Some days I'm up early because of sleeping poorly. Today I'm up early because B. awoke me. The tire pressure light had gone on on her car, and since refilling it isn't in her skill set and she wouldn't have time on the way to work anyway, she needed me to clean out anything I needed from my car before she took that to work. Really, I'm going to have to start taking the cars in to the air station regularly, since tires need reflating long before they get to the warning-light stage.
So, visit to the gas station with free air is on my list of errands for the day, once the big light in the sky turns on. That's not enough of a trip to merit inclusion in my annual list of cities I've stayed in away from home:
Los Angeles, CA
Great Falls, MT
Dillon, MT
Salmon, ID
Missoula, MT
Butte, MT
Hillingdon, England
Oxford, England
Ashland, OR
Atlanta, GA
San Jose, CA
San Diego, CA
Seattle, WA
That comes to two conventions (Mythcon and Worldcon, both with B.), one convention planning session, two trips for concerts or plays (both also with B.), one trip for a museum exhibit (in England!), and two vacations for the heck of it. All my stays were in hotels except for Oxford, where I stayed in a rental house with a fiberglass shark embedded in the roof.
In writings, I co-edited another volume of the journal Tolkien Studies, and contributed a bibliography and part of "The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies" therein. Elsewhere, I wrote a memorial appreciation of the work of Ursula K. Le Guin for Mythlore at the request of the editor, and published an essay on Tolkien's Smith of Wootton Major in a festschrift for Verlyn Flieger.
I had 38 concert reviews professionally published this year, probably a record, not counting two musical articles in the same venues and one CD review.
Kalimac's corner: a journal by DB
Monday, December 31, 2018
Sunday, December 30, 2018
the millennium has arrived
It's just that, for the first time in its history, the comic Pearls Before Swine has produced today a strip that's actually funny, that actually made me laugh. First time a newspaper comic has done that since Dilbert's heyday, and that was a while ago.
Saturday, December 29, 2018
whatever happened to ...?
The link on the blog page read Steve Jobs hired a career juggler to teach programming to developers.
I clicked out of curiosity, not suspecting that I'd be more familiar with the juggler than with Steve Jobs.
But it's true: It was Randy Nelson, "Alyosha" from the Flying Karamazov Brothers.
I first saw the FKB in 1977, when they were playing regularly at the Magic Cellar, a small magic club in San Francisco where my friends would hang out. They were all fans of the Karamazovs, too, and we would make group expeditions whenever they played locally for over a decade. (The full show of which the embedded flaming torch clip is part 8 is a good record of their standard stage show at that date, 1983.)
After Randy dropped out of regular appearances, I understood he'd gotten a job in the computer industry somewhere, but I never heard details or that it came about because Steve Jobs was an FKB fan. It's puzzling to me, because, being in Silicon Valley, I know a lot of people in the industry. I never met Jobs myself, but I know people who knew both him and the Karamazovs, and I don't recall any of them mentioning any of this.
So it's great to hear that distinctive voice again, even though instead of telling knockabout jokes it's discoursing seriously in an embedded clip on intelligent if rather alarming personnel practices. And to wonder how that applies to Pixar of today, for B. and I just watched their latest product, Incredibles 2, and I have to wonder. I love the characters of the Incredibles: all five are distinctive and fascinating people. But why are they embedded in such a dull and predictable plot?
I clicked out of curiosity, not suspecting that I'd be more familiar with the juggler than with Steve Jobs.
But it's true: It was Randy Nelson, "Alyosha" from the Flying Karamazov Brothers.
I first saw the FKB in 1977, when they were playing regularly at the Magic Cellar, a small magic club in San Francisco where my friends would hang out. They were all fans of the Karamazovs, too, and we would make group expeditions whenever they played locally for over a decade. (The full show of which the embedded flaming torch clip is part 8 is a good record of their standard stage show at that date, 1983.)
After Randy dropped out of regular appearances, I understood he'd gotten a job in the computer industry somewhere, but I never heard details or that it came about because Steve Jobs was an FKB fan. It's puzzling to me, because, being in Silicon Valley, I know a lot of people in the industry. I never met Jobs myself, but I know people who knew both him and the Karamazovs, and I don't recall any of them mentioning any of this.
So it's great to hear that distinctive voice again, even though instead of telling knockabout jokes it's discoursing seriously in an embedded clip on intelligent if rather alarming personnel practices. And to wonder how that applies to Pixar of today, for B. and I just watched their latest product, Incredibles 2, and I have to wonder. I love the characters of the Incredibles: all five are distinctive and fascinating people. But why are they embedded in such a dull and predictable plot?
Wednesday, December 26, 2018
post-xmas
So what did we get for Christmas? I'm hard to shop for, so I got a DVD on Churchill and a canister of candied popcorn from B., and tendonitis from an anonymous giver. The cats (by courtesy) got us a few things, including the annual wall calendar. Usually our choice features photos of cats, big cats, or penguins, but 2018's was one of medieval illuminations we found in the DeYoung Museum gift store at the end of the previous year. This year, animal calendars were short on the ground where I looked, and I found one of reading-themed illustrations by Mary Engelbreit. The cover shows a girl perched, I hope not too precariously, in some high tree branches, reading a book whose distinctive jacket design reveals it to be The Hobbit. So, can't miss.
This will probably be the last year that B's family gathers in the old family homestead, as her brother and his wife, who are currently rattling around in it after the departure of all their children, are planning on selling it and moving up to Seattle where their grandchildren are. At least we had a festive gathering, enlivened in particular by the burgeoning family of the niece from Fresno. I asked her eldest, the ten-year-old, about the school play her parents' holiday letter had said she'd be in come spring. What's the play? Treasure Island, she said. I thought rapidly for anything I knew about Treasure Island, a book I've never read, having bounced off it in childhood. (I also bounced off of Hornblower, much to my navy-veteran father's dismay. This was before the fame of Patrick O'Brian, whom I did not bounce off of until a considerably later date.) "The one with the pirates?" I said, and earned compliments for my familiarity with Treasure Island.
As my contribution to dinner I brought the veggies in the form of a rice casserole, but little of it got eaten, so dinner at home for us for the next few days is set.
Back to making hooting noises as I wrap the dashed cold ice-pack around the hand I'm trying not to type with. See you later.
This will probably be the last year that B's family gathers in the old family homestead, as her brother and his wife, who are currently rattling around in it after the departure of all their children, are planning on selling it and moving up to Seattle where their grandchildren are. At least we had a festive gathering, enlivened in particular by the burgeoning family of the niece from Fresno. I asked her eldest, the ten-year-old, about the school play her parents' holiday letter had said she'd be in come spring. What's the play? Treasure Island, she said. I thought rapidly for anything I knew about Treasure Island, a book I've never read, having bounced off it in childhood. (I also bounced off of Hornblower, much to my navy-veteran father's dismay. This was before the fame of Patrick O'Brian, whom I did not bounce off of until a considerably later date.) "The one with the pirates?" I said, and earned compliments for my familiarity with Treasure Island.
As my contribution to dinner I brought the veggies in the form of a rice casserole, but little of it got eaten, so dinner at home for us for the next few days is set.
Back to making hooting noises as I wrap the dashed cold ice-pack around the hand I'm trying not to type with. See you later.
Monday, December 24, 2018
rabbits of the uncanny valley
I've just spent three hours that I'm not going to get back watching the newly-released miniseries adaptation of Watership Down on Netflix. Here we have, once again, a book I cherish adapted into a movie I can't imagine wanting to see again.
Visually, it's disastrous. The computer animation has attempted realism instead of cartoons, but has only achieved that creepy almost-realism known as the Uncanny Valley. Some of the rabbits look like Bunnicula, others resemble stuffed toys. Few of them are distinctive enough to enable me to distinguish groups of Watership Down rabbits from groups of Efrafans, which makes the lengthy confrontation and battle scenes rather confusing. The camera angles seem inordinately fond of rabbit butts. The other animals aren't much better: the farmyard dog looks more like a pig.
As the plot got under way, I began to wonder if it had been adapted by Peter Jackson, as the flaws of his Tolkien adaptations were so lovingly replicated. The rabbits' crossing of the Enbourne is encouraged by the entire Sandleford Owsla at their heels, as so many moments from Tolkien were beefed up in those movies by turning them into superfluous chase scenes. What this tendency becomes when they get to Efrafa is almost indescribable. The plot is entirely rewritten, not to its benefit. The rescue of the does in particular is concocted by throwing out almost everything that was in the book - including the complete disappearance of the boat, which was the best part - taking care to make its replacement as boring, tedious, confusing, and repetitious as possible. It's not quite as awful as Jackson's Hobbit, but it deserves at least a (dis)honorable mention in that category. Some specific scenes - the destruction of the Sandleford warren, Bigwig's final confrontation with Woundwort - work pretty well, but not enough to be cherishable.
Efrafa itself is no longer an ordinary warren at a bridlepath crossing, but rendered into a sinister hellmouth by being placed in the basement of some abandoned human industrial buildings. The rabbits' relationship to human things is peculiar. In the scene of rescuing the hutch rabbits from the farm, the raiding rabbits actually enter the farmhouse, for no apparent reason. Later on, Fiver actually ventures into heavy automotive traffic that's waiting for a bridge opening, for even less reason unless it's as a clumsy foreshadowing of how he (not Hazel) is rescued from the farm cat by the farm girl and driven home in a car. Describing this, he calls her a "little girl". Little? She's twenty times his size! This brings us to the lousy and imperceptive dialogue: droopy emotionalism, noble sentiments from the book rephrased into mush, words that I can't imagine Adams' rabbits using (sometimes turned into a joke by having other rabbits saying they don't understand them), and exact quotes from the book used in ways that show the screenwriters didn't understand it. Most glaring of these is the final moment of the show, as Bluebell (not Dandelion or Vilthuril) starts to tell the young-uns the story of Hazel-rah and his rag-tag band, and quotes exactly, word for word, the opening sentences of the book. Which are all scene-description, not plot, and the use of which utterly ignores Adams' quite brilliant evocation of the mythologizing process, in which real events are reworked, dropped into the cauldron of story, and re-emerge as tales of El-ahrairah. Not that we ever get to hear any tale, except the opening myth, in full, same way that Jackson is reluctant to let us hear full Tolkien poems.
There is asperity and conflict among the heroes in the book, but mostly it's a tale of cooperation among skilled specialists. Which again the movie undercuts, by turning the characters grouchy and uncooperative for most of the movie, and their plans into haphazard whiffle. The resemblance of this to the truly awful parts of J-Frodo and J-Sam's journey to Mordor is quite remarkable.
The one change I thought almost worked was the attempt to beef up the role of females in the plot. Strawberry is changed to a doe, though a chatty and goofy one (I guess a role abandoned by Bluebell when they turned him into Dandelion). Various subplots of romantic pair-bonding fit in reasonably well, though the scenes themselves are often wincingly embarrassing. But it's odd when the hutch rabbit Clover, who in the book is timid and hesitant due to her captive upbringing, not only takes the place of Blackberry in knowing how to open the hutch, but is the one to reach Hazel after he's shot. How dashingly noble of her. It all turns out to be for foreshadowing so that she and Hazel can pair-bond later.
And immediately after being with Hazel, she's captured by scouts from Efrafa. WTF? They're on the far side of Watership Down from Efrafa, but the bad guys are everywhere. In fact, the movie inserts a scene of Woundwort (Ben Kingsley at his most implacable: most of the other voice actors are over-earnest and rather breathless, except for Peter Capaldi as Kehaar who is at his most stage-Scottish) ordering the capture of the heroes as soon as they arrive at Watership Down. He already knows they're there! This is like J-Saruman tracking the Fellowship over Caradhras with his palantir. It reduces the epic scope of the story to the scale of a tabletop role-playing game.
Well, look, I know the adapters can do what they want. But by the same token I can say what I think, which is: ugh.
Visually, it's disastrous. The computer animation has attempted realism instead of cartoons, but has only achieved that creepy almost-realism known as the Uncanny Valley. Some of the rabbits look like Bunnicula, others resemble stuffed toys. Few of them are distinctive enough to enable me to distinguish groups of Watership Down rabbits from groups of Efrafans, which makes the lengthy confrontation and battle scenes rather confusing. The camera angles seem inordinately fond of rabbit butts. The other animals aren't much better: the farmyard dog looks more like a pig.
As the plot got under way, I began to wonder if it had been adapted by Peter Jackson, as the flaws of his Tolkien adaptations were so lovingly replicated. The rabbits' crossing of the Enbourne is encouraged by the entire Sandleford Owsla at their heels, as so many moments from Tolkien were beefed up in those movies by turning them into superfluous chase scenes. What this tendency becomes when they get to Efrafa is almost indescribable. The plot is entirely rewritten, not to its benefit. The rescue of the does in particular is concocted by throwing out almost everything that was in the book - including the complete disappearance of the boat, which was the best part - taking care to make its replacement as boring, tedious, confusing, and repetitious as possible. It's not quite as awful as Jackson's Hobbit, but it deserves at least a (dis)honorable mention in that category. Some specific scenes - the destruction of the Sandleford warren, Bigwig's final confrontation with Woundwort - work pretty well, but not enough to be cherishable.
