the first president from Florida

DT has changed his legal residence from Trump Tower to Mar-a-Lago. This is historically interesting because it makes him the first president to be a citizen of Florida, but also because he is, I think, the fourth president to change his state of residence while in office. The other three also all involved New York.

The first was Eisenhower, who had been officially living in New York when he was elected because he had been serving as President of Columbia University, though that became increasingly nominal, especially while he was on leave off in Europe as military commander of NATO. By the time of his re-election in 1956, he'd bought his retirement home at Gettysburg and moved his residence there, so he was from New York in his first election and from Pennsylvania in his second. He'd been born in Texas and spent his entire childhood in Kansas, and lived all over during his long army career.

The second was Nixon. Previously a life-long Southern Californian, he'd moved to New York after his gubernatorial loss in 1962 and joined John Mitchell's law firm. That's where he was living at his first election. But he bought his "Western White House" in San Clemente and moved his residence there before re-election. After his ejection from the presidency, however, he moved back to New York and eventually to suburban New Jersey.

I'm pretty sure that Bill Clinton of Arkansas moved his residence to his eventual home in Chappaqua, New York, before leaving office, though I can't be sure because he never ran for office there. Hillary Clinton did, though, so at least she must have.

Many other presidents have moved states, but either before running for office (e.g. Lincoln, who was born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana, and lived in Illinois) or in a few cases afterwards (the first was James Monroe of Virginia, who as a widower went to live with his daughter in, ta da, New York).

notes

1. It looks as if the fire in Sonoma County is finally under control, and most of the towns under threat (including the one my acquaintances in the area live in) are relieved from duress. That's a relief. Their inhabitants can go back home, and the power is on. Here's the explanation for all the blackouts: essentially, a judge has forced the utility to take responsibility for the fires its equipment causes, so in lieu of actually trimming the vegetation and fixing their old sparkies, they're taking the passive-aggressive mode of turning the power off.

(There's been little wind down here, curiously, though we certainly occasionally get the Diablos, as they're now becoming known - this is, in case it's not clear, the identical meteorological phenomenon as what's called the Santa Anas in LA.)

2. What most people don't get about the World Series crowd chanting at DT "Lock him up" - they're trolling him. While they'd surely like for him to be duly punished, summary imprisonment isn't being seriously proposed. This is a sardonic reply to all the similar chants at his rallies, which are intended seriously and are actually chilling. This time it's mockery. Here's a columnist who gets it.

3. British politics report: They've called a general election. Chances that the Tories will win a majority, and Boris's plan will go through: Large. About half. Chances that there'll be a hung parliament like the one they have now, and nothing will go through: Large. About half. Chances that anything else will happen: Small. Chances that, if that something else requires a coalition between Labour and any of the Remain parties, that the coalition will break up before it ever gets going, over an argument on whether it requires Corbyn, as leader of the largest party, to be PM: inevitable.

(Footnote: There's no UK constitutional requirement that the PM in a coalition be the leader of the largest party in it. In the 1852 coalition, the PM was the leader of the smaller of two parties. Same in the 1916 coalition. In the 1931 coalition, the PM was the leader of the smallest of four parties. In the 1940 coalition, the PM was initially not the leader of any party.)

4. Activity of the day: the long-deferred clearing out some books to sell from the hardcover fiction shelves in the dining room to make room for some of the extras that have been piling up. Deciding on some authors that no, I don't think I'm ever likely to get around to reading them. Have not stocked up on candy, or substitute. Due to decreasing Halloween activity around here, we've just started bowing out for the last couple of years and keep our outside light off.

concert review: Symphony Silicon Valley

I'm always on the edge when I'm sent to review a work that's jazz-inspired, because I don't have a feeling for jazz. The music doesn't appeal to me, it doesn't make intuitive sense to me as classical does, and I don't know its features or varieties.

So here we have a work inspired by three sets of pairs of collaborators in popular or jazz music, all of whom the now-venerable composer, David Amram, knew when he was a young musician in New York in the 1950s. I knew the work wasn't going to directly copy or transmit its dedicatees' music, just vaguely suggest the inspiration, but I figured I ought to tutor myself a little in what Amram had in mind.

First set, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, no problem. I'm not expert on either, but I know their music and what it sounds like. I even like some of it.

Second set, Lester Young and Billie Holiday. I'd heard of Billie Holiday, but I drew a blank on Lester Young. He turns out to be a saxophonist. I found a set of a dozen songs that the two of them recorded together around 1940. Only one of them was familiar to me, "Night and Day," which I know only because Allan Sherman guyed it in the 1960s. I listened to this version, knowing what I would get because I recalled having heard Billie Holiday before. Oh god: I know she's supposed to be some kind of sublime genius, but I can't abide this. Delete long rant on the subject here. At least Amram's invocation of it isn't that bad.

