

The respondent who's closest to my own views is Elizabeth Hand, who picked The Lord of the Rings because "it imprinted on me at such an early age ... it was still a cult novel, and you had a real sense that you were in some secret, marvelous group of insiders who had visited a place not everyone knew about." Sort of, for me: I'm Hand's age and also imprinted on it from an early age in the 1960's. But I didn't feel part of a group of insiders; I felt terribly alone and clutched the book by myself. From my first reading at eleven, I never found anybody else who'd read Tolkien's work and wanted to talk about it until I was seventeen.* Six years, with no expectation that the durance will end, is a long time when you're that young. As a result, when I did finally find the Tolkien fans - remember that this was long before the public internet - I wanted never to leave, and I never have. Half of what makes up my life has been built around this.

As a result of that intense interest, I have, like Hand, been drawn to Tolkien's other works. She particularly notes the "History of Middle-earth" series, and says "I'm continually so amazed by what this one man came up with, the intensity and single mindedness of his obsession. And I get sucked into it all over again." And that is quite close to what I feel. Not the intensity so much as the sheer boundless creativity of one mind, its ability to deploy the illusion of reality so profoundly.

But one reason to focus on The Lord of the Rings is that it's so large. It'd probably be my choice of desert island book. But word for word, because it's quite short, my favorite Tolkien is something that nobody on the list mentioned: Smith of Wootton Major. I once wrote an article explaining why I thought it was a perfect fairy-story: partly because of what the author chose to leave out.

*I identified with a line about Gollum in The Hobbit (my introduction to Tolkien, and also a favorite): he "always spoke to himself through never having anyone else to speak to." That sums up my childhood relation to peers in a nutshell.

things I learned

from reading the Feb. 2 New Yorker

1. Nancy Kerrigan is now 56 and still skating.

2. Another reason to be happy I'm married: dating apps would not be for me. The sort of things they focus on have nothing to do with what I looked for in a partner.

3. Despite what they tell you about protest marches sparking political change, they don't amount to much. Disorganized movements that allow local groups to foster independent home-grown leadership are the way to go, despite the groups often developing contradictory principles. The article doesn't explain how it succeeds despite that.

4. Japan's leading political party has ties to the Moonies. That was why Shinzo Abe was assassinated: the assailant was angry because his mother had given all the family's money to the Moonies. And he blamed Abe ... how does that follow?

5. Research into chemicals in breast milk is corrupt and unreliable.

6. Tucker Carlson is evil. Sorry, I already knew that.

7. Maybe now I'll remember who David Foster Wallace is. I'd vaguely heard of him, but if you'd presented the name without context I'd have drawn a blank.

8. I'm missing something by never having heard Morton Feldman's music performed live, only on records.

9. Tolkien's "Ent" is a favorite word for crossword-puzzle makers. It keeps showing up.

Thing I learned from another article on the same subject as a New Yorker article:

1. The Easter Island statues should be called "statues." The word moai is probably inauthentic.

The time it takes to put out a weekly magazine is long enough, and the speed of events is fast enough, that it seems quaint that the issue's current events piece is about Greenland. Now we're talking about the murder of Alex Pretti and the possibly game-changing effect of all those videos on the narrative. My thought on that is, "Once, there was just Abraham Zapruder."

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Jaap van Zweden, formerly of the NY Phil, conducted SFS's opening gala this year and is returning twice (this is his second of the three), making him and James Gaffigan, who's also conducting three programs, the closest things to a regular conductor that this director-less (and direction-less) orchestra has this season.

This week he was joined by the storied pianist Emanuel Ax for Mozart's Concerto No. 25, K. 503. Ax played lovely little sheens of notes, particularly shining in his delicate renditions of Mozart's curling phrases, and in some striking tone colors in the perkier moments of the finale. The orchestra was a bit more stolid. As with most other C Major orchestral works of this era, this concerto is heavy on the trumpets and the horns. Combine that with the stolidity and you get some rather dull and routine Mozart. But Ax made a good impression. He didn't play an encore, instead grabbing concertmaster Sasha Barantschik by the hand to drag him (and by courtesy the rest of the orchestra) offstage after the fourth curtain call. I've seen conductors make that move before, but never a soloist.

If Mozart was mixed, Bruckner's Seventh Symphony came out pretty well. Conducting Bruckner with skill means focusing on shaping those big paragraphs, and van Zweden had a good handle on that and on inserting the proper punctuation marks. Fairly brisk but not hurried in tempo, the music made coherent sense, though it could sometimes be less than seamless in flow. Van Zweden's only real quirk was a tendency to drop the volume suddenly in order to build it up afterwards. Balance was mostly good, though the brass in full cry would drown everybody else out even if they were all playing. The first two movements of the Seventh have more lush melodies for strings than any other Bruckner symphony, and these came out with full weight that eschewed opulence.

Most of my SFS concerts this season have been pretty packed, but for this one, though the main floor and terraces were full, the balconies were almost empty.

Usually I leave home for an SFS concert about 3.30, but I had a phone call from my doctor scheduled for 4 pm that couldn't be moved. So I was an hour later and the traffic was that much heavier. I'm driving all the way in instead of taking public transit for the last leg these days, parking in the Civic Center underground garage, and I arrived in time to have dinner at my favorite nearby Chinese place, at the cost of missing the pre-concert lecture.