Efrafa itself is no longer an ordinary warren at a bridlepath crossing, but rendered into a sinister hellmouth by being placed in the basement of some abandoned human industrial buildings. The rabbits' relationship to human things is peculiar. In the scene of rescuing the hutch rabbits from the farm, the raiding rabbits actually enter the farmhouse, for no apparent reason. Later on, Fiver actually ventures into heavy automotive traffic that's waiting for a bridge opening, for even less reason unless it's as a clumsy foreshadowing of how he (not Hazel) is rescued from the farm cat by the farm girl and driven home in a car. Describing this, he calls her a "little girl". Little? She's twenty times his size! This brings us to the lousy and imperceptive dialogue: droopy emotionalism, noble sentiments from the book rephrased into mush, words that I can't imagine Adams' rabbits using (sometimes turned into a joke by having other rabbits saying they don't understand them), and exact quotes from the book used in ways that show the screenwriters didn't understand it. Most glaring of these is the final moment of the show, as Bluebell (not Dandelion or Vilthuril) starts to tell the young-uns the story of Hazel-rah and his rag-tag band, and quotes exactly, word for word, the opening sentences of the book. Which are all scene-description, not plot, and the use of which utterly ignores Adams' quite brilliant evocation of the mythologizing process, in which real events are reworked, dropped into the cauldron of story, and re-emerge as tales of El-ahrairah. Not that we ever get to hear any tale, except the opening myth, in full, same way that Jackson is reluctant to let us hear full Tolkien poems.
There is asperity and conflict among the heroes in the book, but mostly it's a tale of cooperation among skilled specialists. Which again the movie undercuts, by turning the characters grouchy and uncooperative for most of the movie, and their plans into haphazard whiffle. The resemblance of this to the truly awful parts of J-Frodo and J-Sam's journey to Mordor is quite remarkable.
The one change I thought almost worked was the attempt to beef up the role of females in the plot. Strawberry is changed to a doe, though a chatty and goofy one (I guess a role abandoned by Bluebell when they turned him into Dandelion). Various subplots of romantic pair-bonding fit in reasonably well, though the scenes themselves are often wincingly embarrassing. But it's odd when the hutch rabbit Clover, who in the book is timid and hesitant due to her captive upbringing, not only takes the place of Blackberry in knowing how to open the hutch, but is the one to reach Hazel after he's shot. How dashingly noble of her. It all turns out to be for foreshadowing so that she and Hazel can pair-bond later.
And immediately after being with Hazel, she's captured by scouts from Efrafa. WTF? They're on the far side of Watership Down from Efrafa, but the bad guys are everywhere. In fact, the movie inserts a scene of Woundwort (Ben Kingsley at his most implacable: most of the other voice actors are over-earnest and rather breathless, except for Peter Capaldi as Kehaar who is at his most stage-Scottish) ordering the capture of the heroes as soon as they arrive at Watership Down. He already knows they're there! This is like J-Saruman tracking the Fellowship over Caradhras with his palantir. It reduces the epic scope of the story to the scale of a tabletop role-playing game.
Well, look, I know the adapters can do what they want. But by the same token I can say what I think, which is: ugh.
yuletide
So why are we getting articles and follow-up about Stan Freberg's commercial satire "Green Christmas", but nobody's mentioning Tom Lehrer's "Christmas Carol" or Allan Sherman's "Twelve Gifts of Christmas"?
Friday, December 21, 2018
poorhouse in the village
When Google announced that it was acquiring land in the scattered industrial/commercial/residential zone west of downtown San Jose for a future Google village, I looked at the little maps in the paper nervously, because my favorite local restaurant, the Poor House Bistro, is located in a converted house right in the middle of that territory.
Next time I was there, I asked the counter clerk what their status was. "We're safe: we own the building," she said. Apparently they don't own the land, though, or not any more, for here's a report that the land has been sold to Google.
The owner sounds confident about remaining, though: they have a long-term lease. At least, an expiration of 2021 sounds impressively far off, but it's actually only 2 or 3 years.
Will Google keep it around after the redevelopment? If not, I'll have something else to be annoyed with Google about.
Next time I was there, I asked the counter clerk what their status was. "We're safe: we own the building," she said. Apparently they don't own the land, though, or not any more, for here's a report that the land has been sold to Google.
The owner sounds confident about remaining, though: they have a long-term lease. At least, an expiration of 2021 sounds impressively far off, but it's actually only 2 or 3 years.
Will Google keep it around after the redevelopment? If not, I'll have something else to be annoyed with Google about.
idem
1. The last adult has left the building. (You know which building. It has an oval-shaped room in it.) Oh dear.
2. Alex Ross is trying to convince us that György Kurtág is a good composer. No he isn't.
3. Pippin's internal clock, the one he uses to determine when it's time to be fed, runs fast, and one thing he knows: when I'm home, he's to be fed before B. comes home from work. Recently she came home early, and he hadn't been fed, so he expressed his displeasure by thinking outside the box. As B. put it, he'd converted from Catholic to Episscopalian.
4. A few days earlier, I exercised my membership in the Frequent Fallers Club. My innards got disheveled, and are slowly shifting their way back into place.
5. The grocery had only the extra-large size of one of my favorite rice mixes. Never mind, I can use it to fix my contribution to the Christmas celebration with B's family, since I was going to make a rice mix anyway.
6. With a little help from me, the cats bought us several presents this year. They're stacked underneath the tree, waiting for the day. It's coming ...
2. Alex Ross is trying to convince us that György Kurtág is a good composer. No he isn't.
3. Pippin's internal clock, the one he uses to determine when it's time to be fed, runs fast, and one thing he knows: when I'm home, he's to be fed before B. comes home from work. Recently she came home early, and he hadn't been fed, so he expressed his displeasure by thinking outside the box. As B. put it, he'd converted from Catholic to Episscopalian.
4. A few days earlier, I exercised my membership in the Frequent Fallers Club. My innards got disheveled, and are slowly shifting their way back into place.
5. The grocery had only the extra-large size of one of my favorite rice mixes. Never mind, I can use it to fix my contribution to the Christmas celebration with B's family, since I was going to make a rice mix anyway.
6. With a little help from me, the cats bought us several presents this year. They're stacked underneath the tree, waiting for the day. It's coming ...
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
passeport
Having made my plans for my next trip out of the country, even though it's not until next August, I figured it was finally time to replace my lost passport, especially as now is the slow season for passport applications.
Replacing a lost passport is considerably more complex than renewing an expired one. For renewal, you just get a new photo, attach it and a check to the application form, and mail it and the old passport in. (You get the old one back.)
For the lost one, I filled in and submitted a special form online which asks for things like the date and circumstances of the loss. The only place I got stuck was with the question, "Did you file a police report?" I didn't know how to answer this one. I filed a lost item report, yes, but not with the police, but with airport lost-and-found. (The police had in fact directed me to do so, after an airline employee had incorrectly directed me to the police, which only increased the amount of running around I had to do in the airport on the day.) So either a yes or a no would have been misleading.
The questions the online procedure asks you turn out also to fill out an application form for a new passport, which you print out with everything already filled out. But you can't just mail it in, no, you have to take it to a passport application center. You can look these up by zip code. Most of them are post offices, but I was relieved to find one at a local public library. Visiting the library in question, before I could get to the desk to ask, I noticed a sign on an office near the new books display, reading "passport applications." But on that office door was a notice saying you have to make an appointment in advance. Fair enough, and I could have gotten the same info from the library's web site if I'd thought to check that first.
Cross-correlating the info from the Dept of State website, the library's website, and an automated phone call I got from the library the day before my appointment was challenging enough. I learned from the others that I'd need to photocopy my driver's license, but only the phone call revealed that I'd need to photocopy both sides of it, on the same sheet of paper.
I also needed proof of ID, for which it said an expired passport would do, so since I still had the old one I brought that (and a photocopy of the info page) along, but just in case, I also prepared for the other option and hauled out my original birth certificate - the one I'd used to replace my driver's license - again, and photocopied that.
Arriving for my appointment, I found two librarians in the office, who went through all the questions in the application, examined all the supporting documentation, and then had me hold up my hand and swear to the truth of all the contents thereof. Have I ever had to do that before? I remember nothing of the process of my first passport application, but that was in more primitive times.
Then the library sends in the application, not me - something else unclear from the instructions - and now I wait.
Replacing a lost passport is considerably more complex than renewing an expired one. For renewal, you just get a new photo, attach it and a check to the application form, and mail it and the old passport in. (You get the old one back.)
For the lost one, I filled in and submitted a special form online which asks for things like the date and circumstances of the loss. The only place I got stuck was with the question, "Did you file a police report?" I didn't know how to answer this one. I filed a lost item report, yes, but not with the police, but with airport lost-and-found. (The police had in fact directed me to do so, after an airline employee had incorrectly directed me to the police, which only increased the amount of running around I had to do in the airport on the day.) So either a yes or a no would have been misleading.
The questions the online procedure asks you turn out also to fill out an application form for a new passport, which you print out with everything already filled out. But you can't just mail it in, no, you have to take it to a passport application center. You can look these up by zip code. Most of them are post offices, but I was relieved to find one at a local public library. Visiting the library in question, before I could get to the desk to ask, I noticed a sign on an office near the new books display, reading "passport applications." But on that office door was a notice saying you have to make an appointment in advance. Fair enough, and I could have gotten the same info from the library's web site if I'd thought to check that first.
Cross-correlating the info from the Dept of State website, the library's website, and an automated phone call I got from the library the day before my appointment was challenging enough. I learned from the others that I'd need to photocopy my driver's license, but only the phone call revealed that I'd need to photocopy both sides of it, on the same sheet of paper.
I also needed proof of ID, for which it said an expired passport would do, so since I still had the old one I brought that (and a photocopy of the info page) along, but just in case, I also prepared for the other option and hauled out my original birth certificate - the one I'd used to replace my driver's license - again, and photocopied that.
Arriving for my appointment, I found two librarians in the office, who went through all the questions in the application, examined all the supporting documentation, and then had me hold up my hand and swear to the truth of all the contents thereof. Have I ever had to do that before? I remember nothing of the process of my first passport application, but that was in more primitive times.
Then the library sends in the application, not me - something else unclear from the instructions - and now I wait.
Saturday, December 15, 2018
a messiah
Years ago, B. and I used to go to sing-along performances of Handel's Messiah that would crop up at this time of year, particularly the ones at Stanford's Memorial Church, as astoundingly resonant building. She'd sing soprano and, as probably the best non-professional soprano there, would attract all the other nearby sopranos as someone to follow, while I'd do what I could as a bass.
But we hadn't been for some years - probably since before I started blogging, since I can't find any earlier references to this - until this year, when due to the shift in her performing activities B. decided to join the Stanford play-along orchestra as a second violinist. (Most violinists want to be firsts, which leaves more room for the few who don't.) We parked at the student union, which while behind the church is actually a shorter walk than the obvious lots in front of it, and though we arrived before opening time, B. still only managed to grab a seat in the last stand of violins. I wandered separately down front, in hopes of being close enough to the orchestra to find B. when it was over, and found a tall mustached man standing in an empty row by the aisle holding up a sign reading "BASS", obviously looking to form a phalanx.
Just what I need, I thought, as I approached him and said, "I see you're wanting basses. I'm one, too."
He stuck out his hand. "My name's David."
"I'm one, too."
It was hard to tell how many we actually wound up with in the crowds and chaos of a full house, but there must have been at least a dozen occupying one end of three consecutive rows. I was next to a man with a very strong voice, which put me in a position of following him, useful in parts I didn't really know but a bit of a hindrance when I was more comfortable with the music. However, he left before Steve Sano, the conductor, announced we'd encore the Hallelujah Chorus, so I was able to do what I'd hoped, which was hook my voice up with a more general welter of bass sound and belt up.
I hadn't rehearsed any for this, but I'd worked on it hard enough back in the day that a lot of things came flooding back. I'm not a sight-reading singer, but have to learn by ear, but once I have learned a line by ear the score is my prompt-book and life-line and I wouldn't be without it.
We did the entirety of part one, minus a few arhythmic recitatives, plus a few highlights from later on: "The Trumpet Shall Sound," a bass aria I don't recall having done before; the final "Worthy Is the Lamb" and grand "Amen"; and of course the Hallelujah Chorus. Pretty festive show, and we all walked out warm into the night.
