lost Gilbert and Sullivan

I attended an online Zoom presentation by the Lamplighters, the San Francisco Gilbert & Sullivan society, of three songs recently discovered (like, three months ago) that were cut from G&S's opera Iolanthe before the work was finalized for regular performance in 1882. They were found by a G&S scholar named Marc Shepherd, who was browsing through a rehearsal score in the British Library that apparently nobody else had examined closely before. Sullivan's practice was to destroy any material he didn't use in the final opera, but this rehearsal score must have been missed. Probably they were deleted for the reasons that songs are often deleted from stage musicals at a late stage: unnecessary for plot development, slowing down the action, difficult to sing.

I hadn't heard of this discovery before - except for the text of the third song, which Gilbert published among his poetry - nor did I know until the program that the songs had already been released. Here is Shepherd's account of the songs, and here they are being sung by, as the Lamplighters also did them, professional-quality G&S performers.



I don't find them hidden gems, but they're enjoyable enough, especially in these performances, and I'm glad we have acquired these nuggets.

movies with Benedict Cumberbatch in them

I came upon a list of lesser-known Cumberbatch film performances, and decided to watch a few, mostly late at night in between fitfully trying to get to sleep. So my evaluations may not be totally reliable.

Starter for 10 (2006)
As in "starter question, ten points." James McAvoy plays a whiz kid student at the University of Bristol who aims at winning at a varsity tv trivia quiz show. He barely makes the Bristol team, and then both his quizzing and his academic work, as well as the movie, are derailed by his attempts at beginning a love life. Benedict Cumberbatch plays the prissy team captain, who chokes under pressure. Intermittently and modestly amusing.

Amazing Grace (2006)
I actually saw this when it came out. I didn't get very far on a rewatching. Recounts the political campaign by haughtily moral William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd) to outlaw the slave trade in the British Empire around 1800. Benedict Cumberbatch plays his semi-reliable ally William Pitt. Pitt, as you'll recall from The Madness of King George, where he was played by Julian Wadham, was a rigid and rather characterless fellow, so Cumberbatch doesn't have much to do. Like many political history movies, it's written mostly as pontifications based on the screenwriters' reading of the history books. I quit after Pitt outlines his secret plan to become Prime Minister, which relies both on a surety of future knowledge and an oversimplification of those events that stretches credibility.

Four Lions (2010)
Whackabout comedy about a group of inxompetent radicalized British Muslims who want to become suicide bombers. Comedy on such a subject is a risky business, and to enjoy this movie you have to overlook that (spoiler alert, sort of) they do all manage to blow themselves up, and a lot of people get killed, not all by the terrorists. The movie tries to brush that aside as incidental or insignificant. It's the erratic pacing, rather than the content, which makes this film duller than it could be. Benedict Cumberbatch has a cameo role as a police negotiator.

Black Mass (2015)
An unrecognizable Johnny Depp plays real-life Boston mob boss "Whitey" Bulger, who throughout this film is more usually called Jimmy. Focuses on his subsidiary career as an informant for the FBI on the competing mobs and whether the FBI gets anything worthwhile out of this. (Mostly they don't.) Kevin Bacon plays the FBI supervisor who's disgusted by the whole thing. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Jimmy's respectable and politically successful brother Billy, who maintains a distant but friendly relationship with Jimmy but utterly refuses to do any favors solicited by third parties or otherwise get involved on Jimmy's behalf. (Jimmy, who is utterly ruthless, especially in his way of assuring minions that they haven't screwed up just before he has them whacked, isn't foolish enough to ask Billy for anything.) Quite a powerful true-crime theillwe.

