the end of Westercon

The business meeting of this year's Westercon, last weekend, passed a motion to retire Westercon, to put an end to a nearly 80-year sequence of annual science-fiction conventions. It will need to be ratified next year, and any seated conventions will still be held, so unless it's rejected next year, the last Westercon will probably be no. 80 in 2028. I wasn't at the meeting, but you can read about it and, if you're really a glutton for it, watch a half-hour video of the whole thing here.

How have the mighty fallen. When I was active in fandom in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, Westercon was the king of the west coast convention calendar, behind only Worldcon in importance to fans in the area. It was large, maybe 2000 people, full of activity and a great place to expect to meet friends. There were plenty of other large regional conventions around, but Westercon was a centerpiece. Like Worldcon but unlike most other convention series, it moved from city to city each year, so nobody had to carry the entire burden of responsibility for running it. But, once shared, the responsibility was welcome. For instance, Portland had a big annual local convention, Orycon, in the fall. But for nearly 20 years, every five years or so they'd also hold a Westercon, in July. It wasn't too much of a challenge.

Westercon had grown to meet a need. It was in 1948 that LASFS, the LA club, had decided to hold a one-day event to assuage the needs of those who couldn't afford to attend the Worldcon on the east coast. After a few years it got bigger and longer, and started to be hosted in other cities, but for 20 years or more, Westercon served this role of a substitute. When the Worldcon was held on the west coast, no separate Westercon was held - there was no need for it.

But by the 1970s, Westercon had begun to exist for its own sake. 1972 was the first year there was both a Worldcon and a separate Westercon on the west coast. They were both in the LA area. Around the same time, local conventions began growing up: Loscon in LA (starting as a revival of the original format of Westercon), Orycon in Portland, Norwescon in Seattle, Baycon in San Jose, all began in the 70s or early 80s. But Westercon flourished along with them.

But sometime after the year 2000, Westercon began to diminish while other conventions continued to prosper. I'm not familiar enough with the fannish milieu of the time to understand why, but Westercons became much smaller and more obscure. I went to a couple in this period and was really surprised by how the atmosphere had changed.

In recent years it's been suffering from organizational ennui. Every Westercon but one (Tonopah in 2022) since 2014 has been co-hosted with another convention, usually as an add-on to a better-established partner. And for three consecutive years recently there was no qualified bidder, and a special committee had to figure out how to get the convention held. Maybe, Kayla Allen suggested in proposing the motion, there just isn't a need for our product any more.

But as mentioned, what I don't understand is why this has happened. Ben Yalow and Michael Siladi, also experienced conrunners supporting the motion, both suggested that the rise of other regional/local conventions on the west coast has sapped interest away from Westercon, but as Ben pointed out, that phenomenon dates back to the late 1970s/early 1980s, and Westercon was still flourishing in that period. The decline came later. What happened?

100 best

Here's a list of the New York Times's idea of the 100 best movies so far of the century of years beginning with a "20", to be precise about it. It's a little behind; there are no movies on the list from 2025, and none from 2024, either. But it's an interesting list that balances between acclaimed popular movies and more abstruse critical darlings with a lot in between also.

I've seen 37 of the 100 films, of which I'd name 10 as real favorites, which I identify as movies I've re-watched for pleasure, sometimes skipping over parts but usually in full. Those ten, from the top on the list of 100, are:
Mulholland Drive (2)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (7)
Zodiac (19)
Moneyball (45)
Inception (55)
Memento (62)
Spotlight (66)
Ocean's Eleven (71)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (76)
Inside Llewyn Davis (83)

Two Christopher Nolan movies, two Coen brothers movies. That doesn't mean I like all their movies.

Of the 37, there are also 8 which I found disappointing or annoying in at least some respects. Interestingly, while one of my top ten, Mulholland Drive, is near the top of the list at #2, it is immediately followed at #3 by the movie I saw in full that I disliked more than any other, There Will Be Blood (yes, worse than The Fellowship of the Ring, #87).

The other 19 that I saw I enjoyed watching well enough.

Besides the 37, there are 4 that bored or irritated me so much that I gave up on them early on. I'd rather explain why I hated a movie than why I loved it, so they are:
Roma (46) - Even the opening credits bored me to tears, and nothing that happened in the next five minutes changed my mind, so I turned it off.
Whiplash (60) - The teacher is such a human cretin that, were I the student, I would probably have punched him in the face before walking out and never returning.
The Hurt Locker (68) - I explained my problem with this one in a post titled action movies in which the only reason the hero doesn't die is that heroes don't die
The Florida Project (74) - Begins with three six-year-olds gleefully spitting onto their neighbor's new car for no reason other than that they can. Do I want to spend a whole movie with such obnoxious kids? Off.