But we hadn't been for some years - probably since before I started blogging, since I can't find any earlier references to this - until this year, when due to the shift in her performing activities B. decided to join the Stanford play-along orchestra as a second violinist. (Most violinists want to be firsts, which leaves more room for the few who don't.) We parked at the student union, which while behind the church is actually a shorter walk than the obvious lots in front of it, and though we arrived before opening time, B. still only managed to grab a seat in the last stand of violins. I wandered separately down front, in hopes of being close enough to the orchestra to find B. when it was over, and found a tall mustached man standing in an empty row by the aisle holding up a sign reading "BASS", obviously looking to form a phalanx.
Just what I need, I thought, as I approached him and said, "I see you're wanting basses. I'm one, too."
He stuck out his hand. "My name's David."
"I'm one, too."
It was hard to tell how many we actually wound up with in the crowds and chaos of a full house, but there must have been at least a dozen occupying one end of three consecutive rows. I was next to a man with a very strong voice, which put me in a position of following him, useful in parts I didn't really know but a bit of a hindrance when I was more comfortable with the music. However, he left before Steve Sano, the conductor, announced we'd encore the Hallelujah Chorus, so I was able to do what I'd hoped, which was hook my voice up with a more general welter of bass sound and belt up.
I hadn't rehearsed any for this, but I'd worked on it hard enough back in the day that a lot of things came flooding back. I'm not a sight-reading singer, but have to learn by ear, but once I have learned a line by ear the score is my prompt-book and life-line and I wouldn't be without it.
We did the entirety of part one, minus a few arhythmic recitatives, plus a few highlights from later on: "The Trumpet Shall Sound," a bass aria I don't recall having done before; the final "Worthy Is the Lamb" and grand "Amen"; and of course the Hallelujah Chorus. Pretty festive show, and we all walked out warm into the night.
Friday, December 14, 2018
the great misreadings of all time
Some years ago I wrote about one of these: a misreading of C.S. Lewis, expressing dismay at somebody else's tastes, as an expression of his own tastes.
The worst misreading of Tolkien, not involving overlaying the Jackson movies on the books, that I ever saw was in a critical book I shall not name, for some of its contents were better than this. The critic had read the scene at the Mirror of Galadriel that includes this paragraph:
"She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illuminated her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful. Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad."
And came to this mind-boggling conclusion:
"Frodo never meant to destroy the Ring. His offer to give it to Galadriel, for example, is - as she acutely recognizes - motivated by revenge and an enactment of his power as Ringbearer over her, leaving her 'shrunken'."
How is it possible to read this scene, seeing anything other than the words "ring" and "shrunken", and come to such a warped conclusion? As every other critic who's ever read this scene recognizes, what shrinks Galadriel is returning to normal after rejecting the frightening power she would carry if she wielded the Ring. Frodo has no power as Ringbearer. He offers her the Ring not to take revenge on anything - where does one get such an idea? - nor even to tempt her, though tempt her is what it does, but out of a sincere wish to see its evil safely contained. What he says is: "You are wise and fearless and fair, Lady Galadriel. I will give you the One Ring, if you ask for it. It is too great a matter for me." Is that not a desire to be relieved of a terrible burden and to give it to more effective hands? How can one miss this? And what Galadriel replies is that it doesn't work that way. Read her last comment to Sam that closes the chapter.
That comes to mind because I just came across another case of a reader who must have skimmed through the book and completely missed what's going on. The book this time was Watership Down, and the topic was a blog post comparing Richard Adams' classic with a forgotten earlier novel uncannily resembling it, The Wind Protect You by Pat Murphy.* The poster explains, "The rabbits in Murphy’s book have the instincts and behaviours of real rabbits in the wild, clearly based on keen observation of, or reading about, how the creatures actually live, but they also have speech and imaginative thought. Watership Down has the same distinctive perspective."
So far so good, but among the specific similarities cited was this one:
"Another striking, and very specific, similarity is that in Murphy’s book the rabbits are assisted by deer, just as the doe Hyzthenlay helps the rabbits in Adams’ book."
I blinked at this. I could not at first figure out what this sentence meant. What does Hyzenthlay have to do with ...? Then it hit me. The writer thinks that when Adams uses the word "doe", he's referring to deer.
Well, while the OED's first definition of "doe" is a female deer, the second definition is a female hare or rabbit. But even if you didn't know that second definition - I sure didn't when I first read Watership Down - how is it possible to read the book and not pick that up?
I'm trying to imagine going through Watership Down under the impression that the does are deer. There's a whole bunch of deer living underground in a hidden rabbit warren. Hazel and his band - you did catch that, despite the name, Hazel is male, or did you? - make the effortful journey all the way to Efrafa to rescue some of these trapped deer and escort them up to the downs - to do what? Rabbits, mate with deer? Well, as B. pointed out when I told her about this, it is a fantasy.
Or wait - Adams calls the male rabbits "bucks". Maybe they're deer also. Maybe the whole book is about deer. Deer who dig holes in the ground, live underneath there, can be carried in a human's lap, and are afraid of housecats.
That's not the post's only misreading of WD - Bigwig is hardly "an experienced old veteran" when he joins the band - but I tried to be brief and restrained in the comment I left there.
Doe, a deer, a female deer
Ray, the name of Bradbury
Mi, a name, half of Mimi
Fa, you sing in "Deck the Halls" ...
- B. with D.'s help
*An English male writer, short for Patrick, not to be confused with the American female writer of the same nickname, short for Patrice, who hadn't been born yet when this was published in 1946.
The worst misreading of Tolkien, not involving overlaying the Jackson movies on the books, that I ever saw was in a critical book I shall not name, for some of its contents were better than this. The critic had read the scene at the Mirror of Galadriel that includes this paragraph:
"She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illuminated her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful. Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad."
And came to this mind-boggling conclusion:
"Frodo never meant to destroy the Ring. His offer to give it to Galadriel, for example, is - as she acutely recognizes - motivated by revenge and an enactment of his power as Ringbearer over her, leaving her 'shrunken'."
How is it possible to read this scene, seeing anything other than the words "ring" and "shrunken", and come to such a warped conclusion? As every other critic who's ever read this scene recognizes, what shrinks Galadriel is returning to normal after rejecting the frightening power she would carry if she wielded the Ring. Frodo has no power as Ringbearer. He offers her the Ring not to take revenge on anything - where does one get such an idea? - nor even to tempt her, though tempt her is what it does, but out of a sincere wish to see its evil safely contained. What he says is: "You are wise and fearless and fair, Lady Galadriel. I will give you the One Ring, if you ask for it. It is too great a matter for me." Is that not a desire to be relieved of a terrible burden and to give it to more effective hands? How can one miss this? And what Galadriel replies is that it doesn't work that way. Read her last comment to Sam that closes the chapter.
That comes to mind because I just came across another case of a reader who must have skimmed through the book and completely missed what's going on. The book this time was Watership Down, and the topic was a blog post comparing Richard Adams' classic with a forgotten earlier novel uncannily resembling it, The Wind Protect You by Pat Murphy.* The poster explains, "The rabbits in Murphy’s book have the instincts and behaviours of real rabbits in the wild, clearly based on keen observation of, or reading about, how the creatures actually live, but they also have speech and imaginative thought. Watership Down has the same distinctive perspective."
So far so good, but among the specific similarities cited was this one:
"Another striking, and very specific, similarity is that in Murphy’s book the rabbits are assisted by deer, just as the doe Hyzthenlay helps the rabbits in Adams’ book."
I blinked at this. I could not at first figure out what this sentence meant. What does Hyzenthlay have to do with ...? Then it hit me. The writer thinks that when Adams uses the word "doe", he's referring to deer.
Well, while the OED's first definition of "doe" is a female deer, the second definition is a female hare or rabbit. But even if you didn't know that second definition - I sure didn't when I first read Watership Down - how is it possible to read the book and not pick that up?
I'm trying to imagine going through Watership Down under the impression that the does are deer. There's a whole bunch of deer living underground in a hidden rabbit warren. Hazel and his band - you did catch that, despite the name, Hazel is male, or did you? - make the effortful journey all the way to Efrafa to rescue some of these trapped deer and escort them up to the downs - to do what? Rabbits, mate with deer? Well, as B. pointed out when I told her about this, it is a fantasy.
Or wait - Adams calls the male rabbits "bucks". Maybe they're deer also. Maybe the whole book is about deer. Deer who dig holes in the ground, live underneath there, can be carried in a human's lap, and are afraid of housecats.
That's not the post's only misreading of WD - Bigwig is hardly "an experienced old veteran" when he joins the band - but I tried to be brief and restrained in the comment I left there.
Doe, a deer, a female deer
Ray, the name of Bradbury
Mi, a name, half of Mimi
Fa, you sing in "Deck the Halls" ...
- B. with D.'s help
*An English male writer, short for Patrick, not to be confused with the American female writer of the same nickname, short for Patrice, who hadn't been born yet when this was published in 1946.
Thursday, December 13, 2018
ecce homines, pars I
A series of modestly-sized uniform-formatted books on the American Presidents, edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., began to appear from Times Books in 2002. Soon I began seeing these compact but conspicuous 8.5-inch high volumes in public libraries.
Six volumes, not in chronological order, came out that first year, and they continued appearing in quantity for about ten years. Schlesinger had died in 2007, but Sean Wilentz, who'd written the Andrew Jackson volume, took over as editor, and the series continued. Most of the authors were, like the two editors, distinguished historians, but a few journalists and actual political figures (George McGovern on Lincoln, Gary Hart on Monroe, John Dean on Harding) were salted in.
By 2012 only six volumes remained to get the series finished up through its original stopping point of George W. Bush, and these trickled in over the next several years. The final volume, Jeffrey Rosen on William H. Taft, appeared this year. (Whether they're commissioning a volume on Obama is not revealed on the series website; considering that it took 16 years to produce one on William H. Taft, we may have to wait a while.)
Over the years I've read several of the volumes, mostly on obscurer presidents, and found them ranging from the outstandingly insightful to the ploddingly perfunctory. I've decided to celebrate the completion of the series by reading the whole batch, in order of the presidencies they cover, and review them here, three at a time. Despite their brevity, this may take a while, but there's no better time to get started.
So here are the first three, covering the presidencies of 1789-1809. None I'd read before. Their treatment of their subjects is uniform, but as best I recall not all the others followed the same format. (Remember that these were not the first volumes to be published, but they did all appear in the series' 2nd or 3rd year.) Each covers its subject's presidency in fair chronological detail, focusing on the president's actions, but otherwise eschews being a complete biography in favor of discussing its subject's character in a sketchily biographical format. Thus the book on Washington says nothing about his military activities during the Revolution, only giving a brief coverage of his relationship with his subordinates for the light it shows on his character; and the book on Jefferson says little about the Declaration, and only brings up Sally Hemings in the context of the scandal over her, which didn't erupt until his re-election campaign in 1804.
It's in the depiction of the presidents' personal characters that the books differ. James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn on George Washington depict him as a man obsessed throughout life with his personal dignity and integrity. He was determined to find the one most proper course of action in any situation and then follow it. This served him excellently in his first term, creating the position of president as one of honor and respect, but never being tempted to declare himself a monarch (which in an unsettled environment, devoid of precedent, he could have done). But in his second term, as political faultlines began to widen among his advisers, Washington became a little lost. There was no longer one correct course of action, only one party or another to adhere to, and hence no place for him to go. He wound up becoming a Federalist, but more by default, or because Hamilton was still around while Jefferson had resigned, not by conscious intent.
John Patrick Diggins on John Adams is a portrait of a political philosopher. There's a whole chapter specifically on Adams' writings in that topic. Diggins warns that these books are hard going, and so is his chapter. Elsewhere, Diggins is clearer in his portrayal. Adams as a caustic conservative was convinced that, while you could eradicate a formal aristocracy in society, the people would always erect one based on wealth or prestige or some other factor. He held that government needed to be constructed to respond to this tendency. But his warning that an aristocracy you will always have with you was almost universally taken as a desire to promote that aristocracy, and so (Diggins says) Adams received unfair calumny. And the Alien and Sedition Acts weren't really his fault, yeah sure.
Diggins has trouble reconciling some of Adams' actions as president with his principles. Joyce Appleby on Thomas Jefferson doesn't even try. Her Jefferson is a man of contradictions - liberty-loving slave-owner is only the most obvious one - and she does a pretty good job of saying you just have to take him as he is. Because of these contradictions, he becomes something of a slippery character, and while Appleby promises to explain why Jefferson's big-government actions didn't violate his small-government principles, she never gets around to it. It's just another contradiction: Jefferson the peaceful farmer also the first nation-building president in Appleby's view, taking vigorous action to promote western settlement. (This of course involved exterminating the natives in whom he had a passionate anthropological interest: another contradiction.)
