André Previn's greatest moment

André Previn (1929-2019) with Ernie Wise (1925-1999) and Eric Morecambe (1926-1984), doing a number on Edvard Grieg (1843-1907).

urgencies

Urgencies have been piling up, out-urgenting previous urgencies.

Top urgency was to fix the intermittent electrical outage that's been plaguing the circuit that serves our bedroom and bathroom. Twice power went off and then came on again of its own accord several hours later, without a breaker being tripped. Chances are the breaker had gone bad, but I still wanted an electrician to examine the wiring. Amazingly, I found one that actually could make an appointment only five days after the call. (Most electricians are booked up for six months solid and aren't taking any more appointments, and are very smug about telling you so; and this is true every time I need one. He said the wiring looked OK, and he replaced the breaker. It's only been a couple days, but no more problems so far.

Next urgency was to get our internet connection back. This frequently goes out, but usually for an hour on late summer afternoons, which suggests a wiring problem. But it was out all evening and overnight a few days ago, and even when it came back I had to reboot the computers, which is rarely necessary. But this upgrades what had been a chronic nuisance into a major problem, and we're getting a technician to come today.

Third urgency was to buy a new car, to replace the one that went under by hitting a curb too hard. Despite this vulnerability, I was attracted by getting another Honda Fit. A test drive at the same dealer I'd previously used proved that the model has not gotten bulkier in the last ten years, as Honda models often had. I like having a subcompact; it's maneuverable and squeezes into small spaces.

I tried the main competitor, the Toyota Yaris, which gets better reviews than it did back then. I liked it, but not as well, and it was more expensive than the Honda for no greater desirability from my perspective. (The console display panel which sticks up from the dashboard and can't be folded down was particularly annoying.)

My rental car company had their sales department phone me, and I went over to the lot to see what they had. What they had in subcompacts mostly turned out to be the Hyundai Accent. At $3K less than a new Fit, with only 10K on the odometer, it seemed a bargain. After a quick look, I went home to think and research. Condemner Reports, as I call them (an old Mad Magazine line), grumbled at it, but only insofar as they seem to dislike subcompacts in general. I was more worried by the paucity of Hyundai dealers out there. What if I don't like the local one's service department, or need major service when I'm on the road? The phones were busy at the sales lot when I called Wednesday morning, so I got ready to just drive my rental car over there, take a closer look and a test drive, and buy the car on the spot if I liked it; but then I started thinking about how I'd feel if I bought it, and would I be sure I was making the right decision?

I didn't want that nagging at me, and I'm fortunate enough not to have to worry about the $3K. I went back inside the house, called back the Honda salesman (who'd been politely schmoozing me in the interim in typical salesman manner), and said I was in.

So now I am the owner of a bright electric blue (they call it Aegean Blue, and if that's the color of the Aegean Sea I'd be alarmed) 2019 Fit, but I don't have it, because I can't drive it home from the dealer until B. is free to take me over there.

That will free me to return to other urgencies, such as doing the monthly bills and preparing the taxes, not to mention work which is approaching the annual deadline with the usual darkness looming.

how to save the Oscars

Turns out you don't need a host. Just a voice-over announcer to introduce the presenters, at no more than ten words a person, and it saves lots of time that would previously have been given over to inanities like serving pizza. There's even enough time for the winners to give their full speeches, even the ones who read a megillah off their iphone. And it still comes in at no more than 20 minutes longer than the scheduled 3-hour time.

Don't have much to say about the actual awards. I've only seen 3 of the winning films in full, and one of them is Bao, the animated short.

the happy couple, with chocolate

That's our niece Christina on the right, whom I first introduced to my blog readers quite a few years ago when she graduated from high school. And with her is our recently-acquired niece Megan, whom Christina espoused last summer in Syracuse, NY, where they live.

We didn't attend the ceremony, which was a small one held on a footbridge over a lily pond (modeled on this one by Monet). Christina has more aunts and uncles than any other person I know, save only her brothers, and there wasn't room. But she did promise to come out for a visit and hold a party for friends and relations to celebrate and meet Megan, and that was today.

