tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6808190022357733062024-03-18T21:09:49.503-07:00Kalimac's cornerKalimac's corner: a journal by DBUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2902125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-27340896953282258352024-03-17T10:33:00.000-07:002024-03-17T10:34:44.847-07:00newsWell, I've got some news.<br /><br />
First, that <i>The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien</I> is being published this fall. My first excursion into Tolkien arcana was tracking down some of the obscure anthologies and magazines where Tolkien published occasional fugitive poems in the 1920s and 30s - some of them tangents to his then otherwise completely unknown Silmarillion mythology. And now nobody will have to do that. I've put the details up on <a href="https://www.tolkiensociety.org/blog/2024/03/the-collected-poems-of-j-r-r-tolkien/">the Tolkien Society blog.</A><br /><br />
Second, that not one but <i>three</I> short stories by the late, great, and utterly weird Howard Waldrop are being made into movies. They're all short films, but I don't know when they're being released. But there are trailers online! They are:<br /><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJm_LYfQJW8">The Ugly Chickens</A>, starring Felicia Day<br /><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtJud8jC4Sg">Mary Margaret Road-Grader</A>. That looks like Keanu Reeves, but he's not in the IMDB credits.<br /><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C73mShwkH5c">Night of the Cooters</A>, starring Vincent D'Onofrio. That one has already been released, but I hadn't known about it.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-17407365202733677772024-03-16T09:01:00.000-07:002024-03-16T09:01:41.819-07:00concert review: San Francisco SymphonyFriday's SFS concert came in the wake of institutional trauma unleashed the previous day. Thursday morning the Symphony unveiled its schedule for next season, 2024-25 (I haven't looked at it yet; there's no point until I know which concerts will be on my series). That afternoon was a matinee performance of the same program I would hear on Friday. In between, however, Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen released a statement that he will not be seeking to renew his contract which expires at the end of next season. "I do not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors does," the statement said waspishly.<br /><br />
He didn't say what those goals were, but the CEO of the orchestra said in an interview that it was due to financial cutbacks, especially hurting EPS's pet projects, that were undreamed of when he was hired.<br /><br />
But <I>SF Chronicle</I> critic Joshua Kosman thinks there's more to it than that. I got into terrible difficulties when I tried to summarize what he wrote, so let me just quote him:<BLOCKQUOTE>What went wrong?<br /><br />
The simplest answer to that question is banally obvious: COVID-19.<br /><br />
Salonen announced plans for his first season as music director in February 2020. It was supposed to begin that September with an inventive festival spotlighting the eight artists and thinkers he’d tapped as Collaborative Partners, and to include an array of dynamic, inventive programming.<br /><br />
A month later, it all crumbled in the face of the pandemic. Some might argue — OK, I would argue — that the Salonen era in San Francisco never fully recovered from that initial blow.<br /><br />
Nearly everything Salonen undertook for the first two years of his tenure had to function as a survival strategy, and later a recovery strategy, in the face of the pandemic.<br /><br />
He took the Collaborative Partners online with “Throughline,” an ingenious but slender digital program with a score by pianist and composer Nico Muhly. He reconfigured SoundBox, the orchestra’s experimental music series, to function as a digital offering.<br /><br />
And in spring of 2021, when audiences were finally able to trickle back into Davies Symphony Hall for in-person performances, he created ingenious programs that worked around the logistical constraints of masks and social distancing.<br /><br />
All of this was handled with imagination and dexterity. But it wasn’t what anybody wanted — not the orchestra, not its audiences, not (I assume) Salonen. Even after regular concerts resumed in earnest that fall, there was still that faint shadow across the proceedings, a sense that we had all gotten off on the wrong foot together.</BLOCKQUOTE>One should remember that EPS doesn't need the music director job. He didn't <I>want</i> another music director post after retiring from the LA Philharmonic; he wanted to compose and to guest-conduct occasionally. He acceded to SFS's offer because the opportunity to do the work he wanted was irresistible. If it no longer is giving those opportunities, why should he continue beyond what he's already contracted for? He'll be turning 67 about when next season ends; maybe it's time to go.<br /><br />
That gives management about a year to find a replacement, assuming they don't go the "seasons of discovery and decision" route of making a season or two out of auditioning people in guest conducting slots. SFS tried that once before, in the early 1950s: it did not produce a successful result. Nor did it work well for the San Jose Symphony in the 1990s. On the other hand, the California Symphony is happy with the music director it got that way, after firing its previous director because of - ta-da - financial disagreements.<br /><br />
So how was Friday's concert? EPS conducted, and there's no question what the audience thought about the situation: he received rapturous applause and cheers from the full house when he entered, though that was nothing compared with what he got when he finished. He took his bows standing in the midst of the orchestra, as if to emphasize the musical partnership which is unaffected by what management does, and the orchestra members presented him with a huge bouquet of flowers, which they'd also done on Thursday.<br /><br />
EPS specializes in new music, but if you're going to have a conductor from Finland, you can't prevent him from indulging in Finland's most renowned composer, Jean Sibelius, and doing a fabulous job of an all-Sibelius program. He took the famous tone poem <I>Finlandia</I> with great solemnity, grand and slow with biting brass and timpani. In the Violin Concerto, soloist Lisa Batiashvili, who specializes in this piece, gave a sweet and caressing tone throughout double-stops and harmonics and whatever else threatened to be difficult. Meanwhile, EPS kept the orchestra fully involved in dialogue with the soloist, not an easy accomplishment in this concerto. I didn't catch Batiashvili's announcement of the shivering piece she played as an encore, though I think she said it was (like herself) from the nation of Georgia, but I'm not reviewing this concert so I don't have to worry about it.<br /><br />
The concert finished with Sibelius's First Symphony. EPS pulled out all the grand and solemn stops he'd used in <I>Finlandia</I> for the finale, but otherwise the piece was bright, crisp, and bold. I was particularly impressed by the emphasis on the strophic outline of the opening of the gorgeous and touching slow movement, yet without a sense of repetitiveness. A magnificent performance that kept me rapt throughout. It deserved all the applause it got.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-38680791473984117922024-03-12T19:34:00.000-07:002024-03-12T19:34:09.808-07:00in bloomLucy H. reported that two weeks ago she drove down I-5 from the Pacheco Pass to Bakersfield and was astonished to see the usually dry and dusty country blooming with nut trees in blossom. I decided I had to see some of that, so today I headed over there, a 90-minute drive from here. I spent little time on I-5 and didn't go anywhere near as far as Bakersfield but mostly drove back farm roads in the area immediately adjacent to the road coming from Pacheco.<br /><br />