Brexit: The Uncivil War (2019)
British tv movie about the Brexit referendum campaign. Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Dominic Cummings, the campaign director for Vote Leave, and the focus is entirely on Cummings and his unorthodox methods of running the campaign. He succeeds by targeting non-voters and by appealing entirely to their emotions rather than making intellectual arguments. It's only after he wins that he begins to realize what an uncontrolled id he has unleashed. This, unlike Amazing Grace, is how you make a movie about politics, and Cumberbatch is set loose to give an impressive performance. First-rate, if the subject interests you.

didn't go

This weekend there was an Asian Food Fest at the San Mateo fairgrounds. I was hoping to attend and have a report here. The fest opened each day at 10 AM, and I know from past experience with such events that if you want to accomplish anything without standing in line for an hour first, you'd better get there early. Furthermore, parking is expensive, but the fairgrounds are a block from a train station, so if I caught the 9:12 AM train from my local station, I'd be there by opening. But that requires getting up early, and my current so-called sleep schedule has me waking up about 9:30. Of course I could set an alarm and be groggy all day, but that's not compatible with attending a festival nor desirable for a voluntary event. So I didn't go.

more distress

So here's another one. A few days ago I lost my datebook, a little paper-and-pencil calendar in which I write all my appointments. (I don't like electronics for this purpose.) It occasionally disappears and usually turns up again within a few days, but this time I wasn't so sure: a lot of things have vanished from obvious spots lately and never turned up again, like a bill on the kitchen table.

So I set out to find a substitute and re-create the calendar. Instead of mail-ordering another, my usual source, because I didn't want to wait, I checked the few remaining office supply stores. I found the ideal substitute in the office section of Walmart, of all things.

At this time, my upcoming appointme3nts are mostly medical and concerts, the latter not starting till next month. I sorted through my tickets, and checked websites of vendors I subscribe to that haven't sent their tickets yet. My main medical provider lists all my upcoming appointments online, but others, such as dentists, don't. The ones I couldn't reach by phone were very local, so I just went in and asked at the counter.

I know I got everything this way, because a day or two ago the original datebook turned up. In a place I had already looked through thoroughly. Elven intervention, both positive and negative, is not out of the question.

sleep

I haven't been posting much, not just because not much is happening, but because I'm not in a position where I can get much writing done, even light writing like this, let alone more serious material.

The problem is that, since my return from my trip, I've been suffering from the worst ever attack of a recurrent problem: inability to fall asleep. Along about 10 pm I start feeling sleepy, but lying down produces nothing. Instead of the peaceful relaxed feeling that has always accompanied incipient sleep for me, I feel agitated and jittery, or I start experiencing what I could call dreams, though I'm still awake at the time. For some reason I can't stand these, and get up immediately, which stops them. By then I'm no longer sleepy, and that lasts maybe half an hour before I start feeling sleepy again, and the cycle begins anew.

This goes on for maybe six hours, then I finally fall asleep and am out for most of the morning. During the rest of the day I find that no position, sitting, lying down, or standing, is wholly comfortable, so I move around in a distracted way.

My doctor has given me a pill to promote sleep, and the first night it worked pretty well, but the second night it's made me feel sleepier without putting me out.

I'm very tired of and annoyed by this.

Music@Menlo: more bites at the apple

Having returned from my trip with a week yet to run on the Menlo Festival, I was able to attend a few more events. I didn't have tickets to any of the mainstage events, long since sold out and I hadn't wanted to plan far enough in advance to get tickets.

But the concerts by the young professionals in their 20s, and by the teenage students, are free and tickets aren't available until 9 AM on the morning of the event, at which point they vanish rapidly. So I got to a few of those.

The highlights of these events were the Saint-Saëns Piano Trio No. 1 in F, Op. 18, one of the first attempts to make chamber music that sounded distinctively French, full of unusual and striking effects; and Mozart's Divertimento for string trio in Eb, K. 563. The pre-concert remarks warned that this was an unusually long work, but I'd never heard it before, despite its size and importance and the fact that it's fully mature Mozart. I had the rare experience during this performance of falling into a state of perfect contentment. The music could have gone on indefinitely as far as I cared. Even my daily aches and pains vanished for the length of the work. I got to speak to violinist Julia Schilz afterwards to thank her for a performance that really touched the soul.

This is the last year the founding artistic directors are in office, but I expect Menlo will continue on its wonted path of emphasizing the classics. Even incoming co-artistic director Dmitri Atapine, who's been known to play Ligeti's Cello Sonata at the Festival, explained why the student concerts stick to the heart of the repertoire. Sometimes the students come in eager to play new and modern works, he says, but then he asks, "How many Haydn quartets have you played?" When the answer is "none," he says they need more grounding in the classics first.

