Watergate redux

Ron Rosenbaum thinks he has evidence that Nixon personally ordered the Watergate breakin. I'm not so sure that he does, but his article touches on two of the four great remaining questions about Watergate: two of which everybody else has, and two of which I have because I think the answers to the other two are obvious, while mine seem neglected.

The two questions that everybody else has are:
1. Why did the burglars break in to DNC headquarters? What were they looking for there? If they wanted to spy on the Democratic campaign, why not break into McGovern headquarters instead?
2. Why didn't Nixon destroy the tapes while he still could?

The answer to question 1 is multi-fold.
1. When Liddy's plan was hatched, it was still quite uncertain who the Democratic nominee would be. So that part had to wait.
2. They did try to plant bugs in McGovern headquarters. But they couldn't get in because the security was too good. (And they were bumblers.)
3. There were plenty of good reasons to spy on the DNC. Seeing whether Larry O'Brien had information on the Hughes loans, Rosenbaum's theory, was one - and Nixon himself need not have been the only person on his side worried about that, which is why proof of that motive doesn't say whether Nixon was involved. General Republican distrust and hatred of O'Brien was another - again, that could be Nixon, or others, or both. Most likely, I'd think, given the Nixonites' typical delusions, would be the chance to peer into the DNC's fundraising and look for anything embarrassing, like ties to Castro (which motive is how the Cubans were recruited). This all works as one prong of a dirty tricks scheme; we're misled about its importance to the perpetrators because this was the only prong which got very far.
4. They went into the DNC specifically because Magruder told them to. And there's the rub: who ordered Magruder?

As for question 2, that depends on a psychological understanding of Nixon: how obsessed he was with preserving the history of his presidency (which is why he set up the taping system in the first place), the self-wounding a destruction of the entire archive would have imposed on him (and the impracticality of doing it), and the self-deception that led him to see his misdeeds and even his profanity as merely proofs of his toughness.
Also, it appears that Nixon did try to destroy the tapes selectively. The 18 1/2 minute gap was, despite Rosemary Woods falling on her sword for the boss, no accident. And the other missing conversations? Were they really never recorded, or were they destroyed?

My questions, on the other hand, are:
3. Who approved Gemstone?
4. What on earth made Nixon think he could get away with firing Cox?

Gemstone was the code name of Liddy's dirty tricks plan, the one of which the Watergate breakin was one prong. Liddy presented it to Mitchell (and Magruder) twice, each time being sent back to prepare something cheaper. He wasn't present at the third meeting. Magruder says Mitchell approved it, and he got back to Liddy saying so. Mitchell always insisted he did not. Was Mitchell lying? Probably, but it's not entirely clear. Rosenbaum thinks Nixon ordered Mitchell to approve it. To my way of thinking, that matters a lot in regard to Nixon's guilt, but it doesn't affect the basic question of veracity between Mitchell and Magruder.

As for question 4, I can grasp Nixon's reasoning in regard to question 2, but this one defeats me. He seems to have really thought that if he called a halt to the investigation, the whole problem would just go away. In this, he reminds me of nothing more than certain psychopathic criminals in Donald Westlake novels, who if they have a problem with a person proceed to kill that person, certain that that will cancel the problem. Then they're so bewildered by all the fuss that stirs up.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Maybe it was cold, wet, and windy up on stage. Susanna Mälkki wore some kind of an overcoat on the podium, and Horacio Gutiérrez sat down at the keyboard in what looked like a windbreaker. Their rendition of Prokofiev's Third Concerto pleased the audience. Maybe I was just tired, but it seemed to me a fairly nondescript, pedestrian reading of what is admittedly an inherently thrilling work.

Mälkki's Sibelius First came out more appealingly. There were some rough joins and clunkers, but at least she avoided the elephant traps of structure that lurk all over early Sibelius, and the sound colors coming out of the orchestra were consistently vivid and varied, almost as if to support pre-concert lecturer Scott Fogelsong's contention, which he was so proud of coming up with that he giggled all the way through it - what drugs is this guy on? - that the work was written to the model of Tchaikovsky's Fifth. But in fact Sibelius's orchestral palette, subdued and shaded, is quite unlike Tchaikovsky's bright, firmly delineated colors.

Also on the program - more spectralism! This one was Modulations by Gérard Grisey, an early essay in the style from the late 1970s that still half wants to be traditional old-timey post-war modernism. One section in which the soft, high-pitched, overtone-laden chords breathed in and out at a pulse of about two seconds a breath came across, no doubt unintentionally, as the wacky speeded-up Keystone Cops version of Morton Feldman.