1984 revisited

The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984, Dorian Lynskey. (Doubleday, 2019)

B. is re-reading 1984, first time since high school. I also read it in high school, not I think for a class, but I've never attempted to re-read it. It's the bleakest, darkest novel I've ever read, it was searingly memorable and remains fresh in my thoughts, but I don't ever want to delve into it again. I've re-read other dystopias, like The Handmaid's Tale, but Offred remains defiant until the end. Orwell's Winston is just totally crushed, and the rest of the book tends to foreshadow that.

So instead I read this book about 1984. It's in two parts. Orwell said that 1984 was the summation of everything he'd read and done since the Spanish Civil War, which is where he discovered that both sides can be totalitarian. Lynskey goes through all of the ingredients, directly contributory or not, spending a lot of attention on Animal Farm, which is deeply thematically related. Lynskey also disposes of any notion that the year 1984 is any sort of code for 1948, as often suggested. That Winston's environment is based on austerity post-war Britain is a red herring. Orwell picked that as something he could depict, not out of secret hatred of the Labour government.

Orwell died less than a year after the book was published. The second half is the book's posthumous career. This includes consideration of just about every major dystopia concocted in English-language literature or film since then, even if (like Fahrenheit 451 or Brazil) they've little to do with and weren't inspired by 1984. There's also a long and gratifyingly detailed discussion of The Prisoner. But it also covers film and stage adaptations of 1984 itself, and lots of what people have said about the book or about What Orwell Would Be Saying Today. About this last genre, Lynskey is appropriately caustic. "The most inflammatory reputation grab was a story by Norman Podhoretz. 'Normally, to speculate on what a dead man might have said about events he never lived to see is a frivolous enterprise,' he acknowledged, before gamely pressing on to insist that an octogenarian Orwell would have said that Norman Podhoretz was right."

Orwell's particular balanced perspective is widely misunderstood. Normally, especially in Orwell's day but even now, critics of fascism and other leftists tend to make excuses for the Soviet Union and other communist regimes: they're not so bad, Stalin's show trials were misjudged, etc. Visitors to the USSR like Bernard Shaw were totally gulled. Even Jon Carroll writing on Elian Gonzalez thought that Elian's mother was unhinged to make a dangerous flight from the communist paradise of Cuba. And anti-communists tend to have a similar soft spot for the right. Jeane Kirkpatrick praising any dictatorship on the map as long as it was right-wing. Robert Conquest, brilliant excoriator of Soviet terror, offering comparisons as if making excuses for everyone else except the Nazis.

Orwell wasn't like that. He hated totalitarianism, and he hated it equally from either side of the spectrum. He didn't think that the sins of one side made the other side acceptable. People can't see that balance, especially right-wingers who see the depiction of the Soviet-style government in 1984 and especially the Soviet allegory in Animal Farm and assume Orwell would be a right-winger, in favor of capitalism. You'd have to ignore the opening of Animal Farm entirely to think that.

Somebody once summarized Orwell's philosophy - and I think Lynskey quotes this but I can't find it now - as "Capitalism is a disease, socialism is the cure, and communism would kill the patient." Keep that in mind, and your preconceptions won't fool you about Orwell.

talk to the police

Every once in a while YouTube shows me a link to a video urging its watchers never to talk to the police. I've never watched one of these videos - lectures on haranguing topics are not a high priority in my life - but I have looked the question up on Quora and Reddit. There it appears that the urgers don't mean this literally. For instance, when I was in a crumpling three-car auto accident, calling the police and talking to them could hardly be avoided, and it was clear that I wasn't at fault.

But otherwise the answer seems to depend on who's giving it. Police writing say that innocent people should always talk with the police, who just want to gather as much evidence as possible. Others, especially lawyers, say no! no! Whenever there's a crime involved, ask to get a lawyer first. Some say only if you're being detained to be questioned.

And the reason for all this is that the more you say, the more opportunity the police have to twist your words into evidence of your guilt. I know this happens. I've seen a number of accounts of cases where the police, having made a preliminary survey, take a first guess as to the culprit, and then devote the entirety of their attention to finding, sometimes even concocting, evidence of that person's guilt, ignoring anything that points to their innocence or to guilt lying in another direction.

OK, I thought, but if you're an innocent person terrified that the police might fasten on you as the presumed guilty suspect, wouldn't defensive insisting on a lawyer only make the police more likely to suspect you?

I just found some evidence, admittedly in a fictional movie, for that point of view. The movie was The Town, which I came across on Netflix. I hadn't heard of it, so I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that it was a crime drama which got good reviews. So I watched it, and it was indeed a good movie. It's about a bank robber, played by Ben Affleck, who falls in love with his hostage. Well, it's more complicated than that. First the robbers, who are masked during the crime, let the hostage go. Then they decide to tail her, and that's how Affleck meets her without her having any idea that he's one of the bank robbers. It's set in Boston, which I think is required for movies starring Ben Affleck, and is full of Boston accents coming out of unlikely people like Jeremy Renner.