Six volumes, not in chronological order, came out that first year, and they continued appearing in quantity for about ten years. Schlesinger had died in 2007, but Sean Wilentz, who'd written the Andrew Jackson volume, took over as editor, and the series continued. Most of the authors were, like the two editors, distinguished historians, but a few journalists and actual political figures (George McGovern on Lincoln, Gary Hart on Monroe, John Dean on Harding) were salted in.
By 2012 only six volumes remained to get the series finished up through its original stopping point of George W. Bush, and these trickled in over the next several years. The final volume, Jeffrey Rosen on William H. Taft, appeared this year. (Whether they're commissioning a volume on Obama is not revealed on the series website; considering that it took 16 years to produce one on William H. Taft, we may have to wait a while.)
Over the years I've read several of the volumes, mostly on obscurer presidents, and found them ranging from the outstandingly insightful to the ploddingly perfunctory. I've decided to celebrate the completion of the series by reading the whole batch, in order of the presidencies they cover, and review them here, three at a time. Despite their brevity, this may take a while, but there's no better time to get started.
So here are the first three, covering the presidencies of 1789-1809. None I'd read before. Their treatment of their subjects is uniform, but as best I recall not all the others followed the same format. (Remember that these were not the first volumes to be published, but they did all appear in the series' 2nd or 3rd year.) Each covers its subject's presidency in fair chronological detail, focusing on the president's actions, but otherwise eschews being a complete biography in favor of discussing its subject's character in a sketchily biographical format. Thus the book on Washington says nothing about his military activities during the Revolution, only giving a brief coverage of his relationship with his subordinates for the light it shows on his character; and the book on Jefferson says little about the Declaration, and only brings up Sally Hemings in the context of the scandal over her, which didn't erupt until his re-election campaign in 1804.
It's in the depiction of the presidents' personal characters that the books differ. James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn on George Washington depict him as a man obsessed throughout life with his personal dignity and integrity. He was determined to find the one most proper course of action in any situation and then follow it. This served him excellently in his first term, creating the position of president as one of honor and respect, but never being tempted to declare himself a monarch (which in an unsettled environment, devoid of precedent, he could have done). But in his second term, as political faultlines began to widen among his advisers, Washington became a little lost. There was no longer one correct course of action, only one party or another to adhere to, and hence no place for him to go. He wound up becoming a Federalist, but more by default, or because Hamilton was still around while Jefferson had resigned, not by conscious intent.
John Patrick Diggins on John Adams is a portrait of a political philosopher. There's a whole chapter specifically on Adams' writings in that topic. Diggins warns that these books are hard going, and so is his chapter. Elsewhere, Diggins is clearer in his portrayal. Adams as a caustic conservative was convinced that, while you could eradicate a formal aristocracy in society, the people would always erect one based on wealth or prestige or some other factor. He held that government needed to be constructed to respond to this tendency. But his warning that an aristocracy you will always have with you was almost universally taken as a desire to promote that aristocracy, and so (Diggins says) Adams received unfair calumny. And the Alien and Sedition Acts weren't really his fault, yeah sure.
Diggins has trouble reconciling some of Adams' actions as president with his principles. Joyce Appleby on Thomas Jefferson doesn't even try. Her Jefferson is a man of contradictions - liberty-loving slave-owner is only the most obvious one - and she does a pretty good job of saying you just have to take him as he is. Because of these contradictions, he becomes something of a slippery character, and while Appleby promises to explain why Jefferson's big-government actions didn't violate his small-government principles, she never gets around to it. It's just another contradiction: Jefferson the peaceful farmer also the first nation-building president in Appleby's view, taking vigorous action to promote western settlement. (This of course involved exterminating the natives in whom he had a passionate anthropological interest: another contradiction.)
Tuesday, December 11, 2018
concert review: Symphony Silicon Valley
Wow, what a lot of roughage in my concert of the two Big M's, Mozart and Mendelssohn. For some reason I found the review coming in short, and stuck some expository material in. I wonder if I'll get away with calling the "Scottish" the most epic symphony between Beethoven/Schubert and Brahms/Raff. There's another obvious candidate, but I could still make the argument that Mendelssohn carries the prize.
Monday, December 10, 2018
hoc tempore
Hanukkah is over already, but it's still Advent and B. is lighting her candles and has decorated the Christmas tree, underneath which cats perch and occasionally munch on the artificial needles. She's also playing the Roches' Christmas carol CD while doing the dishes after dinner. (I cook. She does the dishes.) So it's the season.
It also means it was the season for the book discussion group's annual Reading and Eating Meeting, last Saturday afternoon. This wilted, rather like Charlie Brown's Christmas tree. There were only 6 of us there: us, the hostesses, and half the world's supply of authorized Elves. Nobody else was up to going, I guess. I brought along some home-cooked chopped chicken in an apple cider sauce I'd found in Raley's deli department, which was a big hit among the few who got to eat it; and when E. pulled out Always Coming Home to read from, I kicked myself that I'd forgotten to bring along one of Le Guin's late poetry collections to read from that, so I borrowed the book and read "The Third Child's Story" in its place. People claim that ACH is a utopia, but it isn't, and this piece is the clearest proof that not everyone is happy there.
Couldn't stay too long, as I had to get to work: to a concert whose review should be up tomorrow. Meantime, more in the season, the previous weekend I'd gotten to a choral concert titled "An English Christmas". It's sometimes hard to review these collections of numerous short pieces, but the review came out all right.
It also means it was the season for the book discussion group's annual Reading and Eating Meeting, last Saturday afternoon. This wilted, rather like Charlie Brown's Christmas tree. There were only 6 of us there: us, the hostesses, and half the world's supply of authorized Elves. Nobody else was up to going, I guess. I brought along some home-cooked chopped chicken in an apple cider sauce I'd found in Raley's deli department, which was a big hit among the few who got to eat it; and when E. pulled out Always Coming Home to read from, I kicked myself that I'd forgotten to bring along one of Le Guin's late poetry collections to read from that, so I borrowed the book and read "The Third Child's Story" in its place. People claim that ACH is a utopia, but it isn't, and this piece is the clearest proof that not everyone is happy there.
Couldn't stay too long, as I had to get to work: to a concert whose review should be up tomorrow. Meantime, more in the season, the previous weekend I'd gotten to a choral concert titled "An English Christmas". It's sometimes hard to review these collections of numerous short pieces, but the review came out all right.
Sunday, December 9, 2018
concert review: Telegraph Quartet
It was a quiet Sunday afternoon in the City, and not very many had come to Herbst Theatre to hear the Telegraph String Quartet. Even the President of San Francisco Performances, who usually says a little to introduce each concert, wasn't there.
Two composers on the program were Eastern European Jews whose lives were upended by 20th century totalitarianism. This biographical imperative seems to have helped drive their rise from obscurity to some note in the classical field in the last couple of decades. They still have some ways to go, so I was glad to hear them today.
Erwin Schulhoff was Czech, and was probably the most distinguished composer to be an actual casualty of the Nazi Holocaust. But he'd been around for a while, and wrote his Five Pieces in 1923. They're a variety of dances, from waltz to tango to tarantella. The music is harsh and brittle, perfect fare for the Telegraph, sounding a bit like Bartók or a less fragmented Webern, but it also contained a fair share of rhythm and bounce.
Mieczyslaw Weinberg was Polish, and fled permanently to Russia when the Wehrmacht hit town. There he became known as Моисей Вайнберг, which transliterates as Moisei Vainberg or Vaynberg, so the form of his name is variable, but Mieczyslaw Weinberg seems to be becoming the preferred form. He also got caught up and nearly executed in the Doctors' Plot, which was one of Stalin's paranoid fantasies. He survived in part due to the sponsorship of his great mentor, Dmitri Shostakovich.
Not surprisingly, his music can sound a lot like his mentor's, and Weinberg's String Quartet No. 6 in E Minor, Op. 35 (1946) turns out to be fabulously good in a Shostakovich mode. It has dark-toned, slowish outer movements and a central Adagio filled with chromatic but intensely lyrical melodies for various solo instruments, frequently accompanied by emphatic pizzicato notes from the others. They're separated by a brief and vehement scherzo (in two nearly indistinguishable parts) and a muted and occasionally squirrely intermezzo. This really is a great quartet in the way that I like difficult modern music to sound.
Also on the program, one 19th-century composer, Antonín Dvořák. (Connection: the elderly Dvořák endorsed the very young Schulhoff to the Prague Conservatory.) The problem is that Dvořák's Op. 51 is relaxed and genial, and I'd have said the Telegraph Quartet doesn't do relaxed and genial. But unlike Kronos, which gave up on music that didn't fit their comfort zone, Telegraph is learning how to play it. This came out quite nicely, rather on the impassioned side and all the spikes sticking out clearly, but not so much as to distort the composition.
I've heard the Telegraph several times in the last couple of years, and they get better literally every time I hear them.
Two composers on the program were Eastern European Jews whose lives were upended by 20th century totalitarianism. This biographical imperative seems to have helped drive their rise from obscurity to some note in the classical field in the last couple of decades. They still have some ways to go, so I was glad to hear them today.
Erwin Schulhoff was Czech, and was probably the most distinguished composer to be an actual casualty of the Nazi Holocaust. But he'd been around for a while, and wrote his Five Pieces in 1923. They're a variety of dances, from waltz to tango to tarantella. The music is harsh and brittle, perfect fare for the Telegraph, sounding a bit like Bartók or a less fragmented Webern, but it also contained a fair share of rhythm and bounce.
Mieczyslaw Weinberg was Polish, and fled permanently to Russia when the Wehrmacht hit town. There he became known as Моисей Вайнберг, which transliterates as Moisei Vainberg or Vaynberg, so the form of his name is variable, but Mieczyslaw Weinberg seems to be becoming the preferred form. He also got caught up and nearly executed in the Doctors' Plot, which was one of Stalin's paranoid fantasies. He survived in part due to the sponsorship of his great mentor, Dmitri Shostakovich.
Not surprisingly, his music can sound a lot like his mentor's, and Weinberg's String Quartet No. 6 in E Minor, Op. 35 (1946) turns out to be fabulously good in a Shostakovich mode. It has dark-toned, slowish outer movements and a central Adagio filled with chromatic but intensely lyrical melodies for various solo instruments, frequently accompanied by emphatic pizzicato notes from the others. They're separated by a brief and vehement scherzo (in two nearly indistinguishable parts) and a muted and occasionally squirrely intermezzo. This really is a great quartet in the way that I like difficult modern music to sound.
Also on the program, one 19th-century composer, Antonín Dvořák. (Connection: the elderly Dvořák endorsed the very young Schulhoff to the Prague Conservatory.) The problem is that Dvořák's Op. 51 is relaxed and genial, and I'd have said the Telegraph Quartet doesn't do relaxed and genial. But unlike Kronos, which gave up on music that didn't fit their comfort zone, Telegraph is learning how to play it. This came out quite nicely, rather on the impassioned side and all the spikes sticking out clearly, but not so much as to distort the composition.
I've heard the Telegraph several times in the last couple of years, and they get better literally every time I hear them.
Saturday, December 8, 2018
apocalypsis
I recently made my first contribution to ISFDB, and I have to say, it was a lot more painless than working for Wikipedia.
I'd happened out of passing curiosity to look up Damon Knight's critical-essay series, Monad, and discovered to my surprise that the third and last issue had no contents information. Well, I have all three issues, having subscribed at the time, so I registered myself with the site, used the previous issues' entries as a template, and entered the data, following the help entry's suggestion of adding a note reading "Working from book in hand."
Then I submitted it to the moderation queue, and within 24 hours it was up. Usually when I submit something useful to Wikipedia, within 24 hours some asshat editor has deleted it.
Also on ISFDB, when I egoscanned myself, I discovered, more to my horror than any other emotion, that somebody had entered the fanzine issue that my high-school SF club issued in my senior year. Now I have to decide whether to augment this info: correct the title, which they got wrong (it was deliberately confusing), link the co-editor to the entry under which he went on to write professionally under a different form of his name [he reads this: what do you think?], and - assuming I can dig out my copies from storage - enter the previous (which had a different title) and subsequent issues which they don't know about.
I'd happened out of passing curiosity to look up Damon Knight's critical-essay series, Monad, and discovered to my surprise that the third and last issue had no contents information. Well, I have all three issues, having subscribed at the time, so I registered myself with the site, used the previous issues' entries as a template, and entered the data, following the help entry's suggestion of adding a note reading "Working from book in hand."
Then I submitted it to the moderation queue, and within 24 hours it was up. Usually when I submit something useful to Wikipedia, within 24 hours some asshat editor has deleted it.
Also on ISFDB, when I egoscanned myself, I discovered, more to my horror than any other emotion, that somebody had entered the fanzine issue that my high-school SF club issued in my senior year. Now I have to decide whether to augment this info: correct the title, which they got wrong (it was deliberately confusing), link the co-editor to the entry under which he went on to write professionally under a different form of his name [he reads this: what do you think?], and - assuming I can dig out my copies from storage - enter the previous (which had a different title) and subsequent issues which they don't know about.