The top of the blossoming has faded by now, but I did see some orchards still in bloom, and the main street of one small farm town in Merced County* was lined with trees which, like ones I remember from my childhood when the area I live in was still mostly orchards, were so full of white blossoms they looked from a distance like popcorn trees. <I>Popped</I> popcorn trees.<br /><br />
This trip also gave me the chance to have lunch at my favorite Basque restaurant in the area, possibly my last chance to eat tough chewy food for now, as the dentist is scheduled to have at me tomorrow and things may be tender in there for a while.<br /><br />
<font size="-1">*Or possibly Fresno County. The road signs said it was Fresno, but the map said it was Merced.</font>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-67674081629451523632024-03-10T20:28:00.000-07:002024-03-10T20:28:32.189-07:00Oscar the grouchSo <I>Oppenheimer</I> was the big winner, taking home Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, and a couple of technical awards. I saw that one when it came out, but mostly because I'm a sucker for historical films on topics that interest me. I wasn't terribly impressed by the movie, and have no desire to see it again, and that's largely because it tried too hard to be Big and Impressive, probably the very qualities that endeared it to the Academy voters.<br /><br />
As I wrote at the time, it's a Christopher Nolan Auditorily Obnoxious Special. Except when making a speech or giving testimony, Cillian Murphy mumbles to show how diffident Oppenheimer is. Only about half of what he says is audible. Meanwhile Nolan blasts you with the subwoofers any excuse he can, from the sound of nuclear bombs exploding to the sounds of an applauding audience stomping its feet on stadium bleachers. They're equally loud.<br /><br />
I've seen two other of the Best Picture nominees: <I>Maestro</I> (7 nominations, no wins), which I was lured to for the same reason I saw <I>Oppenheimer</I>, and which was impressively made but is so focused on its subject's personal life that it's of no possible interest to anyone who isn't fascinated by Leonard Bernstein as a person; and <I>The Holdovers</I> (5 nominations, 1 win for Supporting Actress), an intensely feel-good movie about the redemption of a curmudgeon, so much so that even the sour ending feels feel-good. I'm not inclined to see either of those again soon either.<br /><br />
I saw <I>Nyad</I>, which didn't get a Best Picture nomination but did get two acting nominations, which I thought well-deserved. I had no interest in the subject matter and tend to feel that a feat like that depicted here is pointless. Yet I enjoyed this movie more than any of the above.<br /><br />
Strangely, I have seen a couple other winners in the category of "not really candidates for Best Picture," because they showed up for free online. <I>The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar</I> (Best Live Action Short) is a highly stylized film in a style I enjoy, captivating though the plot doesn't make much sense. <I>The Last Repair Shop</I> (Best Documentary Short), however, is a strangely unsatisfactory film though adequately watchable. The topic is a musical instrument repair shop which services the instruments given by the LA school district to its students. Interviews with repair personnel telling their inspiring life stories are intercut with students testifying to how much they appreciate their instruments, but there is hardly any music played. At one point a student plays a few bars of Beethoven on the piano, but the camera is focused on her head, pulling down to the keyboard only just as she stops. I'm not sure what to make of the repairers, either, especially the one who claims to have once been a major success as a bluegrass fiddler. Count me skeptical of his importance once I found that his group has no entry in Wikipedia. And he doesn't say anything about how, in that case, he wound up with a lowly job in musical repair, still less why he's working on wind instruments and not violins.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-30114078576413449022024-03-08T07:40:00.000-08:002024-03-08T07:41:43.363-08:00way up highSo here's a musical conundrum that I learned of courtesy of <a href="https://file770.com/pixel-scroll-3-6-24-so-we-scroll-on-filers-against-the-current-borne-back-ceaselessly-into-the-pixels/">File 770</A>, not normally a source for musical stories, but it's a science fiction fanzine and this story relates to a fantasy movie, so the story's presence there is no more dragged in from the dirt than is the content of the story itself.<br /><br />
The question is, is the melody of "Over the Rainbow" - the song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSZxmZmBfnU">famously sung</A> by Judy Garland in <i>The Wizard of Oz</I>, composed by Harold Arlen with words by E.Y. Harburg - plagiarized?<br /><br />
<a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/the-wizard-of-oz-over-the-rainbow-plagiarized-1235843128/">This article</A> goes into the matter in detail.<br /><br />
The putative source is a Concert Etude, Op. 38, for piano, by the Norwegian composer and pianist Signe Lund (1868-1950), who was living in the U.S. when she published the work in 1910, and apparently played it widely. Could Arlen have heard it? Maybe. He was five years old when the piece was published, and he studied piano as a boy. His testimony (quoted in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over_the_Rainbow">the song's Wikipedia article)</a> is that the melody just suddenly occurred to him one day while he was thinking of other things.<br /><br />
But even if Arlen's subconscious dredged Lund's piece up, is his just copied or is his song a substantially original composition? I'd say the latter.<br /><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNXvug_BjNM">Here is Lund's Concert Etude</A>, played by the pianist who noticed the resemblance. The section with the resembling melody begins at 1:24. You can follow along with the score of that section which is reproduced in the <i>Hollywood Reporter</I> article.<br /><br />
And the first thing I notice is that Lund's melody completely lacks the most distinctive characteristic of Arlen's: the octave leap at the beginning. It does have the subsequent smaller leaps, in which its resemblance to "Over the Rainbow" principally lies, but their effectiveness comes from the way they follow the initial leap. See <a href="https://sharemylesson.com/todays-news-tomorrows-lesson/best-music-lesson-ever-what-makes-over-rainbow-work">Rob Kapilow</A> on why "Over the Rainbow" is such a haunting and memorable song. It doesn't make such an effect in Lund. Also there's the bridge section of "Over the Rainbow" and its echo at the end, also mentioned by Kapilow and absent from Lund's version.<br /><br />
If I'd been presented with the two with no indication of priority, I'd have been far more likely to guess that Lund's more elaborate melody was a variation and elaboration on Arlen's rather than that Arlen had boiled Lund's down to get his own. And I'd think that based on my experience of listening to how classical composers work when writing variants of melodies. Though Arlen wasn't a classical composer, so who knows.<br /><br />
Furthermore - see the Wikipedia article again - it's already been noticed that "Over the Rainbow" also resembles a melody from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh8dqp1ZzHU">an intermezzo</A> from an opera by Pietro Mascagni - and the opera, <i>Guglielmo Ratcliff</i>, predates Lund's publication by 15 years. So who's copying from whom?<br /><br />
So it's possible, but by no means certain, that parts of the melody to "Over the Rainbow" came from Lund. And in today's fiercely puritan environment, that may be enough to find guilt in copying. But it's clear enough to me that the genius in the melody - what keeps the song alive today - was put there by Harold Arlen and by him alone.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-14144117740951905012024-03-07T09:17:00.000-08:002024-03-07T09:17:33.606-08:00snappy answers to obvious questions"You got your hair cut!"<br /><br />