Anyway, quite early on, the ex-hostage (Rebecca Hall) is being interviewed by the lead FBI agent (Jon Hamm). Worried that she might be considered complicit because she opened the safe at the robbers' orders, she asks, "Should I have a lawyer here?" and he replies, "This isn't a very civil libertarian thing of me to say, but anyone who lawyers up is guilty."

So I guess you should take that under advisement too.

well ...

With the country in the state it's in, I needed something offbeat to commemorate Independence Day, and then YouTube dropped this in my lap:

Frank Sinatra sings "America the Beautiful"
(an impression by Mel Brooks)

chirps

Chirp. It was the smoke detector in our bedroom, waking us to inform that the battery needed to be replaced. Or so we thought. Upon inspection, it turned out the battery couldn't be replaced on this one. You had to buy a new detector. Wait for the hardware store to open for the morning, then find one of the same model, so it fit on the same brackets. Sort of. Anyway, it's up and alert now.

Boom. That, I presume, was the sound of the warehouse full of fireworks exploding after it caught on fire, a couple days ago. Although it was after hours and out in the countryside, seven people were reported missing. It may be a while before this can be put out; fireworks keep exploding. At least one local town had been relying on those fireworks for its July 4th show, which has been canceled. Be careful out there.

Smof. It means ... well, it means someone experienced in running science-fiction conventions. One such has written that the unopposed bid for the next Worldcon up is woefully unequipped to do its job. This is the sort of thing smofs often say about Worldcon bids, whether or not it turns out to be true. The smof recommends voting No Award, er I mean None of the Above, so that the Worldcon Business Meeting will decide what to do. Reading the very serious comments on this post, I decided it was better not to post my snarky comment, which would have been, "Maybe we should put the Worldcon on a boat." But I'm not sure how many readers will have been around long enough to remember what that's a reference to.
Update: Worldcon bid in question has responded with a puff piece. This does not instill confidence.

Meow. A cat walking in front of my monitor, hoping for an early breakfast, made it difficult for me to read the announcement of the impending publication of Ursula K. Le Guin's Book of Cats. This is apparently a collection of unpublished or obscure pieces, many of them whimsical, rather than e.g. an omnibus of Catwings.

Speaking of cats ... This was on xkcd a few days ago:

changing of the guard

The Music@Menlo chamber music festival is starting up in less than 3 weeks, and I'm getting ready. This is the major festival in SFCV's coverage area, and we blanket it. I'm also one of the few reviewers who lives nearby, so a lot of that goes to me. I have the list of concerts I'll be covering, and the supplementary stuff, like lectures, that I'll be attending to give me supplementary background.

And a big piece of news came out this week. Menlo was founded, 23 years ago, by cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han, a married couple who are renowned performers who do a lot of duets and collaborations with other musicians. They've been artistic directors - and coaches, concert introducers, and not infrequent performers - at the festival ever since. It's in their name, it's in their image.

The news is that they'll be retiring after next season. They're both circling 70, I guess they decided it was time to hand it on. And who are they handing on to but their own image in a younger generation: Dmitri Atapine and Hyeyeon Park. Just like them, he's a cellist; she's a pianist; they're a married couple; they perform a lot together and with others.

And they know Menlo: they've been playing there for over 15 years, and for the last 5 they've been directors of the young performers program, which brings preternaturally talented 10-18 year olds to Menlo, where they put on their own concerts that you can attend. (And well worthwhile, too.)

Furthermore, Atapine and Park direct two separate chamber music series of their own, plus they're both professors at a music school (University of Nevada). So they're about as well equipped in both experience and training to take over as anybody could be. I was not in the slightest surprised at their announcement.

I expect they'll continue the Menlo mix of programming. Menlo specializes in the standard chamber music repertoire, attempting (and often enough succeeding at) the most exquisite performances of the masterworks. But they also mix in a lot of obscurer historical stuff when it's good enough - Anton Arensky is one composer whose name I've learned to seek out - and, for a festival that doesn't focus on new or modern music, a pretty fair sprinkling of newer works, very carefully selected for things you might actually enjoy listening to.