Third set, Machito Grillo and Celia Cruz. Who? Online sources suggest they invented Afro-Cuban jazz. Then I read what I wrote about Amram's earlier piece honoring Chano Pozo, and it suggests he invented Afro-Cuban jazz. Maybe they all did. Anyway, listening to bits of them confirms that I've heard Afro-Cuban jazz before, and also confirms what I thought I knew about its rhythms. It can be striking, but a little of it goes a very, very long way. But that's settled.

fire warning

I haven't said anything about the latest round of California wildfires because they're far away from me, and I don't know any more about them than I read in the news. If the smoke is heading south, we haven't noticed it yet.

True, I have some distant acquaintances who live in the evacuation area, and I hope they'll be OK, but they're not people I have a regular direct way of contacting. When they told me, long ago, that they were moving up there, my more politely-phrased question was, "What the heck you want to live up there for?" and the answer was, "Because we can afford a house there."

a tour of pandemonium

So a few weeks ago I was browsing around Atlas Obscura, looking to see what sites it's highlighted around here. Almost all the local ones I'd been to, but there's one I hadn't heard of: Pandemonium Aviaries, a rescue shelter for birds.

The listing said it wasn't open to the public, but it also said that tours could be arranged. The click led to an AirBnB listing, where I found that yes, indeed, a few tours were now available for a limited period.

Well. B. loves to visit animals, especially cats (especially big cats), but birds are next on the list. I hastened to arrange this. I needed to create an account on AirBnB to do this, an interesting experience in itself, and I had some discussion with the proprietors to ensure the tour wouldn't be too physically wearisome on us, but it was arranged, and yesterday we went.

It's a quarter-acre lot on a dead-end back road in the tangle among the hills above Los Altos, and behind the house it's packed with small to medium aviaries. (Visitors don't go inside them, but you can see pretty much everything from the pathways.) There's parrots and parakeets, various species of oversize pigeons (many of them from the Indian Ocean, relatives of the dodo, and some of them looking a bit like the dodo), giant cranes, tiny finches of a vast variety of stunning colors, and much more. There's a lot of good photos on their own website.

There were 6 of us on that day's tour, plus the guide (one of the small regular staff), which is about as many as could fit in the cramped spaces, on a slightly too hot day. Various exotic bird calls were heard, but despite the place's name pandemonium did not erupt. We learned that keeping exotic birds is a challenge. These are species not covered in the regular vet manuals, and few people know much about them. What do they eat? What kind of environment do they like? How do you take care of them? What if they get ill? The owner started with one rescue dove, and now has over 300 birds and has moved into trying to propagate endangered species.

It turned out we were wise to take this opportunity. The reason they've started up the tours is because they've run out of space and will be moving next year, to North Carolina, far away from us. There they'll have room for regular tours, and decided to start getting the birds used to visitors, and also to use the tours, which are not inexpensive, to raise some of the money for the move. So here was a rare, once-ever opportunity to see the birds, close to home. Though it was a very exhausting couple of hours out, we're glad we did it. People around here who like birds should check to see what's available and go see them too.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony. Played all over the US during WW2 as a symbol of Soviet-American wartime solidarity. Spent the next three decades unplayed and pointed at as proof that Shostakovich was a crappy composer. Since then it's reverted to proof that he's a great composer.

But no greater than he was last night. First-time guest conductor Karina Canellakis led this epic work (some 80 minutes) as if she sincerely believed in it, every note, and oh how it showed. Especially in the contrasting middle sections of the last two movements (loud and passionate in the Adagio, quiet and meandering in the finale) but also throughout, the coherent and expressive phrasing was spectacular: emphatically both meaningful and beautiful. This was the best Shostakovich at SFS since Semyon Bychkov's first turn at the Eleventh.

Also on the program, Prokofiev's First and shortest (15 minutes) Piano Concerto. Alexander Gavrylyuk played the solo part with the solid clang that made this sound like maturer Prokofiev than it is. Demonstrated his variety with an encore in the form of a wispy rendition of a bit of melancholy Schumann.

new music

This was on the radio as I drove home from a concert a few days ago. I expect that my modernist-listening friends are going to hate this. But I thought it was very striking, especially the slow movement.

Georgs Pelēcis. Latvian composer, b. 1947. Not very much like Vasks. Piece: Concertino bianco for piano and orchestra. Alexei Lubimov, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, conductor Heinrich Schiff.

an exercise in missing the point

London theatre to ban visitors from bringing single-use plastic bottles

They're not actually single-use. They're good for being refilled, and I've used some that lasted for months. They weigh less than permanent bottles, and if you forget yours when leaving the restaurant or theatre (a problem I've struggled with for years), they're easier to find for sale and less expensive to replace. And having to buy a new plastic bottle because you've lost your old one is, I submit, less harmful to the environment than having to buy a new permanent one.