More interesting than the concert was getting there. Although the weekend's closure of the eastern approach to the Golden Gate Bridge wasn't scheduled to start for more than a couple hours later, the road that eventually becomes the western approach was already far more clogged than usual as I drove in to town, so I got off it sooner than I usually do and found myself, a little unusually for concert trips, in the Mission District. Finding myself even more unusually in sight of an open parking space, a true rarity in the Mission, I had a quick meal at the nearest hole-in-wall taqueria, Papalote at 24th and Valencia. This is far yuppier than others in the district. The burrito was a bit mellow, if I can put it that way, and heavily packed in a thick flour tortilla. What was unbelievable was the salsa that came with the chips. This was neither liquid nor chunky nor both, the customary range among salsas, but smooth and creamy and resembling a tomato alfredo sauce more than anything else.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Do not see this movie. Just don't.

It's not just the rape scenes, or the torture scenes, or even the plot holes so big you could drive a car through them, quite literally.

The final straw is when the villain, apparently just to show how villainous he is - for he doesn't seem to have any better reason - kills a cat.

That's just wrong.

Meow.

apaholic

Lisa Irontongue has an interesting post about communication, but what caught me about it was that she begins by discussing amateur press associations, or apas, communities in print within the context of science fiction fandom, that had a lot in common with the online bulletin boards and other communities that succeeded and have in practice supplanted them - except that the exchange of conversation was a lot slower.

I belonged to several apas in my time, and as many as five at once in the 1980s. But I gradually cut back, and my last apa called it a day after its OE died in 2006. The problem is that I've always liked apas best as close communities of friends, and they could spoil or go sour, and other apas I might have joined didn't appeal to me for the amount of emotional effort it would take to integrate into that community. (This is also why I never joined the Well.) The interactive side of my desire for apas is being reasonably met in blog and LJ comments, and the expository side is actually being met better in LJ, because what I always really wanted was an incentive to keep a kind of public diary, and writing for an apa about "what I've been doing since the last deadline" was only a vague approximation of this.

The post says, "APAs originated in science fiction fandom a long time ago (the 40s? 50s?)." They didn't start in fandom. The original apas (known in fandom as "the mundane apas") were founded in the late 19th century by home-printing hobbyists. They'd print N copies of little magazines, and send them off to a central mailer, who'd distribute bundles of copies of each to all the members. The idea was that it was a cheap way to keep a mailing list, and the point was to display your printing skills rather than whatever the intellectual content was (and it wasn't necessarily written by the person who printed it). The mailings were not bound together - they were just bundles of little magazines in an envelope - and there was no interaction between the individual magazines.

H.P. Lovecraft was such a hobbyist, but apas met fandom when some fans, including Donald Wollheim, later a well-known editor, joined some apas in the mid 30s, and invented mailing comments - they'd write their responses to the material in the previous mailing. This was revolutionary. They founded their own fannish apa in 1937: it was called the Fantasy Amateur Press Association ("fantasy" was considered something of a synonym for "science fiction" in those days) or FAPA, and it's still around, though hobbling. Like the mundane apas, its mailings are unbound, and some of them, also as in mundane apas, are full-scale fanzines with contributions by others than the editor.

A few of the other older apas are similar in nature. I'm not sure when the custom began in newer fannish apas of stapling the contents together, and of the individual contributions being just personal natterings and comments by the typist that don't really stand alone outside of the apa context, and of printing being of no other than practical interest, but these customs were already well-established by the time I started joining apas in the mid-70s, which was something of the heyday of fannish apas. But the relics of the history remain in the custom of calling those individual contributions "zines" and in the custom of giving them individual titles as if they were still fanzines on their own. Every once in a while one encounters people who get the terminology wrong, using "apa" as the term for the individual contribution rather than the entity as a whole, or "zine" for the mailing instead of the individual contribution. This annoys me on the same level as misusing "crescendo" or writing allusions to "lions and tigers and bears, oh my" that don't scan properly.

In their day, I found apas handy to read on the bus or during breaks at work, both because they permitted short, disjointed patches of reading (being written in a short, disjointed, patchy way), and because they were handy to ward off unwanted conversation by the sort of people who thought reading was only something to do if there was nobody to converse with. Asked "What are you reading?" I would reply, "an apa," and when asked the expected follow-up, "What's an apa?" I would reply, "this is," and that was usually the conversation-stopper it was intended to be.

movie seen: The Descendants

I've finally emerged from the state of "so full of pending commitments that I'd feel too guilty to take the time to see a movie" far enough to rent one. Semi-unspoilerish comments:

1. I picked this one in particular probably so that I could weigh in on an argument presented some months ago by a movie-connoisseur friend on the burning question: Does Shailene Woodley (who plays the elder daughter) have a large enough part to qualify as a "Leading Role" by Oscar standards? He says yes, I now say no.

