movie not finished

The Power of the Dog (2021)

An article on the best movies on Netflix said that this was "not just one of the best movies on Netflix right now: It’s one of the best movies ever." Unfortunately it turned out to be great only in the sense that some of those "great novels" I had to read in literature class were great, i.e. totally wretched.

The main characters in this one are a pair of brothers who are cattle ranchers together in Montana (played by New Zealand) in the 1920s. One of them, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a hard man. Though they've worked together for decades, he considers his brother George (Jesse Plemons) to be something of a wimp. George is sweet on the widow lady (Kirsten Dunst) who runs a cookhouse where the ranchers often eat. Phil doesn't think much of her, the more so as her late husband had committed suicide, which Phil evidently considers a rather wussy thing to do. As for the widow's teenage son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who has artistic leanings, Phil thinks he's a total pansy. This is all played out as if it were written in neon signs.

George is incredibly awkward courting the widow, the more so after they suddenly up and get married, which George doesn't even tell Phil about until afterwards. Uh-oh, there's trouble ahead, forced on the story by the contorted plot. I stopped watching at this point and consulted the Wikipedia plot summary, which I'd previously avoided. Yup, there's trouble ahead. I'm glad I didn't have to watch any more of this tortured pretentious mess.

eh

I made one more stab at trying to find a Terry Pratchett novel I might like. I read somewhere that Night Watch is considered one of his very best, perhaps the finest fantasy novel of the then-nascent (it was published in 2002) 21st century, and more serious than Pratchett's wont - which was encouraging, as I generally find his humor tiresome and unfunny.

Well, I actually enjoyed the first couple pages, about an assassination student who's incompetently trying to tag the hero. It was funny, which the rest of the book isn't. The hero is cast back in time 30 years, and for reasons unclear takes on the identity of his own mentor, whom he doesn't know has died at the time he first uses the name. The scenes in which someone or something - it's not clear who or what this entity is - explains at length to the hero how time-travel works were extremely overlong, tiresome and tedious; I skipped over much of it. The hero is a policeman, and once the time-travel stuff is over, it looks like the book is going to settle into a serious novel about the hero instructing his callow younger self in how to be a good cop. I'm not interested in a police procedural about instructing cops, so I'm quitting here, about a third of the way in, though that's a lot farther than I've gotten in any previous attempts at reading Pratchett.

ticket purchasing follies

I've written before about strange experiences getting tickets. Here's another one.

I wanted to attend a concert being given by a small new-music outfit. A news release linked to their concert page. But there was nothing on it about buying tickets.

At first, I assumed they'd be selling tickets only at the door, and I prepared to get there early. But then one day while I was looking at the page again, I noticed that the name of the venue was a link. I clicked on it, and found a list of concerts, every one of which had a ticket-buying link except for this one.

Uh-oh. So I called up the promoting outfit. I had to leave a message, but a man called back almost right away. I said there was no ticket-purchasing link on the concert page; he went to look at it and was surprised that I was right. I said I'd been afraid the concert was sold out. He said, "No, we've sold very few tickets, and I guess now I know why." He said they'd put a purchase ticket link on the page (they have) and he e-mailed me a direct link.

I bought my ticket, and I'm going to this.

decoined

Another reason I lost interest in coin collecting is the decreasing use of coins in our society. As recently as the end of the state quarters program in 2008 I would always have a fistful of coins in my pocket, and could search through any new arrivals for state quarters.

But now I rarely have coins at all, and I tend to decant any I get on arriving home. I just don't need them any more.

This is partly because of the decreasing value of coins. It's been years since you could buy anything, except maybe an hour on a parking meter in a low-congestion district - and they're mostly coin-free now - for a quarter. If you use coins at all, they're just markers on the way up to a greater value.

But just as much it's the move to cards. I was at the Freight & Salvage on Saturday for a concert by a Scottish folkish band called Gnoss (silent G) - it was all right, typical fiddle-driven fast music with occasional slower songs - and I stopped by the food counter for a snack. I picked up a bag of peanuts, $1.10 with tax. I remembered I had a dime in my pocket as well as a dollar bill, and I was reaching to pull them out when the clerk said "We're cards only." So, I now have a credit card charge for $1.10. Sheesh.

coined

My late grandfather was a coin collector in a small way. His usual technique for collecting was to sort through the coins in his pocket, looking for issues that he didn't already have. The oldest coin in his collection was an 1878 silver dollar, which I doubt he found in his pocket, but I don't know how much business with coin dealers he may have done. Probably not a lot. He kept his main US collection in Whitman coin folders, and none of them were complete.