Right now I'm using one whose brand name is "Oregon Rain." That's enough to remind me that I bought it at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival theater snack bar nearly two weeks ago, because I'd accidentally left the previous bottle behind at a restaurant where I'd stopped for a snack. I'm doing the best I can with these things.

concert reviews: Bacewicz and others

It was a busy concert-going weekend. The main event was Bard Music West's sort-of-annual composer festival. Like last year's, this consisted of three chamber music concerts over two days in a tiny church up at the tip of the Noe Valley deep in a residential district of San Francisco. Last year's honoree was Henry Cowell, this year was Grażyna Bacewicz (1909-69), generally considered Poland's greatest female composer. (Judging from the speakers at the festival, the name can be pronounced various ways, but the one I found most congenial was Ba-SHEH-vitz.) I wasn't very familiar with Bacewicz, but I had heard of her, and I'd heard some of her music. Much of what I'd heard, like her Concerto for String Orchestra, was sinewy conservative modernism just the way I like it, rather resembling late Bartók of his exilic period.

So I was looking forward to this, but what I got was not what I was expecting. Bacewicz started out as a neoclassicist, then after WW2 was affected by a combination of shell shock (she'd been in Warsaw) and Soviet cultural oppression (this is when the Concerto for String Orchestra came out), until the international music festival of 1956 revealed to Poland what had been going on in the west, and the Polish composers got all ultra-modernist and skanky. Bacewicz was far more restrained than Penderecki or Górecki, both much younger than she, but her subsequent music was definitely influenced.

I missed the first program, on her earlier years, and the only piece that really appealed to me from the rest of it was her String Quartet No. 4, another postwar work, played brilliantly by the Tesla Quartet, one of the best groups from my first visit to Banff. They'd have made an even bigger hit there if they'd played this then. There was too much of virtuosic solo music for violin or piano for Bacewicz herself to play, all of it nonstop and rattling. (Another attendee remarked to me that this sounded like very angry music, a surprising but understandable judgment.) Her later music became fragmented and disintegrated, and I found this true of the String Quartet No. 7, no matter how well the Tesla played it.

The programs included a lot of other music, by predecessors, contemporaries, and later composers influenced by the honoree, and such music had been the highlight of the Cowell festival. It was less so here, particularly for the new music. A brief documentary on Bacewicz from Polish television (subtitled) screened before the second concert, and readings from her letters between pieces, revealed that she disliked talking about her music, and this would have been good advice for the voluble composer of and violinist in a string trio that was commissioned for the festival. Her music, though, once we got to it, was actually pretty good, and so was a postminimalist piece for piano four-hands. Some other pieces, though, were solo music that sounded as if the performers were making it up as they went along. Worst was a piece for snare drum and taped electronics, which made me wonder why the live performer even bothered to show up.

The reason I missed the first concert was that I had a ticket to the Z.E.N. Trio at Herbst. The name is the initials of the performers, but as a word it was also a good description. You might not think that Brahms' Op. 8 piano trio, or Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 2, would be good works to show performers zoning out, like the cat that just spent half an hour splayed belly-up across my lap, but they did their best.

Then, Sunday after the festival, I went on assignment to review the season's first concert of the San Jose Chamber Music Society. Having been, like half a dozen other presenters, kicked out of the Trianon when the owners decided to turn it back into a church (unanswered question: why? Plenty of churches host concerts at other times; see the Bacewicz festival among many others), they've found a better refuge than the unfortunate Hammer Theatre. I was a little nervous at the prospect of the rather voluminous concert hall in the university music building, where I've heard a few distant-sounding piano recitals from time to time (B. has also sung there, long ago), but the acoustic shell was cannily placed, and the string quartet seated in front of it had a good playing space.

This was the Calidore Quartet, and their performing style sounded so different from my two experiences with them at Menlo that I wondered if there'd been a personnel change. There hadn't, and they deserved and got a good review anyway. That Caroline Shaw is an immeasurably superior composer to some of those duffers on the Bard festival program did not escape my thoughts in the review.

Then on Monday, the same group was playing pretty much the same thing up at Herbst. Oh boy.

o Canada

It appears from the initial results that Justin Trudeau will be forming a minority government. This may seem disappointing to his supporters, but the likes of this have happened before.

His father Pierre received a minority plurality of seats in his second election in 1972, following on his glorious initial victory four years earlier.

So son is no worse off than father was. And less than two years later, Pierre called another election, after the NDP withdrew their confidence & supply support, and he won a majority again. So.