Also in the music biz, Lyric Theatre did another "Gilbert and Sullivan Sing-Off." Following the same format though with different content than last year's, it took the form of a supposed competition between three G&S companies, one which plays the works straight, one which tinkers with them - especially gender-swapping - and one which is just goofy. A lot of unusually Loud singers this time, the most effective of which was Leslie Oesterich in the gender-swapped role of Sir Roderic singing "When the Night Wind Howls." The theme of the show's script was that community theater groups, even of contradicting artistic principles, support each other's endeavors.

Dave Nee, 1953-2026

A pillar of Bay Area sf fandom died last week. From Dave's husband, Scott Marley, via Sarah Goodman and Rich McAllister, "Dave was just walking down the street when he collapsed and could not be revived."

I'm not one to write a proper obituary. But I know from personal knowledge that Dave was one of the three partners of The Other Change of Hobbit bookstore when it opened in 1977. He would have been about 24 at the time. It had grown out of the Portable Bookstore that he and Debbie Notkin and Tom Whitmore would bring to aftermeetings of the Little Men club and sell new books to members, often clearing me out of whatever cash I'd intended to keep for the weekend.

Eventually they scraped together the wherewithal to open a brick-and-mortar bookstore, literally between the brick walls of Berkeley's cavernous under-garage mall off Telegraph Avenue - in the space where the Berkeley Public Library's resale book shop is now - licensed the "Change of Hobbit" name from Sherry Gottlieb, and set to business.

It was quite successful for some years, but eventually both other partners left for other things, leaving Dave and a somewhat stable support staff. The shop changed location at least three times before declining bookstore business led it to dribble to a close.

But in the early days it was gangbusters, especially when the presence of the store made it an obvious site for meetings of the Little Men, which had previously subsisted on members' living rooms. Already a veteran of various local newszines Before My Time, Dave started up a monthly club newsletter, usually two pages, sometimes more, titled The Rhodomagnetic Bulletin, after the club's Rhodomagnetic Digest of distant days of yore. This had not just meeting information and relevant news, but articles, often goofy humor by Mike Ward, and reviews. I wrote my first two published reviews, of Humphrey Carpenter's Tolkien biography and then The Silmarillion, at Dave's request for the Rhodomag.

Dave had one other intellectual interest that I shared to an extent, in classical music. But as with his interest in SF as a bookseller, he pursued this to an extreme extent. Dave was the kind of person who'd collect 60 different recordings of Brahms's First Symphony and be ready to discourse on the differences between all of them. I visited his apartment once and it was packed with shelves upon shelves of LPs. He'd also record operas on tape off the radio on the store's sound system, and my greatest sin was to have turned off the radio once because I had to start the meeting. But we'd occasionally have juicy conversations about whither the San Francisco Symphony and so on.

As you've already gathered, Dave was gay. He was just about the first out gay person I ever met (I was from very straightlaced suburbs, and chose Berkeley for college partly to expand my horizons - it worked, too). I remember thinking, "So he's gay. Interesting. But so what?" and I've been comfortable in the company of gays, lesbians, bis, and trans people ever since. I'm sure that Dave's cool and matter of fact attitude towards life helped my understanding.

groceries gone bananas

We order groceries weekly online via the website of the chain our local store belongs to. We set it for pickup the next morning: I drive in, park in the designated pickup spot, and phone the automated system which informs the staff that I'm there.

When this service first started up, during the pandemic, there were a lot of problems at the pickup level, but they've gotten sorted out, and save for an occasional glitch - fixed promptly and cheerfully on inquiry - that part works fine.

The new problem is with the store's website. If you type a product into the search box, instead of getting a list of matching items, you're getting a blank. The framing is there, but there's no items in the box. This now is happening for category search as well. Of course I've reported this, but who knows if anyone reads that. (The problem is not limited to one browser either.)

This would happen occasionally in the past, but then get fixed within an hour. But while I was gone on my trip, B. reported it had become consistent. The only things she could order were from the past-shopping list in our account, which gives product entries for most (strangely, not all) of what we've bought lately, and since that's most of what we want, it manages.