He also had a miscellaneous box of foreign coins, which he'd picked up on world travels in his later years, and some varied currency notes of both US and foreign issue, as well as a number of US proof sets, mostly encased in plastic shells.

I showed some interest in this coin collection, and so when he was downsizing his possessions in the 1980s, he gave it to me. What I liked about collecting coins was the serried arrays they came in: otherwise identical coins with heads of presidents on them, marching down, distinguished only by year of issue and mint mark - mustn't forget the mint marks, of such vital interest to collectors. This is why I never got interested in collecting stamps. Though much prettier than coins, they didn't come in serried arrays.

For some time after receiving the collection, I kept it up by sorting through my own pocket change, but gradually I gave that up, mostly because the new clad coinage was less interesting than the old silver issues. My last spurt of interest came with the state quarter series of 1999-2008. I had great fun looking for those in my change - to my mind, buying one from a dealer would have been cheating - and eventually I got them all, and bought a folder to keep them in. But I discovered that collecting them had been more fun than having them. I rarely looked at the complete set, and if I was interested in the designs I can see them more clearly displayed on websites.

So now that I in turn am downsizing my possessions, I decided that selling the coins would be a good plan, a decision facilitated by my recent discovery that my once-keen eyesight had deteriorated in detail to the point where I couldn't read the mint marks and sometimes even the dates on the smaller coins. I once had a device that would magnify a coin but it never worked very well. If I were still interested in keeping up coin collecting I could look for a better one, but I'm not.

Just last week, then, an ad turned up in my mail that one of those antiques roadshow outfits would be setting up shop in a nearby hotel conference room for a few days to buy coins and jewelry. Perfect. I went down on the first morning to find it nearly empty: three buyers and no more than two other customers at a time (one of whom looked disconcertingly like the late Dave Rike). They carried the heavy box - which I'd put in the car in installments - in from the car and sorted through the contents. The buyer was especially pleased to find a couple of late 19C silver dollars with Carson City mint marks, plus an item my grandfather had been particularly proud of: an uncut sheet of six $5 bills of National Currency bank notes, series 1929. The buyer said this form of uncut sheets was rare. He paid a pretty penny for that and the lot of miscellaneous stuff, even taking my collection of aluminum tokens from the Shell gasoline presidents and states coin games from the 1970s. And so all that has found a home.

not just Cupertino

There's an article in the Mercury News, the local paper, on the effect that Apple Park, the giant ring-shaped "spaceship" headquarters, has had on the city of Cupertino, where it's located, since it was completed nearly a decade ago.

The thing is, though, that - though other cities are barely mentioned - it's not just Cupertino. Tax revenues - the small part that goes to cities - does indeed go to Cupertino and affect it. But housing prices and especially traffic have more effect on the neighboring cities.

Apple Park is located in a tab of Cupertino that sticks up to the north on the east side of the city. The houses immediately to the north and west of it are in Sunnyvale; the ones to the east are in Santa Clara. They're the ones most directly affected by Apple Park. There's a photo in the article of the spaceship looming up behind what the caption says is "a home on Lorne Way in Cupertino." Lorne Way isn't in Cupertino. It's a block north of the spaceship in Sunnyvale.

What is in Cupertino? The only housing in Cupertino in the immediate area is an apartment complex to the sw that was already there. My mother lived there at one time, but she was glad to be out before construction of Apple Park literally tore up the entire neighborhood.

South of the spaceship is its parking area, and behind that the freeway. On the other side of the freeway is a shopping district. There are homes in Cupertino not far away, but they're not directly under the spaceship's shadow, and access to the neighborhoods is mostly detached from the roads that Apple traffic backs up on.

I'd like to know more about what impact Apple Park has had on Sunnyvale - where I live, about a mile further west - and Santa Clara. But no, it's in Cupertino, we have to talk only about Cupertino.

concert review: Philharmonia Baroque

I don't often get to Philharmonia Baroque concerts, even when the traveling program does get down the Peninsula, which it doesn't always do. However, this one, which landed at the Concrete Tent in Palo Alto, I couldn't resist. It consisted of works by and inspired by C.P.E. Bach, and as C.P.E. (often called that to distinguish him from his colossal father J.S.) is one of my favorite 18C composers, I figured I had to go.

The C.P.E. work was No. 3 in F of his four Hamburg symphonies (Wq. 183), here being conducted by Philharmonia Baroque's former music director. It is, as the program notes point out, a quirky symphony both structurally and harmonically, but to my mind it's the tense and dark quality of the outer movements, a style called "Sturm und Drang" when other composers like Haydn took it up, though I suspect that C.P.E. invented it, that most appeals to me.