2. I've liked every Alexander Payne movie I've seen, and I've now seen four of them.* His way of presenting characters and their surroundings (this really vividly depicts Hawaii as a place that people live in, if those people are rich haoles) and getting strong, naturalistic acting out of the cast appeal to me, despite the kinds of stories that I'd roll my eyes at in novels. I'm now thinking I should see a fifth, Sideways, a movie I'd avoided, despite my familiarity with its geographic setting, because I feared the characters would be too pretentious.

3. The Descendants is mostly about the characters' relationship with another character whom most of them know, but whom we, the viewers, never really get to meet, so there's a kind of hole (deliberate, I suspect) in the middle of the movie. In this, and in the eulogistic air to that relationship, it reminds me of The Big Chill.

4. Although I liked the movie a great deal, I have some plot grumbles, and this is where I have to be only semi-unspoilerish.

a. Character in this movie is most dramatically revealed in the form of monologues delivered to the person in a coma. This gets a little predictable, but is well done. But here's this: Matt (George Clooney) gets two such scenes, even the minor character of Julie gets one powerful one (Matt is present but mostly unseen by the camera until he gently leads her away), but Alex (Woodley) never really gets one. Her one big monologue is as much about the reaction of the others in the room to what she says as it is about her. Another such scene we know happens, but we don't see it. The result is that, although Alex has as dramatic a character arc as Matt does, much of it remains undepicted: we see the results and understand the causes, but we don't see it happening as we do for him. This is one reason I don't consider the role a leading one.

b. There's a key piece of information (the one that Beau Bridges has) that remains hidden until a later point in the movie than it ought to show up, and it depends on another character earlier on making an assumption that ought to be unjustified about what the protagonist knows.

c. Most of the characters are well-handled. But in stories of this kind that offer surprise plot twists, as this one does, there is usually one character whom the writers are openly manipulating for the sake of goosing the audience. In this movie, that character turns out to be the land that the family trust owns.

*Answer to obvious question: About Schmidt, Election, and the unforgettable Citizen Ruth.

Pinkwater and the eggplant, I mean pineapple

All you Daniel Pinkwater fans out there, prepare to have have your jaws dropped over this: a controversy over a Pinkwater story and its test questions in a New York state 8th-grade reader.

The story, which is a rewritten version of a fable from Borgel, is a nonsense takeoff on the tortoise and the hare, so it really should only be read, and certainly should only have quiz questions about it answered, by children who already know the Aesop. (Do today's NY 8th-graders? I have no idea.)

And I agree with the protesting students: most of the questions are ambiguous, to the extent that several answers are equally good. (Link to the actual text is halfway down the article.) If I were setting a quiz on this story, I'd say, "There is no right answer. Pick one, and write a paragraph justifying it," and grade the students on the cogency of their essays. But you can't do that with standardized tests, which suggests the whole episode was misbegotten.

Actually, the test-makers say there's no right answer either. (But they didn't explain that to the students.) Instead, "the 'right' answer is the one that field testing has shown to be the consensus answer of the 'smart' kids." What is this, Family Feud, where you're rewarded for guessing not the right answer but the popular one? Or, worse, the most conformist?

into the vale of contention

In the comments at the end of this SFCV review, Lisa Hirsch and I take issue with the reviewer and another commenter who oppose applause between movements of a symphony, no matter how sublime one thought the performance.

They wouldn't have known at the time of the comments that I'd been giving some consideration to the question of applause, but now all the readers of SFCV can know it, because my report on the Stanford music symposium has finally gone up, including a discussion of that very point.

This report is rather different in approach from the three daily posts I made here as it was going on. Those were my personal reactions, as their titles said, and I wasn't aiming at journalistic objectivity. (That's one reason I named few of the presenters: I wasn't intending fair reports of what they said, and it would be unjust to blame them by name for it.) In the SFCV article, however, most of the content of the first two sections is intended as a journalist's conscientious relay of the presenters' arguments. Only after the second section break do I really get into my own reactions. In fact, as the article was due the day after the conference ended (scheduling issues and editing time resulted in the publication delay), I wrote most of the third section in haste by throwing large chunks of my blogspot reports against the wall to see if they'd stick.