1. No, I got all of them cut.<br /><br />
2. Oh, so <I>that's</I> what that guy was doing!<br /><br />
A more challenging thing to answer is the barber's question, How long do you want it?<br /><br />
I've taken to saying that I want the hair by the earlobe to be as long as will take it up to the earlobe but no further; I don't want it over the ear. And the same length all the way around.<br /><br />
I have no idea how else to say it. I can't estimate inches off, which they sometimes want to know, and in any case hair on different parts of the head grows at different rates, so it can't be consistent.<br /><br />
Often I have to give my answer two or three times. Yesterday I had an inexperienced barber and had to say it about 15 times. Even then he didn't do it right. No, the hair is still going over the ear. See? It needs to be shorter than that.<br /><br />
Eventually I got a satisfactory haircut, but this is why I find barbering such an unpleasant experience.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-3148392156415354032024-03-06T19:15:00.000-08:002024-03-06T19:15:25.364-08:00concert review: Castalian QuartetI'd been very impressed with the Castalian Quartet on my first visit to the Banff String Quartet Competition eight years ago, and this was my first chance to hear them since, nonwithstanding that only two of the four members are still the same people.<br /><br />
It still sounded much the same, navigating a serious-minded way through Haydn's Op. 20/5 with bright, intense colors, and playing Brahms's Piano Quintet, one of my all-time favorite chamber works, with pianist Stephen Hough. The treble intensity of the quartet made the first two movements sound a bit thin, as if fewer instruments were playing than usual, but they made up for it by emitting the scherzo as a ferocious roar.<br /><br />
Also on the program, a quartet by Hough himself, which he'd been commissioned to write for a recording otherwise of French quartet music. So he decided to write a piece reminiscent of Les Six, though none of them were among the composers on the record. Yeah, it sounded a little like Les Six at times, but it didn't sound much like Stravinsky in the parts that were supposed to sound like Stravinsky, and much of it didn't sound like anything at all. You want to be very careful before you position yourself between Haydn and Brahms.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-76986656801382014612024-03-05T08:25:00.000-08:002024-03-05T12:54:39.797-08:00obituary: Richard PlotzA notable figure in the history of Tolkien appreciation passed from us last Saturday. Richard Plotz was the founder of the Tolkien Society of America. Though not the first Tolkien fan club, it was the one that took off and served as foundation stone of the Tolkien fan boom of the 1960s.<br /><br />
Dick was a bright 16-year-old high school student from Brooklyn, auditing classes at Columbia University, when he saw some graffiti in Tolkien's Elvish at a subway station. Various similar comments went by for some time, until finally Dick impulsively scrawled the date and time for a meeting of a Tolkien club on campus.<br /><br />
On the date, half a dozen people showed up - none of whom was the original subway scribbler, but one of whom, Deborah Webster Rogers, later became co-author of the Twayne's English Authors series volume on Tolkien. They talked Tolkien for an hour.<br /><br />
This was February, 1965, <I>before</I> the Ace paperbacks, let alone the Ballantine paperbacks, were published later that year. All these people had read <I>The Lord of the Rings</I> in hardcover.<br /><br />
Clearly there was a surging interest in this. The group continued and formalized. Dick placed a classified ad in <I>The New Republic</I> and attracted more people. W.H. Auden, known to be a Tolkien fan since his laudatory reviews of <I>The Lord of the Rings</I> in the <I>New York Times</I>, attended a meeting, and an attending reporter wrote about it in <I>The New Yorker.</I><br /><br />
Rather to Dick's surprise, the group continued to grow. Mail poured in. An at-first sketchy magazine called <I>The Tolkien Journal</I> was published. Dick's friend Bob Foster started compiling an annotated glossary of names in Tolkien's world, later published as <I>A Guide to Middle-earth</I>. <I>Seventeen</I> magazine sent Dick to Oxford to interview Tolkien. Tolkien, exhibiting more patience with the fan group than he inwardly felt, wrote Dick several letters, informative on himself and his creation. The most valuable of these was a declension of Quenya nouns, the only first-hand material on Elvish grammar then available; it was passed around in a semi-hushed fashion among devotees until it was finally published over 20 years later, and it may now be found on p. 522-23 of the new edition of Tolkien's <I>Letters</I>.<br /><br />
Come 1967, Dick graduated high school and went off to Harvard. College pressures as a pre-med student forced Dick to give up the Society, which was taken over by Ed Meskys, a science-fiction fan from circles there which had been discussing <I>The Lord of the Rings</I> since its publication. When Ed's health problems in turn forced him to give it up in 1972, the Mythopoeic Society (founded in 1967, another fruit of the college and teenage Tolkien boom) took it over.<br /><br />
Dick eventually got his medical degree, became a physician specializing in cancer research, married a woman he'd met in the TSA, and devoted his leisure time to family genealogy. He left active Tolkien fandom behind him, but his contributions haven't been forgotten.<br /><br />
<A HREF="https://www.olsonparent.com/obituary/Richard-Plotz">Obituary for Richard Plotz</A><br /><br />
<A HREF="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE9sUPMzs6c&t=11371s">Recent video interview with Richard Plotz and Robert Foster</A><br /><br />
Thanks to Carl Hostetter and Gary Hunnewell for information.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-48484999976994986232024-03-04T21:38:00.000-08:002024-03-05T11:53:36.163-08:00counting Hugo ballotsSo <A HREF="https://file770.com/proposal-that-there-should-be-a-permanent-hugo-tech-working-group-guest-post-by-doctor-science/">here's another proposal</A> to fix the Hugos. This one wouldn't hive the entire administration off to a permanent committee (which <A HREF="http://kalimac.blogspot.com/2024/02/hugo-ill-stay-home.html">I think would be a mistake</A>) but would create a continuing committee to watch over the software for counting ballots.<br /><br />
For it seems that "convention committees all seem to have at least one person on them, in a position of authority, who wants to be the one to invent the software suite to rule them all that will solve all future fannish endeavours henceforth," so they all reinvent the wheel, and this was done particularly badly at Chengdu, where McCarty wrote his own software which 1) had plenty of code errors in it 2) can't be corrected because the code is proprietary and he won't release it.<br /><br />
My, how different things are from when I co-administered the Hugos thirty years ago.<br /><br />
First off, in those days almost all ballots were on paper. (We got a few by e-mail. We printed them out, so they'd fit with all the others.)<br /><br />
Second, we only used software to count the final ballots. Nominating ballots and voter ID check were done by hand. The idea of creating software to count the nominating ballots seemed to me ill-advised. There were too many different nominations, too much irregularity in how they were identified. Maybe if there'd been 5 or 10 times as many ballots we'd have been forced into it, but a few hundred nominating ballots, most of them largely empty? Not a problem.<br /><br />