Behold, then, the cutting of the cake. All chocolate, of course, a choice proving Christina's genetic relationship with her Auntie B.

The Adventures of Tybalt Underfoot: O, sweet lump

Tybalt continues to be underfoot. When I'm home without B., he follows me around: upstairs, downstairs. He wants to play with toys on a stick, he wants to be petted, he wants to lick my hair (he's learned to jump up onto the top of the back of my work chair), he nuzzles his food canister because he wants to be fed. And sometimes he gets it.

Last night when I came home late, I found an electrical circuit glitch. I'll tell you about that later, when it is, I hope, fixed: the point here is that I spent about 30 minutes running around, from upstairs where the lights were out to downstairs where the fuse box is, trying to figure out the problem (the breaker hadn't tripped, so what the hey?). Anyway, there I was, rushing about, and so was Tybalt. He was with me almost every step of the way.

Today for the first time since we let him out, B. washed the bedsheets and we made the bed all the way from scratch. This is going to be fun with a cat's help, I said, and it was. For each layer, from the mattress pad on up, Tybalt wanted to be buried underneath it. When we got to the top sheet, the first one that isn't fastened down to all four corners, we let him stay. I was reminded of Seven who, though he didn't participate in making the bed, did like to bury himself underneath the covers, making a notable lump: at least, until he figured out that our apostrophes to "O, sweet lump" a la Pyramus to the Wall, were making fun of him. Then he stopped. I don't think Tybalt will be that choosy.

documentary film review: Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin

I drove (rental car, natch) down to Santa Cruz for a special presentation sponsored by the town's film festival, the first (I think) area screening of the long-hatching documentary by Arwen Curry, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin. A small but appreciative audience gathered in a hotel ballroom (on the tourist side of town, where I rarely go).

The roughly hour-long film is an impressive mix of Curry's own footage of Le Guin (who was still alive during the film's long gestation), old photos and film clips (including film from Aussiecon showing UKL with [an uncredited] Susan Wood, whom I was especially pleased to see), a staggeringly impressive list of recent interviewees, headlined by Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, and Samuel R. Delany; and including brief appearances by UKL's husband and all three of their children, and some animations enlivening discussions of her books, notably some impressive rotoscoped oil painting animation for Earthsea.

The flow of the documentary's topics is most impressive, running seamlessly between segments discussing selected works of hers with ones on her personal life and background. She reads a few brief excerpts of her fiction. It begins rather offbeat with a depiction of how science fiction was a literary ghetto in the pulp age, then moves through UKL's early attempts to find a market until she settled in to writing humanistic adventure sf for Don Wollheim; then it jumps to Earthsea before returning to the major early SF. The latest works covered are Tehanu and Always Coming Home, except for her National Book Award speech, though others briefly appear as book covers. The subtlety of the transitions comes in how the segment on Tombs of Atuan follows a personal one on UKL's fondness for the Oregon high desert, whose landscape inspired the Kargish islands; and how another personal segment on the family home in the Napa Valley leads into, of course, Always Coming Home. There's a Berkeley High classroom discussion of "Omelas", with students taking each of the points of view possible in response to that story. The film is too short, but better that than too long. It's a real portrait that shows both what Le Guin did and what makes it both important and great reading.

I had one once, but the wheel fell off

Good news: I got to Stanford to hear the Omer Quartet give an hour's noon concert. One of the groups at Banff three years ago, they've gotten even better in the interim. A Baroquely woody Haydn Op. 20 No. 2, a vivid and skittish Bartok 3, and a properly argumentative Grosse Fuge (Beethoven), none of them pieces I'd heard them do before.

Bad news: On the way home, my car hit a curb with such force that the entire wheel came loose, including the suspension. So that's probably the end of the line for my small blue thing, aged ten and just beginning to feel it.

