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!

dentistry

Because I've been ill, my dentist requires before dental surgery of any kind - even something as non-intrusive as replacing a crown which fell out, my current concern - a verification from my physician that I'm OK for such procedures.

If you go through the medical center's formal procedure for such verifications, the medical records department will send out (with the patient's HIPAA approval) a long list of all the medical procedures you've undergone, but without anything saying that it's OK to go ahead. They're just the records department, after all, and apparently judging that your procedures aren't counter-indicative to dentistry is left to the dentist. But the dentist is no physician; how would she know?

Fortunately, my primary-care physician - who isn't actually much involved in my current treatment, though he's following its course - is willing to bypass the formal procedure and fill out the form himself. However, this time it took three attempts to fax it to the dentist before it came through.

Meanwhile, a pain while chewing, elsewhere in the mouth, is revealed as a probable fractured tooth, and a periodontist will have to look at it to see if it can be saved. It's three weeks until I see the periodontist, and another week before I get the temporary crown, so patience is a virtue.

book review

The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem, Julie Phillips (Norton, 2022)

I hadn't known that Julie Phillips - author of that fabulous biography of Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree - had published another book until I heard her mention it in the course of reading an entry from Ursula K. Le Guin's blog, an online project that's going to involve a lot of guest readers.

It's an analysis of how women writers and other creative artists have balanced their work and the practical job of being a mother, mostly illustrated by example. There's a full chapter on Le Guin, which is why I immediately sought this book out. Phillips is working on Le Guin's biography, and this is the third article I've read of hers on that subject, all written with the same assuredness and insight into character that characterized her Tiptree book.

Each of the featured subjects took an entirely different approach to the problem addressed by the book. Phillips describes Le Guin's method as separating out her two jobs. Once her children were in school, she could write during the day, and taking care of the children and household tasks the rest of the time could be handled because, while her husband had a full-time job, when he was at home he was fully involved in household tasks. For instance, he took the children to all their appointments because Ursula didn't drive. She writes that, while one person can't do two jobs, two people can do three.

The other full-chapter subjects are the writers Doris Lessing, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Angela Carter, and the painter Alice Neel. Interstitial chapters bring in other subjects, including the likes of Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood, and Shirley Jackson whom I'd like to have read more about. Unfortunately there's no index to enable the reader to dig these nuggets out.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Simone Young, from Australia, guest conducted. So was the living composer - from Australia, I mean. 35-year-old Ella Macens offered The Space Between the Stars, depicting what it's like to lie on the ground at night and contemplate the titular view. Unsurprisingly, the music offered sheens and broad melodies, often for strings, sometimes over quiet pulsations. Despite a few Ligeti-like chords, it was mostly so intensely consonant as to resemble movie music more than anything contemporarily classical.

Gautier Capuçon soloed in the Cello Concerto No. 1 of Camille Saint-Saëns, a brief work in one movement in ABA form, where the B section is a charming Tchaikovsky-like chipper waltz.

Lastly, about an hour of "bleeding chunks" as they're called, orchestral excerpts from Wagner's Ring, also including the Siegfried Idyll, which is not part of the Ring cycle although many apparently think it is. Apparently the titular opera doesn't have any bleeding chunks worth excerpting, although the other three in the cycle certainly do, so Young put this in instead. Wagner is much better as a tone-poem composer than he ever was writing operas, though his tendency to beat the listener over the head with his Leitmotivs remains irritating in any form.

concerts review: two quartets

Two of SF Performance's chamber music series wound up in the same week, and as a subscriber I got to both of them. The Danish String Quartet on Tuesday had an interestingly unusual program: first, their own arrangement of Stravinsky's Suite italienne, which in turn was Stravinsky's own arrangement for violin and piano of excerpts from his Pulcinella ballet music. This came out very Stravinskian. Then, Alfred Schnittke's Quartet No. 2, four movements of unending extreme dissonance, some of it Very Loud, some of it Extremely Quiet, and strangely captivating throughout. A lot of composers who like being dissonant could learn from this how to do it effectively. Lastly, a series of pleasant Nordic folk songs and dances, mostly Danish and Faroese, though when it was announced that one piece was from Greenland, the audience broke out into spontaneous applause.

Quatuor Ébène on Thursday was a more conventional program of 3 canonical 19C quartets by Beethoven (Op. 18/2), Debussy (his only), and Brahms (Op. 51/2). For an encore, a bit more daring, Britten's Divertimento No. 2. All were played in a style very typical of their composer. This worked well with the Beethoven, his most lively and perky quartet, but though the sound quality in the Debussy and Brahms was pretty awesome, they were rather duller to listen to. This is the sort of thing that stood in the way of my appreciating string quartets for a long time.

A big shutdown of the approaches of the Bay Bridge for repairs this weekend is already being prepared for, and driving out of the City at night was difficult both evenings even if you weren't going in that direction.