As for that final-ballot software, all three years we used the same program, which had been devised by the administrator from seven years before our first run. Why? Well, it was a reliable program, and its author was a friend of ours. I think others used it too, and I always presumed it (revised by the author as rule changes required) was the standard ballot-counting program, at least for a while.<br /><br />
I'm not computer programmer guy, so I have no idea what computer language it was written in, but I do know the code was simple and accessible. It could be filled out so that the names of the actual finalists would appear on the data entry screens, and then the end users just typed in the sequences of numbers from the ballot. Finish your batch, save the file, run the program for the complete results on that file if you're curious, then when the ballots have all come in, combine all the files and run the program for the final result. Then do recounts on categories where the results are tight. Us two administrators and a couple volunteer assistants did all the data entry work.<br /><br />
This program was only designed for manual data entry, so it couldn't count the electronic ballots used today without inserting an unnecessary and stupid manual step. And I suspect that the EPH rules of the far future would have been beyond it without a massive rewrite.<br /><br />
But it did everything we needed it to do back then. It even calculated adherence to the 5% rule which caused so much vexation in those days. The 1st ... nth place result cascades that we submitted to <I>Locus</I> and other news sources? Those were a direct cut-and-paste from the output of our wonderful little program.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-10317338200579517822024-03-03T19:56:00.000-08:002024-03-03T19:56:18.556-08:00musical theater review: The LamplightersHaving successfully transplanted <I>The Mikado</I> from Japan to Renaissance Italy, the G&S company The Lamplighters has now experimented with <I>Ruddigore</I> or, in the spelling they prefer, <I>Ruddygore</I>.<br /><br />
<I>Ruddigore</I> is a satire of early 19th-century melodrama, and it must have occurred to somebody that its plot - of witches, ghosts, madness, a family curse, and a plot twist leaving a woman unsure which of three men she's engaged to - resembled a Mexican <I>telenovela</I>.<br /><br />
And while the result isn't much like <I>Jane the Virgin</I> or the stage play <I>Destiny of Desire</I>, the only telenovela-inspired works I know, it is set in Mexico, late 19th century. The character names and spoken dialogue were tinkered with a bit, but the English core of the story, unlike the Japanese one of <I>The Mikado</I>, is apparently irreducible, so the setting is a real town which was settled in the 1820s by Cornish miners. So the characters are mostly either Mexicans of English descent or actual English who immigrated to be with their ex-compatriots.<br /><br />
Thus Richard, though clearly a Mexican (and played by an actor who looks and sounds Mexican), whose pet name for himself is Rico instead of the original's Dick, has still joined the British Navy, sings the same boastful British mock-patriotic song, and as in the original waves a Union Jack to protect his fiancée.<br /><br />
On the other hand, Sweet Rose Maybud (also an obviously ethnically Mexican performer) has had her name changed to Rosa Capullo de Mayo, though she's still "Rose" in the songs because "Rosa" wouldn't scan. Mad Margaret's code word Basingstoke is replaced by Cocoyoc (it's a town in central Mexico), and the place that Ruthven gets it confused with is Calistoga.<br /><br />
The cleverest plot addition, however, had nothing to do with the Mexican setting. In the scene where the ghosts torture Sir Ruthven for not committing his daily crime, which usually consists of Roderic pointing his finger at Ruthven who writhes in agony without obvious cause, this time the torture consisted of the ghosts - the male chorus - singing "Poor Wandering One" and "Little Buttercup" in falsetto. Writhe away, Ruthven.<br /><br />
The big change, of course, is in the costumes and sets, all of which are meticulous 19th century Mexican style. Very impressive. Many of the ghosts are made up in the fashion of Day of the Dead figures. The dances are whatever Mexican folk dances the choreographer could find that fit Sullivan's music.<br /><br />
The setting was explained to the audience by a combination of supertitles and animated pictures on the scrim backdrop during the overture. (During the opera itself, the supertitles were in both English and Spanish.) The ghosts made their entrance by just walking in from the wings without even covering smoke, but at the same time their portraits vanished from the frames in the scrim, and reappeared when they left.<br /><br />
As a performance, this was OK. It didn't have any of the Lamplighters star performers, so it lacked their ability to achieve the transcendently wonderful. It's good to introduce Hispanic performers trained in this kind of material, but even the non-Hispanic ones were ... OK. The acting was OK (Noah Evans as Ruthven was a lot funnier as a clumsy bad baronet getting caught up in his cape in act 2 than he'd been as a clumsy yeoman farmer in act 1), the singing was frequently more than OK, but overall it was merely all right, and the Mexican setting didn't really click into place in all tabs.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-63383667743391592982024-03-02T19:37:00.000-08:002024-03-02T19:41:37.215-08:00two concerts and half a dance recitalWell, that was weird (see previous post). Betty Smith is an author I'm capable of not having a thought about for decades on end, and then she shows up twice in my feed in a matter of days.<br /><br />
Back to slightly more normal events. I <A HREF="https://www.smdailyjournal.com/arts_and_entertainment/calder-quartet-and-urban-jazz-dance-company/article_b89d3896-d759-11ee-a7ae-bfe75bffca09.html">reviewed</A> for the <I>Daily Journal</I> a string quartet concert taking place the day after my previous concert. But it was a string quartet concert with a difference. A dance company founded and run by Deaf people would be performing along with the music. Turned out there were just three of them, and it was less than half of the music, which raised the question of why there was so little dancing when they were going to special lengths to invite members of the non-hearing community to attend? What were they supposed to do while there was no dancing? Just watch the musicians busily sawing back and forth?<br /><br />
The next Saturday, which was today, the small music department recital hall featured one of its student showcase concerts: various ensembles play a movement or two of something, followed by a different ensemble playing something else, and so on. And if you read the bios, it turns out that most of the students are either computer science majors or pre-med.<br /><br />
The best instrumental performance on this program was a movement from a Brahms Piano Trio. More problematic was a movement from the Franck Violin Sonata, the same work that B. is struggling with at home. Turned out that this violinist was struggling with it a bit too.<br /><br />
But the highlight of the event was something a bit unusual for these concerts: song recitals. Three songs each by a tenor and a soprano. The tenor, probably more of a light baritone as his low notes were strong but his high ones a bit chancy, sang Rodgers and Hart's "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" too slow and Bernstein and Sondheim's "Maria" too fast. The soprano, Moira O'Bryan, with a light but firm voice, sang three songs that I (nor B., when I showed her the program afterwards) didn't know, and she brought the house down with a dazzling romantic breakup number called "If You Hadn't, But You Did," music by Jule Styne and lyrics - unsurprisingly considering their virtuosity - by Comden and Green.<br /><br />