I just placed the weekly order for the first time since I came back. Sure enough, both item search and category search are broken, and unlikely to fix themselves.

However, I found a workaround. Anyone with a humanistic soul is going to hate this, but it's the store's own fault for not getting the regular search working.

They have an A.I. search. I'm not doing anything fancy; I just type the name of a product into the A.I. search box, and that brings it up so I can order it. I hate A.I., but I feel forced into this, and at least it's not making me have sophisticated intellectual interactions with it.

added travel tips

I've counted myself as an experienced traveler for over 40 years, but even at this point I can still learn tips for how to handle things.

I arrived at the airport for my flight home from Mythcon to find that I had no assigned seat for the flight, and that I'd have to get one from the gate agent, the one who arrives at the gate one hour before departure time. This was initially puzzling, as I'd picked a seat when making the reservation, but the check-in agent explained: the aircraft had been changed to a smaller one, and all the seat assignments erased.

Here's where I learned my lesson. When I'd checked in online the previous day, there'd been an option on the screen to choose a seat. Partly because I was pressed for time at the moment, I'd ignored that, as I already had a seat. I shouldn't have ignored it.

Fortunately I was early at the airport, the gate seating area was not crowded, and I went to stand up at the counter a few minutes before the gate agent arrived, and there was a seat available in the class that I'd requested, so all came out OK.

after Mythcon

Since Mythcon was being held in a slice of territory entirely new to me, I decided to spend a little post-Mythcon time exploring that territory further. What most interested me was the Oklahoma Panhandle. Center of the Dust Bowl long ago (I found Ken Burns's documentary on that subject one of his more successful efforts), it interests me as a geography buff as one of the few places in the US where as many as five states are so close together. It would be fun, I thought, to tag all five of them.

So that's what I did. Monday after the con, I drove northwest through Oklahoma, visited the Washita Battlefield NHS, where Custer massacred the Indians instead of the other way around (captions in the site museum are very sorrowful about the whole thing), cut through a corner of Texas, back into Oklahoma, and finally into Kansas, where I stayed for the night in the improbably-named border town of Liberal.

Tuesday was the real action day. I was in KS-OK-TX-OK-KS-CO-OK-NM-OK-TX-NM. Colorado was the most challenging of these: thirty miles of unpaved road. Generally, though, it was pleasant. The temperature was hot, but the fields of grain - mostly cattle feed - were green and the aspect pleasant. People I stopped and chatted with, at museums and gas station convenience stores, were friendly and agreeable. Only in the very farthest extent of the panhandle did the gently rolling land turn jagged, with buttes and arroyo canyons. It would have been a good spot to take a photo for one of those "what state is this?" competitions; few would have been likely to guess Oklahoma.

In the Oklahoma town of Goodwell, home of the local college, is a museum on the history of the panhandle. This slab of territory has a curious jurisdictional history. Before it was attached to Oklahoma Territory in 1890, it wasn't part of anything, the victim of political machinations and accidental omission back in the 1850s. For forty years it had no US civil authority whatever, and settlers came in at their own risk (not usually staying long, more because of the brutal climate than the lack of any legal right to buy their lands.) Because of this absence, it was known as No Man's Land, and the museum in Goodwell is the No Man's Land Museum.

Nobody was at the museum when I arrived at the 10 am opening time except me and the curator. She asked me, what did I know about No Man's Land, and I answered with a brief version of my understanding of the jurisdictional history. "That's good," she said. "A lot of people come in here expecting a museum about World War I."

Venturing further into New Mexico, I explored two further NPS sites: the Capulin Mountain NM, an extinct cinder cone where you can drive a road that twists up the mountainside as far as the crater; and next day to Salinas Pueblo Missions NM, three abandoned spots in the desert which all have the same thing: fragments of the buildings of a once-thriving pueblo, and the better-preserved remains of a Spanish church built in the 17th century and which flourished for a few years until, partly due to Spanish interference, the pueblo began to collapse.

DT would not be happy with the historical interpretation either here or at Washita, so nobody tell him about it.