three concerts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

petty annoyances of the week

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

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

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

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

wtf, Cesar Chavez?

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

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

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

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

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

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

more than it seems?

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

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

breakfast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that's my breakfast these days.

context!

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

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

a pair of concerts

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

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

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

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

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

Oscar the semi-grouch

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

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

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

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

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

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

a guide

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

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

review redux

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

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

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

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

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