Friday, December 7, 2018
cattus agonistes
The cats went to the vet today for their annual checkup et al (shots, pedicure). This was the usual agony for them, strange lady feeling their kidneys and commenting on the state of their bowels, how humiliating.
We'd put the cat carriers out a couple days beforehand, to allow the fright at their appearance (it's a magic trick: how to make Pippin disappear) to die down before the actual event.
This morning I went through the normal routine, feeding Maia in the upstairs bathroom, closing the door on her as I sometimes do to keep her from wandering down and scarfing Pippin's food; then going downstairs to feed an eager Pippin. But something spooked him that overwhelmed his usually intense desire to eat. He dashed off and ran upstairs.
But instead of the closet he usually goes to ground in, he was faced at the top landing by a phalanx of closed bedroom and bathroom doors. With the despairing look of a contestant on Let's Make a Deal who's facing a refusal by Monty Hall to open anything, he just sat there on the landing, enabling B. to scoop him up and deposit him in the carrier. He's learned over the years that resistance is useless, the autocracy will overcome.
Then B. squeezed into the bathroom with the other carrier while I waited outside with a poised laundry basket in case Maia tried to make a break for it. Then through the closed door I heard a couple loud cat wails and a thump, followed by the emergence of a victorious B.
It was still half an hour before time to leave for the vet - that's what you get for giving us trouble, cats - so I stacked the carriers in the living room, giving Maia a chance to teach the usually silent Pippin how to wail in despair, and B. took a photo and posted it on Facebook with the title "Jailhouse blues."
After it was all over and we came home, they dashed off in all directions when we let them out. When I came down to fix dinner, I found them in the living room embodying the style of English place names, Maia-under-Tree (I'd set up the Christmas tree earlier in the afternoon) and Pippin-on-the-Couch, both giving me a very wary eye. But they ate their dinner OK, and Maia wanted her usual adoration afterwards.
We'd put the cat carriers out a couple days beforehand, to allow the fright at their appearance (it's a magic trick: how to make Pippin disappear) to die down before the actual event.
This morning I went through the normal routine, feeding Maia in the upstairs bathroom, closing the door on her as I sometimes do to keep her from wandering down and scarfing Pippin's food; then going downstairs to feed an eager Pippin. But something spooked him that overwhelmed his usually intense desire to eat. He dashed off and ran upstairs.
But instead of the closet he usually goes to ground in, he was faced at the top landing by a phalanx of closed bedroom and bathroom doors. With the despairing look of a contestant on Let's Make a Deal who's facing a refusal by Monty Hall to open anything, he just sat there on the landing, enabling B. to scoop him up and deposit him in the carrier. He's learned over the years that resistance is useless, the autocracy will overcome.
Then B. squeezed into the bathroom with the other carrier while I waited outside with a poised laundry basket in case Maia tried to make a break for it. Then through the closed door I heard a couple loud cat wails and a thump, followed by the emergence of a victorious B.
It was still half an hour before time to leave for the vet - that's what you get for giving us trouble, cats - so I stacked the carriers in the living room, giving Maia a chance to teach the usually silent Pippin how to wail in despair, and B. took a photo and posted it on Facebook with the title "Jailhouse blues."
After it was all over and we came home, they dashed off in all directions when we let them out. When I came down to fix dinner, I found them in the living room embodying the style of English place names, Maia-under-Tree (I'd set up the Christmas tree earlier in the afternoon) and Pippin-on-the-Couch, both giving me a very wary eye. But they ate their dinner OK, and Maia wanted her usual adoration afterwards.
Wednesday, December 5, 2018
que?
So a while ago, leaving plenty of time to find a successor, Michael Tilson Thomas announced his retirement from the music directorship of the San Francisco Symphony, as of the end of next season. That would be about a year and a half from now.
So today, still long before the change is due, they announced the next music director. And it will be:
Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Who retired from the Los Angeles Philharmonic a decade ago because he wanted to be relieved of the extra-conductorial burdens of being a music director (fund-raising, administration, community schmoozing) so he could spend more time composing.
So why did he change his mind? According to SFCV's news announcement, it was too juicy a job to refuse.
Well, okay. But I still don't quite get it.
But while this puzzles me more than excites me, it will, I think, be good for SFS on a strategic level.
For one thing, one of MTT's few flaws is that, while he talked a good new-music game, he rarely delivered. Salonen in LA delivered (and his successor there, Dudamel, is keeping it up). We can count on much more varied programming once Salonen arrives. How good a thing that will be depends on what he programs, and that will be affected by factors we can't yet measure.
Then there's the matter of the conductor's ability to set the orchestra's tone, which is a measure of his heft or subjective weight. When MTT arrived, he was 50 years old, a mid-career conductor who was respected and liked but did not, at the time, have a big reputation. But he was coming to an orchestra that was solidly built but didn't have much flash. He was able to put the flash, the extra degree of energy and enthusiasm, in. And after staying for 25 years, longer than any of his predecessors even in what had been a fairly stable job, he has built up a towering reputation and, turning 74 this month, has become one of the leading senior conductors of his time and, more to the point, has remade SFS entirely in his image.
Coming after such a figure is a challenge in itself. ("You replace Dr. Franklin?" asked the Parisians. "I succeed Dr. Franklin," replied Thomas Jefferson. "No-one can replace him.") Salonen, who's 60 and will have just turned 62 when he takes over, and with his successful couple of decades at LA behind him, is enough of a senior and powerful figure that he won't be overhung by MTT's shadow and can proceed on his own pace. But at the same time he's old enough that he probably won't stay more than a decade or so. Meaning that he'll have time to accomplish what he wants without becoming in turn a giant shadow. Like Herbert Blomstedt, whose decade as SFS music director roughly coincided with his sixties, he can leave a solid foundation for a younger successor to build upon after him. Who came after Blomstedt? MTT. So we go on ...
So today, still long before the change is due, they announced the next music director. And it will be:
Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Who retired from the Los Angeles Philharmonic a decade ago because he wanted to be relieved of the extra-conductorial burdens of being a music director (fund-raising, administration, community schmoozing) so he could spend more time composing.
So why did he change his mind? According to SFCV's news announcement, it was too juicy a job to refuse.
Well, okay. But I still don't quite get it.
But while this puzzles me more than excites me, it will, I think, be good for SFS on a strategic level.
For one thing, one of MTT's few flaws is that, while he talked a good new-music game, he rarely delivered. Salonen in LA delivered (and his successor there, Dudamel, is keeping it up). We can count on much more varied programming once Salonen arrives. How good a thing that will be depends on what he programs, and that will be affected by factors we can't yet measure.
Then there's the matter of the conductor's ability to set the orchestra's tone, which is a measure of his heft or subjective weight. When MTT arrived, he was 50 years old, a mid-career conductor who was respected and liked but did not, at the time, have a big reputation. But he was coming to an orchestra that was solidly built but didn't have much flash. He was able to put the flash, the extra degree of energy and enthusiasm, in. And after staying for 25 years, longer than any of his predecessors even in what had been a fairly stable job, he has built up a towering reputation and, turning 74 this month, has become one of the leading senior conductors of his time and, more to the point, has remade SFS entirely in his image.
Coming after such a figure is a challenge in itself. ("You replace Dr. Franklin?" asked the Parisians. "I succeed Dr. Franklin," replied Thomas Jefferson. "No-one can replace him.") Salonen, who's 60 and will have just turned 62 when he takes over, and with his successful couple of decades at LA behind him, is enough of a senior and powerful figure that he won't be overhung by MTT's shadow and can proceed on his own pace. But at the same time he's old enough that he probably won't stay more than a decade or so. Meaning that he'll have time to accomplish what he wants without becoming in turn a giant shadow. Like Herbert Blomstedt, whose decade as SFS music director roughly coincided with his sixties, he can leave a solid foundation for a younger successor to build upon after him. Who came after Blomstedt? MTT. So we go on ...
hoc est
This is it. The 6-page document legally analyzing the "backstop" agreement on EU/NI/UK trade, the one that May's government would do almost anything to avoid releasing. After repeated and increasingly growly insistences by an irritated Parliament, they gave in and let it out. (HTML cover page linking to PDF of the full document.)
So what's it say? It says that, though the backstop is declared to be temporary, that's temporary only on the basis of it being succeeded by a permanent agreement, which the parties are bound to proceed towards in good faith.
But since there is no perceivable way to reconcile the fundamentally conflicting imperatives on the Irish border question, at least not one better than the jury-rigged backstop, that points to a particular form of legal and administrative hell:
1) The backstop will go on applying indefinitely, possibly permanently, despite the fact that nobody likes it and it was accepted only because it'd be temporary;
2) The EU and UK will be, because of the "good faith" clause, bound to keep on negotiating actively, despite the fact that neither's desired position is even remotely acceptable to the other. They could well just sit there and make the same futile points over and over again. This could go on ... possibly forever.
Of course, there is a way out, though the Attorney General is too polite to specify it, saying only that this is a political question. That way out is: no Brexit.
So what's it say? It says that, though the backstop is declared to be temporary, that's temporary only on the basis of it being succeeded by a permanent agreement, which the parties are bound to proceed towards in good faith.
But since there is no perceivable way to reconcile the fundamentally conflicting imperatives on the Irish border question, at least not one better than the jury-rigged backstop, that points to a particular form of legal and administrative hell:
1) The backstop will go on applying indefinitely, possibly permanently, despite the fact that nobody likes it and it was accepted only because it'd be temporary;
2) The EU and UK will be, because of the "good faith" clause, bound to keep on negotiating actively, despite the fact that neither's desired position is even remotely acceptable to the other. They could well just sit there and make the same futile points over and over again. This could go on ... possibly forever.
Of course, there is a way out, though the Attorney General is too polite to specify it, saying only that this is a political question. That way out is: no Brexit.
Tuesday, December 4, 2018
eine Festschrift für Flieger
A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger, edited by John D. Rateliff (Gabbro Head; available in print from Amazon, with e-book coming this month)
A Festschrift is a useful German term, designating a collection usually honoring a distinguished scholar, and in that case consisting of essays in the scholar's field by students and colleagues, often drawing from that scholar's work.
J.R.R. Tolkien has two scholarly Festschriften, one published soon after his retirement and the other posthumous. Of scholars who themselves study Tolkien, there are Festschriften of one sort or another honoring Christopher Tolkien, Richard Blackwelder, Tom Shippey, and now Verlyn Flieger.
I come not to review this book, because I'm in it, but to praise it. John Rateliff has assembled a raft of distinguished scholars who have built on Verlyn Flieger's deep thoughts and penetrating insights into Tolkien.
I knew I was in good hands with the first essay, Amy Amendt-Raduege on the development of Merry and Pippin into maturity and heroism. This is exactly the theme I placed on the last Mythcon I chaired, and never have I seen this prime example of it so clearly expounded on.
There's a lot more good ones: Marjorie Burns on pre-echoes of The Hobbit in Grahame and Buchan, a paper I heard her give at a small conference years ago; Thomas Hillman and colleagues on the role of dreams in Tolkien, a highly Fliegeresque topic; Thomas Honegger also on heroism in LotR and what Tolkien accomplished by not making the story into a Chanson d'Elessar; John Rateliff himself on everything you need to know about the mysterious Romano-Celtic god Nodens to understand Tolkien's scholarly note on the name's philology; Anna Smol on sub-creation as practiced by the characters in several elusive Tolkien stories; Kris Swank on several clear Irish literary parallels in Tolkien's work; Richard C. West's clear and detailed study of The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son, including why Tolkien spelled the name that way; and many others.
There's two papers regarding Tolkien's recollection of writing a childhood story about a "green great dragon," examining why his mother told him it ought to be a great green dragon instead; one of which, by John R. Holmes, points out that if you look up "green great" in Google Books today, you'll find a lot of Tolkien scholarship about this very incident: "We peer into the linguistic telescope to find ourselves staring back."
There's also some papers on Verlyn's own fiction, mostly on how her work reflects on Tolkien's; and some brief personal essays honoring her scholarship and her teaching.
My own piece discusses what I've learned from Verlyn's scholarship as to what makes Smith of Wootton Major such a perfect fairy-story. I think I hit on something, because I've already received two e-mails complimenting me on such observations as "[the interpretation of the plot] seems to me to be dyed into the fabric of the story" and "What fantasies in unthinking imitation of Tolkien's have taught me is that all the appendices in the world will be of no appeal, will be just so much empty data, if the story isn't moving and meaningful."
I hope we have left Verlyn Flieger well-honored.
A Festschrift is a useful German term, designating a collection usually honoring a distinguished scholar, and in that case consisting of essays in the scholar's field by students and colleagues, often drawing from that scholar's work.