You have to hear this, so <A HREF="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sJeAHD_aqg">here's a recording by Dolores Gray from the original cast album.</A> That's probably the best version all around, though it's also been picked up by <A HREF="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G7gE16OWO0">Kristin Chenoweth</A>, <A HREF="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCxrzvshE3c">Liza Minnelli</A> (sounding more like a Christine Pedi impersonation of her than Christine Pedi does), and <A HREF="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlC09Kxeet4">Carol Channing</A> - this is probably the best, certainly the funniest, of the cover versions, despite or perhaps because of Carol losing the thread of the fast-paced lyrics as she sings to an increasingly dismayed Perry Como.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-47658444121223442512024-03-01T22:16:00.000-08:002024-03-02T09:41:59.462-08:00lecture and a playI went to a guest lecture at Stanford because the topic sounded interesting. "A Poet's Thoughts on Perception, Cognition, and the Literary Image" was the subtitle, and it was by Richard Kenney, a noted poet who's an English prof at the UW.<br /><br />
He spoke of a lot of things, and ran considerably over his allotted time, but towards the end he focused on a neurological theory that what we think we see is generated by our minds predicting what we're likely to see, and only cross-checks itself against outside reality. I found this theory hard to believe, or if it is true that the cross-checking must be so frequent that it doesn't matter where the images originate, afterwards when driving home, relying on my perception of reality being accurate so I didn't hit another car when going through intersections without stoplights in the dark and pouring rain.<br /><br />
Kenney's purpose in bringing this up was apparently to suggest that if the theory is true, reality is no less a construction of our brains than the things we imagine are. So read more poetry and nourish your imagination, or something.<br /><br />
This and another remark that, if we removed all the words that are somehow metaphorical from the language, there wouldn't be much left, made me wonder if he'd read any Owen Barfield, because they were all things that sounded like what Owen Barfield wrote. But there was no question period, or if there was I didn't stick around for it.<br /><br />
The play came in online video form from the Mint Theater, which specializes in reviving obscure plays. Some are deservedly obscure, like the one I got on their mailing list from, but this is somewhat better. Never previously produced nor published, and sitting among the author's papers in a university archive, it's called <I>Becomes a Woman</I> and is by Betty Smith, author of the novel <I>A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.</I> I've never read the book, but I thought I'd try the play, and it was good enough (and excellently acted, in front of a live audience) to get through.<br /><br />
The heroine starts out as a 19-year-old singing sales clerk in a 1930s sheet music store. Her name is Francie Nolan, which is the name of the heroine of <I>A Tree Grows in Brooklyn</I>, but even considering the age difference their life circumstances are quite different, aside from being poor and living in Brooklyn, so they're not the same person in the fictive universe. Francie is young and naive, and she's very pretty, so every man who comes in the store asks her out, which earns her scorn and reinforces her cynical co-worker's theory that men are all alike and all want the same thing (i.e. to ask Francie out). But then in comes Leonard, who's handsome and suave and apparently well-off, and when he asks her out she changes her mind about being asked out.<br /><br />
That's Act 1. In Acts 2-3 things turn out quite differently. Leonard isn't what he makes himself out to be (of course), and Francie goes through some dramatic vicissitudes which change her mind and her approach to life. To the biggest crisis the reactions of the other characters are as clichéd as possible, but Smith doesn't write them as clichés. Francie's response is to harden and mature, and she <I>Becomes a Woman</I>, hence the title. Anyway, I found it worthwhile to watch and <A HREF="https://minttheater.org/mint-theater-free-streaming/">you could watch it too</A>, free on the web for the next two weeks.<br /><br />
<B>ETA</B>: And what should get published this morning but <A HREF="https://slate.com/culture/2024/03/a-tree-grows-in-brooklyn-book-summary-betty-smith-history.html">an article revealing what Betty Smith <I>really</I> thought of Brooklyn.</A>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-74918003112524492752024-02-29T01:58:00.000-08:002024-02-29T01:58:47.774-08:00buon giorno GioachinoAfter all, it's not <I>every</I> year we can celebrate Rossini's birthday.<br />
<br />
Here's three of his lesser-known great overtures.<br />
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1teYRq5mccc" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uKUJvGBtAkM" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SvYXp8jG4bs" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
It's also Tim Powers' birthday. He's 18 in pirate years.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-50827434700547744092024-02-28T06:25:00.000-08:002024-02-28T06:25:41.443-08:00browser warsI usually keep two web browsers open on my desktop: Firefox, which is my regular browser, and Opera, which I use for a few things Firefox doesn't work on. For instance, if a vendor sends me a ticket as an e-mail attachment, Firefox will not display the QR code. I get an empty box. Neither will Opera display it, actually, but if I <I>print</I> it in Opera it comes out OK, which it doesn't in Firefox.<br /><br />
Some websites which didn't display well in Firefox now work better than they used to. One of them is Disney+, and this is fortunate because yesterday, Opera decided it no longer wanted to play videos, from any source. (The sound is still OK.) This happened directly in between one Disney video and another. Online advice for dealing with this problem included closing and reopening the browser, and clearing the cache. I don't know why I keep following advice to solve problems by clearing the cache, because it never works, nor did it this time.<br /><br />
Occasional websites, like Delta Airlines or Kaiser's video appointment service, won't function in either Firefox or Opera, so I have to drag out Google Chrome, which I otherwise avoid.<br /><br />
A non-web item that stopped working recently was our old reliable DVD player, useful for when we've already bought the DVD and don't want to pay additional money for streaming. As with Opera, the problem appeared directly between two files from the same source, in this case on the same DVD, and it took the same form: sound, but no picture. At first I thought the problem was with the monitor, then the disc, but testing proved that not so, and when the player made grinding sounds instead of loading another disc, I knew the end was upon us.<br /><br />
Suspecting that DVD players aren't major items in stores any more, I looked up the model number of ours on Amazon and found it's still in production and not too expensive. So I ordered another one, figuring I could swap it out without having to deal with any rigamarole regarding settings. I placed the new DVD on top of the old one, moved all the cords to the equivalent plugs, and pulled the old one out. Lo, it worked.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-63356841994581956202024-02-27T20:44:00.000-08:002024-02-28T05:36:09.462-08:00concert review: Telegraph QuartetSaturday evening I went to the Bing Studio, the little room in the basement of Stanford's concert hall, for a concert by the Telegraph Quartet. I was there to review them. They were playing modern music by three early-to-mid 20th century B's: Berg, Britten, and Bacewicz. All right, it wasn't all that difficult music - even the Berg, which is (mostly, effectively all) serialist, was not that hard to listen to, the Bacewicz is charming when played well, and the Britten is weird and fascinating - and they played it very well, as I acknowledged in <A HREF="https://www.sfcv.org/articles/review/telegraph-quartet-takes-three-bs-modernism">my review.</A> It was an enlightening and enriching experience, truly.<br /><br />