And this performance emphasized that. Led from the violin by guest conductor Shunske Sato (that is, though standing in front, he played along with the first violins for the whole concert, and let the orchestra pick up his directions from that), it was heavy, intense, even vicious, despite the small size of the orchestra.

Much the same quality was brought to the rarely-heard Mozart work, the entr'acts from his incidental music to the play Thamos, King of Egypt, and a bit even to Beethoven's Symphony No. 1, a work as quirky in form and harmony as C.P.E.'s symphony. The work that didn't quite fit this format was Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in D Minor. This is the other Mendelssohn violin concerto, not the famous one, the one he wrote when he was only 12. It's partly like a Baroque concerto, evoking the generation before C.P.E., and partly like the Mendelssohn to come.

Anyway, a good concert.

so you want to vote for Steve Hilton?

I swear this was a coincidence. I was browsing through the memoirs of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, both of which I own and have read before, when I remembered that I'd never gotten around to reading the memoirs of their successor, David Cameron, though that was published seven years ago. So, having another errand in that direction, I went to the library and checked it out.

What's coincidence is that that same day I looked up all the major California gubernatorial candidates on Wikipedia to learn their background. Where I learned that Steve Hilton, one of the Republican candidates, though by now a U.S. citizen with something of a mid-Atlantic accent, started out as a Brit who was a political aide to David Cameron.

So what does his former boss have to say about Steve Hilton? Brace yourself:

Steve Hilton's ideas continued to be one part brilliant to several parts bonkers. However, his relationship with people in government wasn't working. He was no longer excused as a free spirit when he was late for meetings - he was seen as someone who had disregard for others. His antagonistic style was no longer helping him advance his cause - it had started to hurt it. And the relationship between the two of us became strained, too. Steve is a real ideologue in a way I'm not. He thought I was losing my radical zeal and falling for the trappings of prime minister. But I knew that to be a successful radical you have to play the game. And he wasn't interested in playing the game, just tipping it over and throwing the pieces all over the floor.

Michael Tilson Thomas

Well, it happened. Michael Tilson Thomas died yesterday. He'd been very ill and wound down his conducting career entirely a year ago, so it's not a surprise though it remains a tragedy. The San Francisco Symphony has announced that its performance of Beethoven's Ninth in June - led by the now-unavoidable James Gaffigan - will be dedicated to MTT's memory. That's appropriate, as the last time I heard him conduct was in Beethoven's Ninth in October 2023. He was scheduled to conduct another concert on my series later that season, but had to bow out due to frailty and illness. But his Ninth was well-appreciated. What I wrote at the time was:

Michael Tilson Thomas, music director laureate, returned to lead the SFS in the Big One, Beethoven's Ninth. What he did for SFS while stationed here was incalculable, and the love and affection that poured forth from audience and performers alike on his arrival onstage - and even more when the piece was over - was tremendous. The more so with his increasing health problems since his retirement, including a cancer operation two years ago that had him off work for months. If we never see him again, we want him to know that the last was the best. This was as fine and assured a Ninth as we've heard, particularly cherishable in a smooth and layered slow movement.

MTT served as music director of the SFS for 25 years (1995-2020), the longest service they've ever had, and he was probably the greatest director they've ever had, politely eclipsing Pierre Monteux, his predecessor in both distinctions. His arrival was announced with some hoopla, which turned out to be deserved. Taking up the orchestra rebuilding of his two immediate predecessors, he turned SFS into one of the world's great orchestras, and it's not fallen far since his departure, despite the crises of the last couple years. Beethoven's Ninth, which I think he led here several times, was one of his specialties; so was Stravinsky; so was American music when he could dub it as "maverick" whatever that means; so was Mahler, which I appreciated from him a lot less than from others. So it goes. I did appreciate him in a lot of other music, remembering especially some exquisitely burnished Sibelius, the Third in September 2016 and the Sixth in June 2018.

California gubernatorial debate

Matt Mahan: I'm the mayor of the third largest city in California!

Xavier Becerra: I've sued Donald Trump and won!

Katie Porter: I've sat down and talked with suffering Californians!

Tom Steyer: Let me repeat the question, slowly. Also, I'm the Change Agent!

Steve Hilton (or was it Chad Bianco?): All of California's problems are the result of Democrats running it for 16 years.

Chad Bianco (or was it Steve Hilton?): Yeah. Also, regulations are bad!