What's worse than losing one's car is the impossible struggle to get anybody, body-shop consultant or insurance person on the phone or anybody, to explain what the course of events will be before you commit to following it. Afterwards they'll happily tell you many things, but you can't eke an outline out of them beforehand. Consequently you have to make decisions in a state of ignorance or even of misleading partial information.

concert review: Dover Quartet

The San Jose Chamber Music Society administrators were really eager to get me back to review their most prestigious ensemble of the year, the Dover Quartet. Fortunately my editor was of the same mind.

A number of things I might say about the performance would merely feel redundant after the review, so I'll just add here that the remarkable thing about attending a concert in San Jose in the company of one of the local Master Gardeners (a public education job, basically) is how many Master Gardeners attend chamber music concerts in San Jose. I think she knew more people there than I did.

And it was appropriate they be there, for the Dovers grew a luxurious garden of music.

concert review: New Century Chamber Orchestra

This is the other review I wrote last weekend, and as with the other I'm satisfied that I got down in writing what I wanted to say.

That what Max Richter was doing with Vivaldi was conceptually identical to what Luciano Berio used to do with Schubert, Monteverdi, et al, despite the very different compositional styles, is something that occurred to me while listening to it. The next thought, of course, was that I like Richter's way of doing it much better. The line about Berio just getting grubby fingerprints all over his betters' music comes from a comment I once made to a post on Berio by the late Alan Rich. He replied that he admired the quality of Berio's mind. I don't; but I do admire the quality of Richter's.

anent

1. Oops, after the hassle replacing my driving license last summer I still have to renew the thing this year as well, don't I? Online appointment list not quite as long as last year; still, I decide to visit the office that opens at 7 AM. Lines not quite as long there as last year either. There's been much news recently about how they'd been asking for only one address-confirming document (utility bill, etc.) where the feds require two. One's what I'd given last year, so I bring along all my documentation again, because the web site implied I should, but nobody ever asks for it. At the last station when they tell me I'm done, I ask. Oh, there's another window for that. Give them my second document, they photocopy it, done.

2. Tybalt's most endearing flaw turns out to be that he loves to lick me. B. too, but especially me. Skin, hair. Raspy tongue, incessant, not a couple dabs. He'll only nestle quietly in my arms if I'm long-sleeved and no skin is within his reach, including my hands. When I get into bed, he gets off where he'd been sitting quietly atop B. and comes over to lick me, and he will not be dissuaded. Not only will this rub me raw, but I can't sleep with that going on. So I have to get up, pick him up, throw him out, and shut the door, every time.

2a. When he is resting in my arms, I notice another characteristic new to me: He purrs silently. You can feel it, but you can't hear it.

3. Diogenes' search for a non-spicy Indian restaurant continues. Place with the extremely tasty but perfectly mild lunch buffet turns out to be not nearly so restrained for dinner. Even if the menu doesn't mark it as spicy, even if you ask for mild. I try it too and it impresses even me: no surface burn, but an impressive dig underneath. Stop at ice cream parlor on the way home for something to cool the mouth. Who makes cookie-dough ice cream with no lumps in it? This place.

4. At work at the synagogue library, we've been wrestling with the problem of what to do with high-quality but superfluous (for our collection) donated books. Latest idea: Install a "take a book" box down by the classroom wing. Custodial staff put it up. Looks like a birdhouse on a pole. Our committee artist has painted it with the tree of life. Yesterday is the dedication. I need to stop by work anyway, so I show up. It's raining, but it looks like the books we've put inside this miniature shuk will stay dry. Rabbi thinks a bit. Despite the claims of Fiddler on the Roof, there isn't a special blessing for everything. Decides to have us sing the Shehecheyanu, the most all-purpose Jewish prayer, praising God for letting us experience whatever it is that's going on. Then we eat strawberries dipped in chocolate.

5. Andrew D. thinks the trailer for the Tolkien bio-pic is going to make a few people's heads explode. No, it only makes my head hurt. It looks agonizingly precious.