But the new directors might have a few tricks up their sleeves. Atapine once played here a solo cello sonata by György Ligeti, not the sort of composer you'd expect at Menlo, and Park has done dynamic piano work in pieces by Janáček and Bartók, also not everyday fare here. So you never know.

it's an opera review

Encouraged by the blog post and review by Lisa of the Iron Tongue, I bought a ticket for today's matinee performance of the Pocket Opera production of the opera Tartuffe by Kirke Mechem, a contemporary American composer who's also written an opera of Pride and Prejudice which I've also seen. This was the last performance of Tartuffe, and the only one convenient to me geographically, and I wasn't the only person persuaded to go. The small theater in Mountain View's CPA was pretty well packed (the main stage was putting on a musical about James Dean, in whom I have no interest) and among the audience I counted five people I know, including the conductor who put on that Pride and Prejudice.

Like the original play, from which this is significantly simplified (there's no Cléante, for one thing, and the dénouement has a rather different way of arriving at the same ending), this opera is bright and funny. It's through-composed and through-sung, with only a couple set piece arias or duets, in an agreeable modern style. The orchestration (cut down to chamber size by the composer) varies strongly depending on which characters are singing, and there are a couple clever and funny references to well-known bits from the classical repertoire; not worth explaining to non-audience members, but effective at the time.

The title role was sung by the powerful-voiced baritone (he sounds more like a bass) Eugene Brancoveanu, who'd been Darcy in that Pride and Prejudice. Unusually, his voice was not the most distinctive part of his performance here, because there was an equally powerful-voiced bass, Isaiah Musik-Ayala, as the credulous Orgon. Brancoveanu most excelled, instead, in acting the part of the oily and mock-sanctimonious Tartuffe. The other cast member I was familiar with was the bright-voiced soprano Shawnette Sulker as the sly maid Dorine, but they were all good and worked out well in the small space.

I got to the theater after stopping in for the first set of the annual Stanford Chamber Music Seminar's marathon finale, in which all the attending student and amateur groups each play a movement from something. The best I heard here were string quartets, the finale from Mendelssohn's Op. 44/1 and a couple of bright Haydn pieces.

I'd also got to the showcase concert the previous evening, which featured the two best ensembles - again, both string quartets - playing a full work each. We had a highly sharp-nosed performance of Smetana's "In My Life" and a Mendelssohn Op. 80 with a particularly snappy finale. In between the two quartets, the stage crew disassembled and then reassembled the entire string quartet infrastructure - the chairs, the music stands, the little footpads for turning the pages on the tablets - so as to provide for an intermediary performance of a Schubert song. (There was no program, and I don't remember the title.) Was it performed by a soprano? No. A tenor? No. It was a clarinet. B. wasn't there, but she likes vocal music and would have been very disappointed.

more progress

I'm still buried in copy-editing for the next issue of Tolkien Studies, with more to come, but I'm wondering what I can say publicly about it at this point. Oh, here's one thing: we have three papers so far which cite the recently-published Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, which we've decided to put in our standard abbreviations list as CP. Other posthumous Tolkien books have appeared while we've been publishing this journal, and some have sparked a flurry of papers, but no others have become this ubiquitous this quickly. It's a monument.

I'm adopting a practice of pulling down from my shelf each source item that I have in hard copy when the author first cites it, and then leaving it on my desk, because I may need it again later. When I finish the paper, I put them all away and start on the next one. Of course there's also a lot to look up in my computer files, or online, and I also need to make occasional quick trips to the university library.

In other news, I've learned that Corflu is coming back to the Bay Area, specifically Santa Rosa, next year. I dropped out of SF fandom entirely some years ago, and I missed a few events I probably should have gone to, including the last L.A. Corflu; but I think I'll go to this one. The membership list is the same old acquaintances who were there when I was attending regularly, and it's near enough that I can drive with no trouble. In fact what tipped the balance for me is that I have concerts in San Francisco both Thursday and Friday of that weekend, so staying in Santa Rosa will actually make it easier to get there.

I find little need to make political commentary, since there are online sources doing it for me, but I do wish to express how remarkable it is that for four years, judge-shopping produced speciously-argued holds on Biden administration activity without a word from the Supreme Court, but as soon as it's applied to Trump for blatantly unconstitutional actions, the Court puts a halt on the entire practice of universal holds. They're not even pretending not to be partisan any more.

the heat

Here's an article on the heat + humidity that's currently wracking the central and eastern U.S. It's full of detail on exactly how to measure the danger to human health. I hope those of you currently subject to this heat dome are doing OK, especially those of you without air conditioning.

I say "currently" because we get heat domes out here in the west too - we just don't have one right now. It's been 70s up to mid-80s F lately, which is not too uncomfortable, especially because our humidity is typically low - although that's less often true than it used to be. We've gotten some sparkling high waves here in recent years, up to about 105F, but usually in August-October. And of course it gets much hotter further inland: the shore is typically quite cool here in high summer, with each successive coastwise valley inland getting hotter; we're in the first valley, which can be bad enough, and have no intention of retiring out to the second or third valley as so many lounge lizards do.

So I'm counting us really lucky - so far.