Yet the reason it was tucked away in the basement is that the main auditorium had been reserved by the Music Department for the quarterly concert by the student orchestra. The music from it was piped out to monitors in the lobby. At our concert's intermission, they were playing Ravel's <I>Ma Mère L'oye</I>, and when the string quartet concert was over, the orchestra was playing Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. And y'know, I would rather have been there.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-27865278296183816142024-02-26T20:33:00.000-08:002024-02-26T20:36:17.644-08:00on the cusp of bureaucracyHurrah, my new driving license arrived, just two weeks after my last visit to the DMV.<br /><br />
The process wasn't so much difficult - though it was that - as consequential, insofar as if anything went wrong I'd be without a license.<br /><br />
You can start as early as 3 months before the renewal date, and I did that. Went online and got an appointment at what I hoped was the most obscurely located (hence perhaps uncrowded) local DMV office - the one that opened at 7 AM that I used before has since closed. I arrive at noon, in time for the appointment, to find no open parking spaces and a long line for <I>non-</I>appointment customers. Go through the normal rigarmarole, to find a new wrinkle. Although in previous renewals my unusual optical situation (one of my eyes can't be corrected for distance vision) was merely checked off, this time they insist I get an eye doctor to verify it. They give me a form for the doctor to fill out, and a temporary license which, as it's only good for two months, expires before the real one does.<br /><br />
Then I have to get an appointment at the eye clinic. My local one has no appointments available for as long as they take appointments for. But it's easy to get one at another branch some distance away. I go there. Usual eye test, new prescription, doctor fills out form, notices that the DMV, when writing down the results of the eye test I took there, mixed the two eyes up.<br /><br />
I can't get an appointment online to turn the form in, because there's no option for this on the web site, which is very baroque and forces you to fill out the application form every time you log in, even if you specified you've already done that. So I decide to return to the same DMV office <I>sans</I> appointment, only this time when they open at 8.<br /><br />
This is much more successful. There's plenty of parking spaces and nobody in line. I get my business done without an appointment faster than I had with an appointment at a busier time. Clerk corrects error on the form, agrees that everything looks OK, confirms I did everything else on my previous visit, isn't put off by all the phantom applications I filled out on the web site, sends me off in the hope that the license will actually arrive soon.<br /><br />
It's two weeks later when I find that this was correct, and that brings us to today and, I hope, the end of this story.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-3965872084164139962024-02-23T10:35:00.000-08:002024-02-23T10:36:10.635-08:00theory in practiceSo I've been watching, on YouTube, early episodes of the BBC quiz show <I>Only Connect</I>, which I'd long avoided because I hate the title. In practice it's strangely hypnotic. Its aim is to test both knowledge (over a broad field from academic and technical to British pop culture) and imagination. No one person is expected to display this; it's played in teams of three. I get the answers a lot less often that the teams do, but often enough that I could imagine myself being on a team, and every once in a while I get the answer faster than the teams do.<br /><br />
My favorite of its quizzes is the one where you're given up to three clues and have to guess what the fourth in the series is. Extra points if you guess the fourth after only two or (very rarely) one. (One case where they got it after one was where the one was the text of a 401 web error code and a contestant guessed very reasonably that the fourth would be the classic 404.) Some of the ones that I had no trouble guessing right faster than the teams did, and after only two clues, were<OL><LI>Alexander the Great<LI>Aristotle</OL>
<OL><LI>Victoria<LI>Edmonton</OL>
<OL><LI>Ares<LI>Gaia</OL>But my absolute favorite was the one which read <OL><LI>Fear<LI>Surprise</OL>The team given this was absolutely stumped. They were imagining something akin to the Five Stages of Grief (which has also been used in this quiz segment). Meanwhile the other team was chomping at the bit to answer it, and so was I. We knew that the fourth in that sequence is "devotion to the Pope," because "fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope" are the chief weapons - pardon, <I>amongst our weaponry</I> - of the Spanish Inquisition in the Monty Python sketch.<br /><br />
And this comes to mind because I was reading <A HREF="https://reactormag.com/tools-for-thinking-about-censorship/">Ada Palmer's wise essay about censorship.</A> And yes, she mentions the Spanish Inquisition. Amongst the article's weaponry is the point that censorship doesn't have to be formally conducted by governments. They can lure people into censoring themselves, and their chief weapons for doing this are described as<OL><LI>fear<LI>deliberate unpredictability (i.e. surprise)</OL>So you can see that, silly as Monty Python is, it's based on reality.<br /><br />
Answers to the unanswered quiz items above. Remember we want the <I>fourth</I> in the sequence.<br />
1. Socrates (each was taught by the next).<br />
2. Winnipeg (Canadian provincial capitals from west to east).<br />
3. Hermes (planet names, inbound, in Greek).
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-65179006540588890242024-02-22T19:50:00.000-08:002024-02-22T19:50:23.662-08:00more world according to catsIt's not going to eat you, Maia: it's only a laundry basket.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-4887704444978880932024-02-21T16:29:00.000-08:002024-02-21T16:29:19.755-08:00world according to catsThe cats were sleeping in the lazy hours of the afternoon as I hoisted the remaining half-bag of cat food from storage to the upstairs bathroom where we feed them. I managed to keep it silent enough that the food did not rattle.<br /><br />
Closing the bathroom door, I no longer worried about sound as I opened the canister we keep up there, poured the food in, and sealed it up again.<br /><br />
So I was not at all surprised, on opening the door, to find two faces at the threshold patiently looking in. As I left, the cats were scouring the bathroom trying to figure out where the food went. They knew they'd heard it, so it had to be there somewhere.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-69882169643381464592024-02-20T04:27:00.000-08:002024-02-20T04:27:22.825-08:00presidential greatnessA news item has been running around that historians have once again been asked to rank all US presidents in order of greatness, with the obvious one coming last and the relatives of James Buchanan thanking the scholars for getting him out of the bottom hole at last. However, it's hard to get at the actual list, and I had to fight my way past a series of "Danger Will Robinson" warning labels from my internet security provider to do it.<br /><br />
So as a public service, here's the list, enhanced by me with full names and terms of office. The authors forgot that there were two presidents named Harrison so they didn't distinguish them, so I just guessed which was which. Also, although Biden is called #46 there are only 45 names because there was a 19th-century president, Grover Cleveland, who served two separated terms and gets two numbers - a numbering practice not followed in any other case I know of office-holders more likely to experience repetitions.