J.R.R. Tolkien has two scholarly Festschriften, one published soon after his retirement and the other posthumous. Of scholars who themselves study Tolkien, there are Festschriften of one sort or another honoring Christopher Tolkien, Richard Blackwelder, Tom Shippey, and now Verlyn Flieger.
I come not to review this book, because I'm in it, but to praise it. John Rateliff has assembled a raft of distinguished scholars who have built on Verlyn Flieger's deep thoughts and penetrating insights into Tolkien.
I knew I was in good hands with the first essay, Amy Amendt-Raduege on the development of Merry and Pippin into maturity and heroism. This is exactly the theme I placed on the last Mythcon I chaired, and never have I seen this prime example of it so clearly expounded on.
There's a lot more good ones: Marjorie Burns on pre-echoes of The Hobbit in Grahame and Buchan, a paper I heard her give at a small conference years ago; Thomas Hillman and colleagues on the role of dreams in Tolkien, a highly Fliegeresque topic; Thomas Honegger also on heroism in LotR and what Tolkien accomplished by not making the story into a Chanson d'Elessar; John Rateliff himself on everything you need to know about the mysterious Romano-Celtic god Nodens to understand Tolkien's scholarly note on the name's philology; Anna Smol on sub-creation as practiced by the characters in several elusive Tolkien stories; Kris Swank on several clear Irish literary parallels in Tolkien's work; Richard C. West's clear and detailed study of The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son, including why Tolkien spelled the name that way; and many others.
There's two papers regarding Tolkien's recollection of writing a childhood story about a "green great dragon," examining why his mother told him it ought to be a great green dragon instead; one of which, by John R. Holmes, points out that if you look up "green great" in Google Books today, you'll find a lot of Tolkien scholarship about this very incident: "We peer into the linguistic telescope to find ourselves staring back."
There's also some papers on Verlyn's own fiction, mostly on how her work reflects on Tolkien's; and some brief personal essays honoring her scholarship and her teaching.
My own piece discusses what I've learned from Verlyn's scholarship as to what makes Smith of Wootton Major such a perfect fairy-story. I think I hit on something, because I've already received two e-mails complimenting me on such observations as "[the interpretation of the plot] seems to me to be dyed into the fabric of the story" and "What fantasies in unthinking imitation of Tolkien's have taught me is that all the appendices in the world will be of no appeal, will be just so much empty data, if the story isn't moving and meaningful."
I hope we have left Verlyn Flieger well-honored.
Monday, December 3, 2018
exempli gratia
1. Sunday evening was the first night of Hanukkah. Our goyische wall calendar says "Hanukkah begins" under Monday, which is impressively misleading. B. didn't realize it started the previous night until I began to light the candles.
2. And it's also Advent, so her candle ceremony comes right after mine.
3. So I've been trying to spend more time at work in the library than in the past. I've undertaken a massive project which will take a few months to complete, cleaning up the typos and inconsistencies in the subject database. This would be less of a problem had I been reviewing the inputters' work all along, so I'm trying to do that too.
4. Occasionally SFCV decides to review a few CDs. And sometimes they ask me to do that. This time the publisher didn't send out the physical CDs, but issued a press release with links to Dropbox entries with WAV files and a PDF of the liner notes. I took my good headphones down to the library and listened to it on the computer there so I could follow along with the (non-circulating) scores. Read my brief take (CD reviews are 300 words) on bristling modern performances of three bristling modern quartets here.
5. News nugget that people are buying iceberg lettuce as a desperate substitute for tainted romaine. That choice amuses me, as I actually like iceberg, and generally consider romaine an acceptable substitute. I won't eat most other lettuce at all. The spinach recall years ago didn't worry me, because I only eat spinach cooked. Lettuce is another matter, but except for the occasional caesar salad I rarely eat salads, and I only eat caesars because they're made with romaine. So right now I'm not eating those either.
6. World's most caustic Bible book review, by Jo Walton.
7. 2 1/2 years ago I went to a week-long string quartet festival in the Canadian Rockies. I had a fabulous time. Would I return when they held it again in three years? I said, very possibly. They've announced next summer's schedule. I've looked at it. There will be a good helping of Schubert this year. I've thought about it. And yes, I'm going. This is in part in compensation for not being able to get to the Tolkien Society's Birmingham conference a few weeks earlier.
8. Delayed flight announcement for the fabulous new book on Tolkien I'm reading, until I finish reading it. Which should be real soon.
2. And it's also Advent, so her candle ceremony comes right after mine.
3. So I've been trying to spend more time at work in the library than in the past. I've undertaken a massive project which will take a few months to complete, cleaning up the typos and inconsistencies in the subject database. This would be less of a problem had I been reviewing the inputters' work all along, so I'm trying to do that too.
4. Occasionally SFCV decides to review a few CDs. And sometimes they ask me to do that. This time the publisher didn't send out the physical CDs, but issued a press release with links to Dropbox entries with WAV files and a PDF of the liner notes. I took my good headphones down to the library and listened to it on the computer there so I could follow along with the (non-circulating) scores. Read my brief take (CD reviews are 300 words) on bristling modern performances of three bristling modern quartets here.
5. News nugget that people are buying iceberg lettuce as a desperate substitute for tainted romaine. That choice amuses me, as I actually like iceberg, and generally consider romaine an acceptable substitute. I won't eat most other lettuce at all. The spinach recall years ago didn't worry me, because I only eat spinach cooked. Lettuce is another matter, but except for the occasional caesar salad I rarely eat salads, and I only eat caesars because they're made with romaine. So right now I'm not eating those either.
6. World's most caustic Bible book review, by Jo Walton.
7. 2 1/2 years ago I went to a week-long string quartet festival in the Canadian Rockies. I had a fabulous time. Would I return when they held it again in three years? I said, very possibly. They've announced next summer's schedule. I've looked at it. There will be a good helping of Schubert this year. I've thought about it. And yes, I'm going. This is in part in compensation for not being able to get to the Tolkien Society's Birmingham conference a few weeks earlier.
8. Delayed flight announcement for the fabulous new book on Tolkien I'm reading, until I finish reading it. Which should be real soon.
Saturday, December 1, 2018
de mortuis nil nisi bonum
Never have I seen this rule more stringently applied than in the obituaries that have been appearing this morning for the late U.S. President, George "H.W." Bush. They're all about the wisdom of his foreign policy and the character virtues of his restrained and humble personality.
Yes, there may be some acknowledgment that, say, the 1988 election was not the highlight of his career, but let's leave it at that. In fact, Bush's virtues did not go unnoticed during his active career, but they had a tendency to get drowned out by less admirable things. That 1988 campaign, for one, put the lie to any categorical statements about Bush's uprightness and honesty. If he's willing to go down in the gutter like that, it doesn't really matter that he doesn't spend all of his time there.
This article concentrates on the particularly interesting area of his foreign policy, arguing that during an especially critical period of two years he was something of a genius at it. More so than he himself realized: one of the virtues cited in the article was his bringing the Gulf War to an end after the liberation of Kuwait, not turning it into an imperialist conquest of Iraq. The article doesn't mention that, although for some years he eloquently defended that decision, after his son launched Gulf War II to do exactly what had been refrained from earlier, the elder Bush started saying "I miscalculated." No, he hadn't, and subsequent events have shown that.
I noted much of the foreign policy achievement at the time, particularly admiring the careful and diplomatic handling of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire. Had I been polled at the time and asked if I thought the President was doing a good job, I would have had to say yes. So did a lot of other people, which is why the pollsters were so bewildered by his loss of the next election. But what the pollsters failed to do was to follow Ted Sturgeon's advice to ask the next question. After saying that I thought Bush was doing a good job, if I'd been asked, "And do you plan to vote for his re-election?" I would have replied, "Hell no." Well, why? Because I didn't support his economic program. (Characteristically, the above-cited article mentions only the half-right part of that policy.)
And so the first vice-president since Martin Van Buren to immediately succeed his presidential predecessor by election, instead of accession, like Van Buren passed out of office after one term.
A word on his name. Everything written about him today invariably calls him "George H.W. Bush". It seems to have been written out of history that, during his active political career, he was always called "George Bush" with no initials whatever. Google ngrams confirms that he was never called "H.W." until his son George W. began running for President around 1998 and it became necessary to clearly distinguish the two. That's fine, although I find the previously-unused initials intrusive and prefer to call him "'Poppy' Bush"; it's the retroactive erasure of the old form, as if it never existed, that feels weird.
ETA: Politico has more, a lot more, on the real legacy of George Bush.
Yes, there may be some acknowledgment that, say, the 1988 election was not the highlight of his career, but let's leave it at that. In fact, Bush's virtues did not go unnoticed during his active career, but they had a tendency to get drowned out by less admirable things. That 1988 campaign, for one, put the lie to any categorical statements about Bush's uprightness and honesty. If he's willing to go down in the gutter like that, it doesn't really matter that he doesn't spend all of his time there.
This article concentrates on the particularly interesting area of his foreign policy, arguing that during an especially critical period of two years he was something of a genius at it. More so than he himself realized: one of the virtues cited in the article was his bringing the Gulf War to an end after the liberation of Kuwait, not turning it into an imperialist conquest of Iraq. The article doesn't mention that, although for some years he eloquently defended that decision, after his son launched Gulf War II to do exactly what had been refrained from earlier, the elder Bush started saying "I miscalculated." No, he hadn't, and subsequent events have shown that.
I noted much of the foreign policy achievement at the time, particularly admiring the careful and diplomatic handling of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire. Had I been polled at the time and asked if I thought the President was doing a good job, I would have had to say yes. So did a lot of other people, which is why the pollsters were so bewildered by his loss of the next election. But what the pollsters failed to do was to follow Ted Sturgeon's advice to ask the next question. After saying that I thought Bush was doing a good job, if I'd been asked, "And do you plan to vote for his re-election?" I would have replied, "Hell no." Well, why? Because I didn't support his economic program. (Characteristically, the above-cited article mentions only the half-right part of that policy.)
And so the first vice-president since Martin Van Buren to immediately succeed his presidential predecessor by election, instead of accession, like Van Buren passed out of office after one term.
A word on his name. Everything written about him today invariably calls him "George H.W. Bush". It seems to have been written out of history that, during his active political career, he was always called "George Bush" with no initials whatever. Google ngrams confirms that he was never called "H.W." until his son George W. began running for President around 1998 and it became necessary to clearly distinguish the two. That's fine, although I find the previously-unused initials intrusive and prefer to call him "'Poppy' Bush"; it's the retroactive erasure of the old form, as if it never existed, that feels weird.
ETA: Politico has more, a lot more, on the real legacy of George Bush.
Friday, November 30, 2018
metasongs
I'm not going to make the mistake of ever commenting in Making Light again, but this latest post intrigued me:
Of course, this doesn't have to be irritating. It's the coy way the lyrics go about it.
This can be books too, you know. Many years ago, I published in Mythprint a list of fantasy books whose titles were shared by other, fictional books that they were about. The one I can remember offhand is The Throme of the Erril of Sherill by Patricia A. McKillip (which also falls into the category of "things I have to look up every time I write about them in order to spell them properly").
However, when I asked for more examples, what I mostly got was not books about fictional books with the same title, but books which themselves exist within the fictional universe they describe, such as The Lord of the Rings, which presents itself as Tolkien's translation of Frodo's written account of the journey (and retroactively presents The Hobbit as Bilbo's of his). That's another interesting category, but it's not the same thing.
“Monster Mash,” “Crocodile Rock,” and “Jailhouse Rock” are all real songs about other, fictional songs that share the same titles as the real songs. Any other examples? And is there a name for this kind of song?I remember once remarking that one of the many things that makes "The Pennsylvania Polka" an irritating song is that it seems, without stating it explicitly, to be about some other song which is also called "The Pennsylvania Polka."
Of course, this doesn't have to be irritating. It's the coy way the lyrics go about it.
This can be books too, you know. Many years ago, I published in Mythprint a list of fantasy books whose titles were shared by other, fictional books that they were about. The one I can remember offhand is The Throme of the Erril of Sherill by Patricia A. McKillip (which also falls into the category of "things I have to look up every time I write about them in order to spell them properly").
However, when I asked for more examples, what I mostly got was not books about fictional books with the same title, but books which themselves exist within the fictional universe they describe, such as The Lord of the Rings, which presents itself as Tolkien's translation of Frodo's written account of the journey (and retroactively presents The Hobbit as Bilbo's of his). That's another interesting category, but it's not the same thing.