Here is where, after relaying Anatole Leikin's robust defense of inter-movement applause in part 1, I express my concern over it becoming obligatory and hence perfunctory. This occured to me in connection with the concert the previous evening, where Anatole and his fellow performers preceded the Reinecke trio by saying that inter-movement applause would be acceptable. Inter-movement applause dutifully followed, not that it was undeserved, but I was still bemused by Anatole, in his presentation the next day, comparing his reaction on being applauded to Sally Field's on getting an Oscar. That was a bad comparison, because Field was ridiculed for her "you really like me" speech, and the reason it was ridiculed is that she overinterpreted the polite applause she received. Still, will musicians play better if they already think they're doing great?

Editing trimmed my overlong article a fair amount, but intelligently, and I only miss two things of significance. One is that I think my original opening was a bit punchier. It began,

Can old recordings save classical music?

A small, lightly-attended conference on technical issues in historical musicology might not seem the ideal venue to address deep questions on the future of the classical music industry. Yet that was the presiding theme at Reactions to the Record III, a symposium on early recordings, musical style, and the future of performance held at the Stanford Music Department last weekend.

The other was an ultimately unanswerable extension of the point about whether modern classical performances all sound alike. It's a matter of context - I'd like to take this up later in regard to how alike Tolkien is to other authors - and I did begin my classical-listening career with an assumption that all performances were an approximation of a platonic ideal reading of the score, because that's what they were trying to be. It took me many years both to change my mind about that and to develop a secure sense of how they differed, and to be able to say that A is like this and B is like that with a feeling that I had any notion of what I was talking about.

The extension of this question is: OK, they differed more in the early days, but how much did they differ? This too is a question of context. I noted in my reactions to day 1 that the guy who played three diverse recordings of the same Schubert song and called them the same notes but three different works would be stared at in disbelief by anyone whose ears were formed by pop song cover versions. What I didn't say in my reactions posts was that I raised this question on day 3 with Jose Bowen, the guy with the survey of Rossini aria recordings. He's primarily a jazz musician, so I figured he'd have the non-classical ears to grasp the point. But when I tried to illustrate it by pointing to the first evening's chamber music, he started enthusing about how wonderful they were because they were so different.

I thought, "He doesn't get it either. He may play jazz, but he listens to classical with purely classical ears." And I gave up. The problem is this: that the range of possible performing styles in classical music, even within the broad variance of late 19th century style, is minuscule compared to that heard every day from different performers of pop songs, and that therefore, classical music isn't going to save itself by re-adopting 19th-century diversity. It's not going to impress anybody who listens to pop and who thinks of classical as uninviting and only permitting discrimination to be performed by experts. The only hope - but, fortunately, it's not a small one - is that more idiomatic performances will be better, more committed performances and thus more attractive even to the ears of non-expert listeners who can't analyze what they're being attracted to.

More on this article, and also on what's not in it, to come.

the music listener's glass ceiling

I hope this doesn't become the norm.

I'd considered the possibility of going down to LA to hear the Philharmonic give the west coast premiere of Philip Glass's Ninth Symphony, but it was both Easter and Pesach weekend, a busy time here, and for that and other reasons a trip would not have worked out.

I did read somewhere, though, that the work had been recorded, so when I was making out my online order of delectable CDs, I looked it up. Nothing there.

Puzzled, I went to The Man's website, where I found this: "Download exclusively from ITunes." (I know they don't capitalize it that way, but I refuse to do it their way.) Oh fnick. To buy something from Amazon, evil as they are, you just need to go to the Amazon website and give them your credit card and address, but Apple is evil in its own way, besides imposing insane and awkward-to-type capitalization rules: to buy from ITunes you need to load the ITunes program on your computer, and I'm not clogging up my computer with that thing and all the hassle needed to get it there.

Eventually I remembered that B. has ITunes and I asked her to do it. The page on The Man's website says just click here and you'll be taken to it on the ITunes website, but you're not: you still have to search for it. It took us three searches to find it ("philip glass" didn't work), which exceeded B's interest in the matter. Fortunately, once I found it, it was not difficult to download and burn to a CD, despite confusing instructions in the ITunes help database that turned out to be unnecessary anyway.

So now I have a CD, which is what I want - and I hope it lasts; some of my older hand-burned CDs have conked out after 5-10 years; the commercial ones haven't - but without cover art or liner notes. Oh well.

So how's the music? It's another dark-toned, churning work, at 50 minutes the longest of his non-vocal symphonies, and in three movements, his preferred format. The LA Phil has the most detailed description of the work that I could find. This says the opening was inspired by that of Mahler's Ninth. If the composer says so, but I don't hear it. The tone color and scale of movement are similar, but the somber darkness entirely lacks the gemütlichkeit, the open yearning, and the abrupt mood switches of Mahler, while it does abound in the continuously bounding rhythmic energy typical of Glass. The work I'm most reminded of is the prelude to Glass's own Akhnaten, and I suppose I was waiting for the music to hush and a deep voice to boom out "Open are the double doors of the horizon; unlocked are its bolts" or possibly "Koyaanisqatsi, Koyaanisqatsi."