<OL><LI>Abraham Lincoln (1861-65)
<LI>Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-45)
<LI>George Washington (1789-97)
<LI>Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09)
<LI>Thomas Jefferson (1801-09)
<LI>Harry S. Truman (1945-53)
<LI>Barack Obama (2009-17)
<LI>Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-61)
<LI>Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-69)
<LI>John F. Kennedy (1961-63)
<LI>James Madison (1809-17)
<LI>Bill Clinton (1993-2001)
<LI>John Adams (1797-1801)
<LI>Joe Biden (2021- )
<LI>Woodrow Wilson (1913-21)
<LI>Ronald Reagan (1981-89)
<LI>Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77)
<LI>James Monroe (1817-25)
<LI>George H.W. Bush (1989-93)
<LI>John Quincy Adams (1825-29)
<LI>Andrew Jackson (1829-37)
<LI>Jimmy Carter (1977-81)
<LI>William H. Taft (1909-13)
<LI>William McKinley (1897-1901)
<LI>James K. Polk (1845-49)
<LI>Grover Cleveland (1885-89, 1893-97)
<LI>Gerald R. Ford (1974-77)
<LI>Martin Van Buren (1837-41)
<LI>Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-81)
<LI>James A. Garfield (1881)
<LI>Benjamin Harrison (1889-93)
<LI>Calvin Coolidge (1923-29)
<LI>Chester A. Arthur (1881-85)
<LI>George W. Bush (2001-09)
<LI>Richard Nixon (1969-74)
<LI>Herbert Hoover (1929-33)
<LI>John Tyler (1841-45)
<LI>Zachary Taylor (1849-50)
<LI>Millard Fillmore (1850-53)
<LI>Warren G. Harding (1921-23)
<LI>William H. Harrison (1841)
<LI>Franklin Pierce (1853-57)
<LI>Andrew Johnson (1865-69)
<LI>James Buchanan (1857-61)
<LI>Donald J. Trump (2017-21)</OL>
I would find it difficult to vote in a survey like this. How do you account for actual malignancy in presidents? I count five clear-cut cases, not all of which are ranked at the very bottom; plus about three more with malignant traits passing beyond foolish or erroneous policy, and no, I'm not counting "being a slave-owner in a slave-owning society" as evidence of malignancy. (Though it is notable that only 3 of our first 18 presidents were entirely free of either the taint of this practice or of fellow-traveling in its favor.)
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-91104760176049353502024-02-19T11:20:00.000-08:002024-02-19T11:22:55.075-08:00Hugo, I'll stay home<I>"We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality."</I> - T.B. Macaulay<br /><br />
I'm beginning to be reminded of that by some of the reactions to the scandal regarding last year's Hugos. No question that it was very badly run and all sorts of rules both written and implied were violated. The question at hand is, Now what do we do about it?<br /><br />
<A HREF="http://www.nerds-feather.com/2024/02/the-hugo-awards-crisis-deepens-where-we.html">Here's a proposal</A> that makes me wonder. The author sweepingly denounces<BLOCKQUOTE>the cartel of self-proclaimed "SMOFs" (secret masters of fandom) who treat the Hugos - and Worldcon more broadly - as their birthright, playground and personal fiefdom. The Hugo Awards are supposed to be democratic in nature and process; the behavior of the self-proclaimed "SMOFs" is fundamentally anti-democratic - and this is by no means confined to Chengdu Worldcon.</BLOCKQUOTE>Note that last clause in particular. That being the author's belief, why is one of the proposals that <BLOCKQUOTE>Individual Cons should no longer administer the Hugo Awards - this should be done by an independent, rotating committee.</BLOCKQUOTE>Wouldn't that continuing committee be a "cartel" even more than having each convention run the Hugos separately? Sure, if it's rotating it wouldn't be the same people every year, but that's what we have now. There is an informal mass of people known as the permanent floating Worldcon committee, who keep turning up doing the job - and a good thing that often is: they have experience, they're not starting from scratch every year - but each Worldcon is a separate entity and has its own administration. That means that, a few specific overlapping individuals aside (and the relevant one has resigned), the upcoming Worldcons in Glasgow and Seattle are in no way complicit in or tainted by anything that was done by Chengdu. If we had a permanent Hugos committee, we'd lose that.<br /><br />
In any case, practice has been to hermetically seal off the Hugo subcommittee from the main Worldcon committee, for the purpose of protecting the main committee - which can be an awfully large number of people, with uncertainty as to which workers formally qualify as part of it and which don't - from the constitutional provision that those responsible for the Hugos are ineligible as candidates. The main committee can't <I>make</I> the Hugo administrators do anything. Whether Dave McCarty, the Chengdu administrator, accepted direction from above is unknown - we only have his e-mails to his subordinates - but, if so, that was his decision. And a permanent committee wouldn't have been immune to unwonted sensitivity to Chinese censorship.<br /><br />
The current situation is that each Worldcon appoints its own Hugo administrators. And these are either seasoned trusted experienced people who've done it before - which class included Dave McCarty until last month - or new people without any historical baggage, or, mostly these days, some of each. A continuing committee would have the same sort of people, because who else is there to do the job? And without being individually selected by the Worldcon committee, who would select them? Would the committee choose its own new members? Would the Worldcon Business Meeting? If we don't trust the Worldcons themselves to do it - they're selected by the members, who are the ultimate authority.<br /><br />
Perhaps it's clear, then, why I'm also dismayed by another proposal, which reads<BLOCKQUOTE>No one involved in the administration of the 2023 Hugo Awards, or who assisted in the collection of political evidence, can ever be allowed to have any role in administering the awards ever again.</BLOCKQUOTE>What exactly is the point of this stricture? It must be just to punish the specific individuals involved and to chill all future administrators with the threat of this very meek form of cancellation, because it can't be to keep maladministrators out of office. It's fallacious to think that only the people who did this, could have done it. Nobody would have suspected Dave McCarty of it until he did it. If someone else were in his place, maybe they would have done the same thing. Human fallibility isn't limited to identified miscreants, but it's convenient to identify a scapegoat and then think you've solved the problem.<br /><br />
I don't think any Worldcon is likely to appoint McCarty again, even without directives. Some of the lower flunkies were perhaps naive or ill-informed and not as responsible. My belief is that we should learn our lesson from this, as we did from the Puppies affair, and move on. A constitutional provision specifically prohibiting the erroneous acts of Chengdu couldn't hurt, but being aware that this flaw in administration could happen is the best way to prevent it from happening again.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-8615321178330071532024-02-18T16:49:00.000-08:002024-02-18T16:52:27.125-08:00not entirely thereThis weekend was the Mythopoeic Society's Online Winter Seminar, whose topic was queerness in all its manifestations, and the papers that I heard mostly stuck pretty closely to it. One of the more interesting, if provocative, speakers defined queerness by saying that the meaning was inherently unstable, but that basically it means "transgression from the normative." This is what it meant, for instance, when a crusty hobbit told Gaffer Gamgee that "Bag End's a queer place, and its folk are queerer." And that's the root of the word's application to specifically sexual transgression, which as a common usage is generally dated from the trial of Oscar Wilde, though it was less prominently used in that sense earlier.<br /><br />