Wednesday, November 28, 2018
beau spam, merveilleux spam
I've had spam in Spanish and spam in Chinese. (More of the voice messages I get on my mobile phone are Chinese spam than all other things put together.) Now I've just received my first spam e-mail in French. With a little Spanish weirdly mixed in, like so:
Politique de confidentialité . Afin de vous proposer des publicités pertinentes pendant votre navigation en ligne (internet, messagerie et mobile), ce message utilise des cookies. En ouvrant ce courrier, vous acceptez nos Termes et conditions de même que notre politique sur Cookies. Pour plus d'informations, n'hésitez pas à nous contacter Recibes este correo porque [email] está registrado en la base de datos de Car. Este email viene de EMAILING NETWORK SARL. propietaria de la marca ClicPlan.
Politique de confidentialité . Afin de vous proposer des publicités pertinentes pendant votre navigation en ligne (internet, messagerie et mobile), ce message utilise des cookies. En ouvrant ce courrier, vous acceptez nos Termes et conditions de même que notre politique sur Cookies. Pour plus d'informations, n'hésitez pas à nous contacter Recibes este correo porque [email] está registrado en la base de datos de Car. Este email viene de EMAILING NETWORK SARL. propietaria de la marca ClicPlan.
Tuesday, November 27, 2018
inheritance
When my mother died several years ago, the one thing I really wanted to inherit from her was the old family hanukkiah, or Hanukkah menorah. Like much of the furnishings my parents bought in the 1950s and early 60s, it was Scandinavian modern in design, with the candleholes embedded in a golden Saarinen-like swoop. It was the symbol of Hanukkah in my childhood, and though it's somewhat battered by years of digging candle wax out, I have it now and use it every year.
When my father died more recently, there was similarly one thing I most wanted to inherit, and after considerable logistics it's been shipped from Britain and it's mine now: his Charles Addams collection. He had the first seven book collections of Addams cartoons, dating from 1942 to 1964: not all of them first printings, but all from the original editions except the first, which is a 1962 reissue. These also I had read carefully in my youth, as a result of which - unlike many latter-day fans - I was as familiar with the Addams Family in their original cartoon form as I was with the 1964-6 TV show, of which I was also a devoted fan.
Looking over the cartoons now, I notice a lot about the Family that had escaped my attention: that Lurch on his first appearance wore a beard; that Uncle Fester almost always appears by himself in the early cartoons, though once in 1953 he took the children fishing - with a case of dynamite; that there are lots of nasty little boys who might or might not be, and in some cases definitely aren't, Pugsley. I learn further from the definitive book on the topic, which I grabbed from the library, The Addams Family: An Evilution by H. Keith Miserocchi, director of the Addams estate and archives, that the mysterious person whose lank-haired head peers from the shadows or down from the gallery in a number of cartoons is Thing; thus the depiction of Thing in the movies as a disembodied hand running around is as wrong as the depiction of Sauron as a disembodied eyeball in some other movies.
But there's so much more to Addams than the Family. The one with the skier, the unique take on Hansel and Gretel, "I'm sorry, sonny, we've run out of candy", "Speak up, George, stop mumbling", "George! Drop the keys!" (what is it about George, anyway?), the unnervingly prescient "Where will it ever end?", and my all-time favorite, "For goodness sake, stop that chattering and let your father think."
My father was not an eccentric man, but he did have a hidden taste for the macabre that also led him to collect the original albums - which I also have - by Tom Lehrer, composer of "The Masochism Tango," a song which I see I am not the only person to imagine Gomez and Morticia dancing to:
When my father died more recently, there was similarly one thing I most wanted to inherit, and after considerable logistics it's been shipped from Britain and it's mine now: his Charles Addams collection. He had the first seven book collections of Addams cartoons, dating from 1942 to 1964: not all of them first printings, but all from the original editions except the first, which is a 1962 reissue. These also I had read carefully in my youth, as a result of which - unlike many latter-day fans - I was as familiar with the Addams Family in their original cartoon form as I was with the 1964-6 TV show, of which I was also a devoted fan.
Looking over the cartoons now, I notice a lot about the Family that had escaped my attention: that Lurch on his first appearance wore a beard; that Uncle Fester almost always appears by himself in the early cartoons, though once in 1953 he took the children fishing - with a case of dynamite; that there are lots of nasty little boys who might or might not be, and in some cases definitely aren't, Pugsley. I learn further from the definitive book on the topic, which I grabbed from the library, The Addams Family: An Evilution by H. Keith Miserocchi, director of the Addams estate and archives, that the mysterious person whose lank-haired head peers from the shadows or down from the gallery in a number of cartoons is Thing; thus the depiction of Thing in the movies as a disembodied hand running around is as wrong as the depiction of Sauron as a disembodied eyeball in some other movies.
But there's so much more to Addams than the Family. The one with the skier, the unique take on Hansel and Gretel, "I'm sorry, sonny, we've run out of candy", "Speak up, George, stop mumbling", "George! Drop the keys!" (what is it about George, anyway?), the unnervingly prescient "Where will it ever end?", and my all-time favorite, "For goodness sake, stop that chattering and let your father think."
My father was not an eccentric man, but he did have a hidden taste for the macabre that also led him to collect the original albums - which I also have - by Tom Lehrer, composer of "The Masochism Tango," a song which I see I am not the only person to imagine Gomez and Morticia dancing to:
Monday, November 26, 2018
diversity in Congress
I keep reading articles noting that the Democratic caucus in the new US House of Representatives is more diverse in race and gender than the Republican caucus. Usually this takes the form of pointing at photos of them. But I haven't seen any statistics. So I decided to compile some.
This mostly comes from Wikipedia, so it's a seat-of-the-pants thing, not a peer-reviewed sociological analysis. According to the election results when I checked there last week, the outcome was D 234, R 201, which may be one or two off from figures elsewhere, due perhaps to races being called before the final results were in. Figures for diversity are mostly from its lists of members fitting these criteria, and may be even less reliable. Not to mention the possibility of errors on my own checklists. However, the differences are still clear.
The categories I looked for are those which customarily are taken as depicting socio-economic diversity. If you think I should have covered something else, I'll see if I can find a list.
*Women: D 89, R 12.
*self-identified LGB (which is as far down those initials as Congress gets): D 8, R 0.
*African-Americans: D 50, R 1.
*Native Americans (enrolled tribes, in case you ask): D 2, R 2.
*Hispanics (those of Latin American origin or descent only: another 6 whose ancestors came from Europe in the 19th century or earlier are socio-economically indistinguishable from those from other southern European countries who immigrated at the same time - I'm looking for minority diversity, not running an ethnography of Congress): D 33, R 5.
*Asian-Americans (East Asia or South Asia): D 12, R 0.
*Jewish (not usually considered a minority group, but as voters and in Congress they really stand apart from whites as a whole): D 26, R 2.
*Muslims: D 2, R 0.
Adjusting for those who are more than one of the above, I get 163 D (69% of the caucus) and 21 R (10% of the caucus) who are something other than straight white Christian male.
This mostly comes from Wikipedia, so it's a seat-of-the-pants thing, not a peer-reviewed sociological analysis. According to the election results when I checked there last week, the outcome was D 234, R 201, which may be one or two off from figures elsewhere, due perhaps to races being called before the final results were in. Figures for diversity are mostly from its lists of members fitting these criteria, and may be even less reliable. Not to mention the possibility of errors on my own checklists. However, the differences are still clear.
The categories I looked for are those which customarily are taken as depicting socio-economic diversity. If you think I should have covered something else, I'll see if I can find a list.
*Women: D 89, R 12.
*self-identified LGB (which is as far down those initials as Congress gets): D 8, R 0.
*African-Americans: D 50, R 1.
*Native Americans (enrolled tribes, in case you ask): D 2, R 2.
*Hispanics (those of Latin American origin or descent only: another 6 whose ancestors came from Europe in the 19th century or earlier are socio-economically indistinguishable from those from other southern European countries who immigrated at the same time - I'm looking for minority diversity, not running an ethnography of Congress): D 33, R 5.
*Asian-Americans (East Asia or South Asia): D 12, R 0.
*Jewish (not usually considered a minority group, but as voters and in Congress they really stand apart from whites as a whole): D 26, R 2.
*Muslims: D 2, R 0.
Adjusting for those who are more than one of the above, I get 163 D (69% of the caucus) and 21 R (10% of the caucus) who are something other than straight white Christian male.
Sunday, November 25, 2018
I didn't realize I cared
Andrew Ducker linked to an article claiming that the movie of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen missed the point of the original. I'm sympathetic to such arguments, having been through numerous similar cases, but it seemed to me that the article itself misunderstands the graphic novel as seriously as it claims the movie does. But I haven't seen the movie, so I intended to keep quiet until Andrew encouraged me to respond. At which point I surprised myself - because I didn't realize I'd internalized this literature so deeply - with a long screed:
Well - I knew something was wrong when the author wrote "Moore does not like these guys." Actually, the virtue of Watchmen lies primarily in the evaluation of the characters being mixed and ambiguous.
Even the Comedian - such a nasty piece of work that we only meet him in flashbacks, so we never have to confront his appallingness directly - discovers, rather to his own surprise, that he has a moral conscience: which vitally turns out (spoiler alert!) to be the reason he's murdered.
Ozymandias is a brilliant depiction of someone moved to do great evil for what he perceives as a greater good; and unlike most such characters in fiction, he isn't a straw-man; his greater good really is a good if not a greater one. Instead of being unlikable, he's a personally likable character who forces the reader to think hard about what actions are justifiable for such goals.
And he gets away with it, succeeds in his goal - until the final panel of the book throws an ambiguity into that. Leaving the reader even more conscious of how mixed and questionable everything is.
And who's responsible for throwing in that ambiguity? Rorschach, whom the article dismisses as "basically a force for evil," acknowledging only that he's competent at what he does. But Rorschach only applies his ruthless methods at truly reprehensible characters. If you're not feeling both satisfied and disgusted by his actions at the same time, you're missing the point.
How much more subtle a depiction of the fascist impulse this is than Frank Miller's. The article describes Miller's 300 as "a nakedly fascistic work." I haven't read 300, but that's how I felt about The Dark Knight - brilliantly written, but loaded and heavy-handed in a way that Watchmen totally isn't.
And so, returning to the ending, if you consider Ozymandias's plan evil, who's going to save the world from its consequences? Rorschach, who sacrifices his life to do it. On that account, he's the hero of the story - but such an ambiguous and nutty one. And is destroying Ozy's plan after it's been carried out an unambiguously good idea? Nobody else is trying to do that. More questions, uncertainties, ambiguities.
Lastly, the article describes Nite Owl as "a clueless pud who’s never not in over his head." This makes me wonder if the writer actually read Watchmen. True enough that Nite Owl feels that his superhero career has been pointless and futile in overall accomplishment - his sexual impotence is a metaphor for this - but he's no pud or doof, he's done a lot of good in individual missions, and while not a match in combat with, say, Ozymandias, he is generally competent and knows what he's doing. He's not the Tick or a pathetic wanna-be, which is what the description makes him sound like.
Well - I knew something was wrong when the author wrote "Moore does not like these guys." Actually, the virtue of Watchmen lies primarily in the evaluation of the characters being mixed and ambiguous.
Even the Comedian - such a nasty piece of work that we only meet him in flashbacks, so we never have to confront his appallingness directly - discovers, rather to his own surprise, that he has a moral conscience: which vitally turns out (spoiler alert!) to be the reason he's murdered.
Ozymandias is a brilliant depiction of someone moved to do great evil for what he perceives as a greater good; and unlike most such characters in fiction, he isn't a straw-man; his greater good really is a good if not a greater one. Instead of being unlikable, he's a personally likable character who forces the reader to think hard about what actions are justifiable for such goals.
And he gets away with it, succeeds in his goal - until the final panel of the book throws an ambiguity into that. Leaving the reader even more conscious of how mixed and questionable everything is.
And who's responsible for throwing in that ambiguity? Rorschach, whom the article dismisses as "basically a force for evil," acknowledging only that he's competent at what he does. But Rorschach only applies his ruthless methods at truly reprehensible characters. If you're not feeling both satisfied and disgusted by his actions at the same time, you're missing the point.
How much more subtle a depiction of the fascist impulse this is than Frank Miller's. The article describes Miller's 300 as "a nakedly fascistic work." I haven't read 300, but that's how I felt about The Dark Knight - brilliantly written, but loaded and heavy-handed in a way that Watchmen totally isn't.
And so, returning to the ending, if you consider Ozymandias's plan evil, who's going to save the world from its consequences? Rorschach, who sacrifices his life to do it. On that account, he's the hero of the story - but such an ambiguous and nutty one. And is destroying Ozy's plan after it's been carried out an unambiguously good idea? Nobody else is trying to do that. More questions, uncertainties, ambiguities.