It never did, though. Instead, each of the three movements, after a quiet beginning, built up energy and then died down again. Other writers have mentioned things like the woodblock pattern at the conclusion of the first movement, not an unprecedented type of sound in a Glass symphony. I, however, am most struck by the towering plateaus of forte climax of both the second and third movements - long undifferentiated stretches of unvarying intensity, in the second movement led by continuously braying trumpet. Even after three listenings, I haven't taken to this as much as I have to the Eighth and the Third, my favorites among his previous symphonies. But I'm glad to have it, even in this crude physical form with just a slip of paper pasted in the jewel box to identify it. I understand that Glass has bypassed the Curse of the Ninth by having written two more symphonies before this one even premiered, though they're not listed on his web site, so there's more to come.

who are we?

Yesterday, in my capacity of working on programming for Mythcon 43, I met for lunch with our Author Guest of Honor, Malinda Lo, to talk about what will be going on at Mythcon and to exchange programming ideas. Naturally, as one new to the Mythopoeic Society, she wanted to know something of what we are about. So I explained that, as our name suggests, we're interested in myth-based and mythically resonant fantasy, that, while there probably isn't a well-known fantasy writer who doesn't have fans in the Society, we focus on what we consider the quality work, not necessarily the best known, as our awards nominee list, which her work has been on, testifies. It's fair to say that we don't follow the crowd, and, with con attendance under 200, it's pretty obvious, too.

And then I come home and read this post about World Fantasy Con and how they "don't want the 'wrong sort of fan' coming to 'their' convention." Are we like that too?

In a way we are, and I see nothing wrong with it. Mythcon is a particular sort of conference and aims to continue being that sort. People who want other sorts of fantasy cons, there's plenty of others to choose from, most far larger than ours, but there's none, or few, others like Mythcon. Those looking for DragonCon, or even WFC, won't find it at Mythcon, and it would be futile to try, and only annoy those who are at Mythcon because that's what they want.

At the same time it's not exclusionary. Anybody is welcome if they want what we offer, at least for long enough to attend a Mythcon. I go to many different types of conventions myself; each has a particular flavor, and I go expecting to dine on that flavor for the weekend, whether it's my regular dish or not. Mythcon doesn't have to go around proclaiming what it isn't, because it runs under the radar and doesn't have people knocking at its door with the wrong address, but maybe WFC isn't that lucky. Mythcon doesn't have a pre-emptive list of what we don't allow in our dealers' room, but when someone writes in to ask for a table, or for that matter offer to give a paper, on some topic that just doesn't fit Mythcon, we just write back and say no, thanks. It happens occasionally. We're certainly not trying to impress the general literati, as some think WFC is.

As far as comics, a particular subject of the above-referenced screed, it depends on what kind. A tableful of ordinary superhero comics would not do well at Mythcon, although we do have a few fans of them among us (B. is one), and we did give our scholarship award once to a book discussing superheros as mythic figures. On the other hand we did once have Neil Gaiman as our GoH, though perhaps uniquely among conventions he's attended, he was better-known among us for his prose fiction. I recall, however, that Sandman was on sale in the dealer's room, and properly so; and B. and I both gave papers on it.

concert review: Olga Kern

It's those Oshman acoustics again, I guess. I came to hear Olga Kern, a tall blonde woman with one black dress, and one red one (she changed during the interval), play Schumann's Carnaval, but I'm not sure I heard it. Her performance sounded so plain and blocky, without a touch of grace or beauty, that the work was mostly unrecognizable, and the Davidsbündler marched in hob-nailed boots.

On the other hand, maybe it wasn't entirely the acoustics, for I liked her Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies, because they're supposed to be shamelessly tasteless. This was the Liszt who led a flourishing afterlife as a house composer for Warner Brothers cartoons. Kern's Chopin sounded like an unsuccessful aspirant for the same position. She should have stuck to the original announcement's plan of playing Rachmaninoff instead of Chopin.

One remaining piece on the program I was unfamiliar with, so since the booklet had nothing to say about the repertoire I looked it up when I got home. It was an obscure bit of Beethoven, his Variations on a Theme by Salieri. This is an early work, from 1799, but it resembles a smaller-scale version of his much later Diabelli Variations in that he takes a dorky little tune by somebody else - this one is an aria from Salieri's Falstaff opera - and treats it to such serious and complex variations as to make the composer of the original embarrassed to have written it.