So, since if there's one thing fantasy literature is full of, it's transgression from the normative, there should be plenty to talk about. And there was, but I didn't get much out of it, and bailed early. This was partly due to not liking online conferences. Somehow it's one thing to sit in a cramped classroom chair in a stuffy room and listen live to someone read a paper, but less appealing to sit in my own chair in my own office and listen to someone on a computer.<br /><br />
But it was also due to the style of the papers. These presenters have obvious passionate personal commitment to their subjects, to which their own personal identities are tightly wrapped. But they're also trained industrial-production academics, most of them working on their Ph.D.'s, and they write in stultifying heavy-weather academese. It's a shame: what I like about Tolkien scholarship, or used to like about it, is that so much of it was not written in the academic style, even if it was by tenured academics. Scholars like Verlyn Flieger and Tom Shippey and Brian Attebery and Diana Glyer write like real humans imparting their brilliant insights into the literature that you and they have both read, in ordinary comprehensible language.<br /><br />
The conference was also dotted with the kind of severe correctives of personal failings, especially of those of the past who were not so enlightened as we, that so alarm right-wing critics of this sort of academe. Indeed, some of these right-wingers are former leftists who have decamped in disgust. I, at least, would never do this. Over the top (as Joe Biden would put it) as some of these correctives may be, the right wing's own directives are vast orders of magnitude worse, and far more thorough and sweeping, and more hurtful to those they hit. I know the difference between what's occasionally overloaded and what's thoroughly rancid.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-53763724743686749942024-02-17T07:01:00.000-08:002024-02-17T07:01:58.717-08:00concert review: Oakland SymphonyThe Oakland Symphony still hasn't gotten past the death of its long-time music director Michael Morgan two and a half years ago. It hasn't hired a new music director; this concert was guest conducted by Kedrick Armstrong, the young leader of an orchestra in Galesburg IL; like Morgan he is Black, and he once worked as Morgan's assistant on a guest-conducting gig, so he knew the man.<br /><br />
And the featured work on this program was the premiere of a work that Morgan commissioned. (Musical compositions can be a long time gestating.) It's a half-hour cantata, basically, on the life of <A HREF="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Robeson">Paul Robeson.</A> One thing that emerged from the pre-concert talk was how few people today, even Blacks, have ever heard of Paul Robeson; even Armstrong hadn't when he was asked to lead this concert, which is why I linked to Robeson's Wikipedia page. But people my age, or Morgan's, though we postdate Robeson's career, have at least picked up resonances and heard his recordings.<br /><br />
The music, basically neo-post-Romantic, was by Carlos Simon, and the libretto, mostly from Robeson's book <I>Here I Stand</I> (which also provided the piece's title) and his public statements, by Dan Harder. It incorporated references to some of Robeson's vocal repertoire: a verse of "Joe Hill," a couple bits of spirituals, and a brief thematic reference - no lyrics, you wouldn't want them - to "Old Man River." The solo part, which mixed singing, speaking, and some in between, was delivered by Morris Robinson, whose range went if anything deeper than Robeson's own, but seemed less powerful or resonant, but that may be due to my sitting in the back of the auditorium beneath the overhang. The text focused on Robeson's political and social faith to help the African American and other suffering peoples (it did not shy from Robeson's use of the now-outdated word "Negro", sometimes using it in melismas); the chorus mostly chimed in, except for a scene taken from Robeson's HUAC hearings where it played the censorious congressmen.<br /><br />
Anyway, an effective piece, and it was paired with two other works which could be packaged as showing the composer as social activist: Joan Tower's <I>Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 6</I>, rushed and angry, and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, for which Armstrong took the slow and quiet parts of all four movements as slowly and gently as possible, the better to contrast with the fast and loud parts without overloading them. Also an effective performance.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-6757122224615525122024-02-16T08:17:00.000-08:002024-02-16T08:17:02.219-08:00concert reviewNearly fourteen years ago, I <A HREF="https://www.sfcv.org/articles/review/storm-and-sunshine-redwoods">reviewed</A> a Paganini concerto with a staggeringly talented fourteen-year-old boy named Stephen Waarts as soloist.<br /><br />
Yesterday, I heard him again at Herbst: in his late twenties, very tall, and playing Janáček's gnarly First Violin Sonata from memory (Juho Pohjonen, pianist). But the principal attraction of the evening was a pair of piano trios (Jonathan Swensen, cellist) by composers who were themselves teenagers at the time they wrote them: Dmitri Shostakovich's, which was incipiently modernist, and César Franck's, which was stealthy and hypnotic. This weirdly attractive piece (Op. 1 No. 1 in F-sharp minor) ought to be heard more often, or, indeed, at all. (Music@Menlo has just announced this year's festival, which is focused on French music but includes no Franck whatever. What were they thinking?)<br /><br />
Arriving in the Herbst lobby over an hour before showtime, I was genially accosted by an elderly woman in a wheelchair who wanted to talk at me incessantly. She was interesting enough, and even asked permission to follow me over when I went to sit on a bench, so I welcomed her company. She told me that she'd once been engaged to sing Tosca at La Scala, but canceled to return to the States to take care of her ailing mother. She told me this several times. She was also frantically looking through the plastic bags of stuff in her lap for her misplaced credit card. I suggested that she spread the stuff out on the bench to make it easier to look. This worked and she was grateful. Then she went off to buy a ticket and then came back. Not sure if she'd ever stop talking, at least if she had me to talk to, when the hall opened I pointed her towards the wheelchair seating and went myself off down some steps. Phew.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-680819002235773306.post-3445432380504760352024-02-15T10:08:00.000-08:002024-02-15T10:08:58.611-08:00Hugo mess(This will only make sense to people who've been following the controversies over last year's Hugo Awards. My apologies to anybody else: just skip it.)<br /><br />
So Kat Jones has resigned as Glasgow Hugo Administrator, presumably because she was complicit in the censorship decisions made at Chengdu.<br /><br />
The thing is, though, that she's been complicit all along, and she knew she was complicit. The rest of the world didn't know it, but she did. She knew what was going on. She knew what lay behind Dave McCarty's infamous non-answers to legitimate questions, and why he wasn't answering them. Perhaps she even knew why that long delay ensued before the release of the statistics (Diane Lacey did).<br /><br />
So, if this was so shameful, why didn't Kat resign earlier? If her reputation is so besmirched that she has to be "removed from the Glasgow 2024 team across all mediums" (e-mail from Glasgow announcing the resignation), why did she join Glasgow at all, assuming she did so after the Chengdu vetting period?<br /><br />
What bothers me is that the sequence of events says that it's not <I>being</I> complicit in Chengdu that's the fault here, but being <I>publicly known</I> to be complicit. Either that's the real reason for Kat's resignation, or else Glasgow has over-reacted to the revelations. (Not their transparency decisions: those are good. But the cleansing of any trace of Chengdu. If it was that dishonorable by those involved ... well, I've made my point already.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0