Lastly, the article describes Nite Owl as "a clueless pud who’s never not in over his head." This makes me wonder if the writer actually read Watchmen. True enough that Nite Owl feels that his superhero career has been pointless and futile in overall accomplishment - his sexual impotence is a metaphor for this - but he's no pud or doof, he's done a lot of good in individual missions, and while not a match in combat with, say, Ozymandias, he is generally competent and knows what he's doing. He's not the Tick or a pathetic wanna-be, which is what the description makes him sound like.
Saturday, November 24, 2018
women sing
In my recent YouTube listening, as I putter about my business, I've come across several delightful examples of musical theater songs, intended for male characters, being sung by women.
The first two of these are from MisCast, which I gather is an annual Broadway fest in which stars sing numbers they'd never be cast in a production for - although, especially in the first case, as the character has virtually nothing else to do in the show, I'd ask, "Why the hell not? She's really good!"
You may also, if you look under MisCast, find men singing women's songs, but I didn't find those as memorable, although, to be sure, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Raúl Esparza as Anita and Maria from West Side Story is a remarkable sight.
Carmen Cusack sings "You'll Be Back" from Hamilton. (Yes, the guy she taps on both shoulders with her scepter while coming on stage is Brian D'Arcy James. ETA: Who sang the part in the original off-Broadway production, so that's why he deserves to be knighted for it.)
Katrina Lenk sings "If I Were a Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof.
Linda Eder sings "I, Don Quixote" from Man of La Mancha.
The first two of these are from MisCast, which I gather is an annual Broadway fest in which stars sing numbers they'd never be cast in a production for - although, especially in the first case, as the character has virtually nothing else to do in the show, I'd ask, "Why the hell not? She's really good!"
You may also, if you look under MisCast, find men singing women's songs, but I didn't find those as memorable, although, to be sure, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Raúl Esparza as Anita and Maria from West Side Story is a remarkable sight.
Carmen Cusack sings "You'll Be Back" from Hamilton. (Yes, the guy she taps on both shoulders with her scepter while coming on stage is Brian D'Arcy James. ETA: Who sang the part in the original off-Broadway production, so that's why he deserves to be knighted for it.)
Katrina Lenk sings "If I Were a Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof.
Linda Eder sings "I, Don Quixote" from Man of La Mancha.
Friday, November 23, 2018
Thursday, November 22, 2018
thanksgiven
We got through Thanksgiving at niece T's house without trauma, not that we were necessarily expecting any. As is gradually becoming the case, especially with more relatives moving out of town, there were more of T's friends (and their families) present than ours. Which, among other things, meant more destinations for leftovers so we didn't have to take any. T's mom did try to press on us some of her pumpkin muffins, but we declined, B. for trying to resist indulgence and me because I don't care for pumpkin.
I brought a heaping quantity of steamed broccoli seasoned with the salt-free spice mix I bought at Pike Place Market earlier this month. It was all taken so it must have been a success. The hostess's Beef Wellington (an alternative to the turkey which we also had) was much tenderer than last year and also very rare.
Reminder to footnote a discussion with my brother, who was also there, about Beef Wellington by checking on whether it was named for the Duke of Wellington. According to Wikipedia, nobody knows. Wikipedia does cite someone who claims that it had nothing to do with the Duke but was invented for a dinner in 1815 in Wellington, New Zealand; but 1) Wellington, New Zealand, was itself named for the Duke; 2) 1815 was the year of Waterloo and thus an excellent occasion to honor the Duke with a dinner; 3) the little wrinkle that the city of Wellington wasn't founded and named until 25 years later.
However, continuing the conversation, I confirmed that, as I thought, the Salisbury steak was not named for the Marquess of Salisbury.
Visit was further enlivened by the three Kittens of Intense Cuteness that T. is currently fostering. They clambered all over us, which our cats won't do. They've been named Bronx, Brooklyn, and ... no, not Staten Island, as I thought, but Soho. In which case the other two should have been Greenwich Village and Battery. Unlikely as they are ever to come near any of these places.
I brought a heaping quantity of steamed broccoli seasoned with the salt-free spice mix I bought at Pike Place Market earlier this month. It was all taken so it must have been a success. The hostess's Beef Wellington (an alternative to the turkey which we also had) was much tenderer than last year and also very rare.
Reminder to footnote a discussion with my brother, who was also there, about Beef Wellington by checking on whether it was named for the Duke of Wellington. According to Wikipedia, nobody knows. Wikipedia does cite someone who claims that it had nothing to do with the Duke but was invented for a dinner in 1815 in Wellington, New Zealand; but 1) Wellington, New Zealand, was itself named for the Duke; 2) 1815 was the year of Waterloo and thus an excellent occasion to honor the Duke with a dinner; 3) the little wrinkle that the city of Wellington wasn't founded and named until 25 years later.
However, continuing the conversation, I confirmed that, as I thought, the Salisbury steak was not named for the Marquess of Salisbury.
Visit was further enlivened by the three Kittens of Intense Cuteness that T. is currently fostering. They clambered all over us, which our cats won't do. They've been named Bronx, Brooklyn, and ... no, not Staten Island, as I thought, but Soho. In which case the other two should have been Greenwich Village and Battery. Unlikely as they are ever to come near any of these places.
Wednesday, November 21, 2018
Tuesday, November 20, 2018
rehearsal review
I'm not scheduled to attend this week's SFS concert, but I decided to respond to an invitation from the development department to attend an open rehearsal this evening. They sent me three separate and distinct e-mails, each strictly instructing me to print it out and use it for admission. The doorwarden barely looked at the first one before waving me in.
The main audience section was fairly full - enough to surprise some of those onstage with the size of the attendance. I was one of about 15 people who decided to go upstairs, which I did so I could see the entire orchestra, spread out in their street clothes.
Fortunately for my tastes, MTT decided to rehearse Beethoven's Ninth instead of the other piece on the program, which is by Alban Berg. If I understood correctly the assistant conductor, who gave a pre-show talk to the audience explaining where rehearsals had gotten to so far, this was the first time the chorus and soloists in the Ninth met to rehearse with the orchestra. MTT began with a stop-and-start run through the last few minutes of the Ode to Joy, then took the entire finale nonstop, then worked on some other sections.
After a break, he did a full run of the Adagio, a slow and contemplative version, before working extensively on individual passages, which left enough time for one quick run through the scherzo before the contracted quitting time.
The conductor's concerns were various and usually pretty subtle, but I could hear a crescendo in the chorus becoming more dramatic and vehement, and a long note in the Adagio getting just slightly extended. It was a good opportunity to hear part of the Ninth, in backwards order, in an informal setting, played splendidly well.
The main audience section was fairly full - enough to surprise some of those onstage with the size of the attendance. I was one of about 15 people who decided to go upstairs, which I did so I could see the entire orchestra, spread out in their street clothes.
Fortunately for my tastes, MTT decided to rehearse Beethoven's Ninth instead of the other piece on the program, which is by Alban Berg. If I understood correctly the assistant conductor, who gave a pre-show talk to the audience explaining where rehearsals had gotten to so far, this was the first time the chorus and soloists in the Ninth met to rehearse with the orchestra. MTT began with a stop-and-start run through the last few minutes of the Ode to Joy, then took the entire finale nonstop, then worked on some other sections.
After a break, he did a full run of the Adagio, a slow and contemplative version, before working extensively on individual passages, which left enough time for one quick run through the scherzo before the contracted quitting time.
The conductor's concerns were various and usually pretty subtle, but I could hear a crescendo in the chorus becoming more dramatic and vehement, and a long note in the Adagio getting just slightly extended. It was a good opportunity to hear part of the Ninth, in backwards order, in an informal setting, played splendidly well.
Monday, November 19, 2018
three concerts
I wrote over a week ago that the smoke from the Camp Fire had cleared a little. Not very much, and it's stayed grittily hazy. A lot of people are wearing masks outside, but in downtown last weekend there were just as many cheerfully dining on the sidewalk tables, and I've been assured that short exposures are not dangerous for most people. So I've been going out, but keeping my exposures short.
Last weekend I reviewed the Fauré Requiem from the Masterworks Chorale, mostly because they'd pitched it to me. I liked it better than the obscure Schubert choral pieces they dredged up with it, but the Kirke Mechem piece had him at his very best. The chorale certainly sang everything finely.
On Friday - this was the day after I saw All the Way on stage, and two days after the Estonians' concert - I was up in the city at Herbst for a string quartet concert by a group called Brooklyn Rider. I didn't have to review this one, which is good because I'd find it hard to describe in detail, but I wasn't much more impressed by it than Lisa Hirsch in her review was. The concert's theme was music as a form of healing - interesting, I thought, as I've been to and heard of quite a few concerts in the last few weeks touting music as an antidote to stress of one kind or another - but there wasn't anything obviously healing about any of the new works they'd commissioned: all from female composers between their mid-30s and mid-40s. The Caroline Shaw piece was at least brilliant in her best mode and I liked it a lot; the Gabriela Lena Frank was pretty good; the Reena Esmail was very heavy on the Hindustani accent; and the Matana Roberts turned out to be the load of random noise it was intended as.
Then they played Beethoven's Op. 132, which really is a healing piece, centered on a long and rapturous adagio/andante depicting his thankfulness for convalescence from illness. But the problem with letting a group that specializes in the newest possible music loose on Beethoven is that they're not likely to have a long-enough perspective. They played Op. 132 in a rough and unsteady style with no sense of the magnitude of this enormous and profound work.
I had better luck being sent up to SFS the following evening to review another resilient-human-spirit concert, consisting of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony in the most uplifting performance imaginable, plus MTT's own setting for narrator and orchestra of excerpts from the diary of Anne Frank.
Unlike some narrated pieces I've reviewed recently, like Chad Cannon's Gateway or Copland's Lincoln Portrait, this piece is as much about the music as the narration, so I felt at ease not rehearsing the well-known story of Anne Frank and concentrating on the music instead. One place I almost got stuck was in describing the narrator. She wore one of those head-fastened microphones that make you look like a telephone operator. How was I to spell this? People mostly write mic instead of mike now, but what's the verb form? Are you miked, miced, or perhaps mic'd? I found advocates for all of these online, but though the AP seems to have gone for miked, I decided not to put my copy editor through any of this, and instead spelled it amplified.
Needless to say, when we got to the moment that MTT rescored Beethoven, I nearly jumped out of my seat. This is the second time in my experience that a conductor has dared to do that. Some people might pass by it unaware, but you do something that obvious (to me) to a work that iconic, and I will bloody well notice it.
Last weekend I reviewed the Fauré Requiem from the Masterworks Chorale, mostly because they'd pitched it to me. I liked it better than the obscure Schubert choral pieces they dredged up with it, but the Kirke Mechem piece had him at his very best. The chorale certainly sang everything finely.
On Friday - this was the day after I saw All the Way on stage, and two days after the Estonians' concert - I was up in the city at Herbst for a string quartet concert by a group called Brooklyn Rider. I didn't have to review this one, which is good because I'd find it hard to describe in detail, but I wasn't much more impressed by it than Lisa Hirsch in her review was. The concert's theme was music as a form of healing - interesting, I thought, as I've been to and heard of quite a few concerts in the last few weeks touting music as an antidote to stress of one kind or another - but there wasn't anything obviously healing about any of the new works they'd commissioned: all from female composers between their mid-30s and mid-40s. The Caroline Shaw piece was at least brilliant in her best mode and I liked it a lot; the Gabriela Lena Frank was pretty good; the Reena Esmail was very heavy on the Hindustani accent; and the Matana Roberts turned out to be the load of random noise it was intended as.
Then they played Beethoven's Op. 132, which really is a healing piece, centered on a long and rapturous adagio/andante depicting his thankfulness for convalescence from illness. But the problem with letting a group that specializes in the newest possible music loose on Beethoven is that they're not likely to have a long-enough perspective. They played Op. 132 in a rough and unsteady style with no sense of the magnitude of this enormous and profound work.
I had better luck being sent up to SFS the following evening to review another resilient-human-spirit concert, consisting of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony in the most uplifting performance imaginable, plus MTT's own setting for narrator and orchestra of excerpts from the diary of Anne Frank.
Unlike some narrated pieces I've reviewed recently, like Chad Cannon's Gateway or Copland's Lincoln Portrait, this piece is as much about the music as the narration, so I felt at ease not rehearsing the well-known story of Anne Frank and concentrating on the music instead. One place I almost got stuck was in describing the narrator. She wore one of those head-fastened microphones that make you look like a telephone operator. How was I to spell this? People mostly write mic instead of mike now, but what's the verb form? Are you miked, miced, or perhaps mic'd? I found advocates for all of these online, but though the AP seems to have gone for miked, I decided not to put my copy editor through any of this, and instead spelled it amplified.
Needless to say, when we got to the moment that MTT rescored Beethoven, I nearly jumped out of my seat. This is the second time in my experience that a conductor has dared to do that. Some people might pass by it unaware, but you do something that obvious (to me) to a work that iconic, and I will bloody well notice it.
Sunday, November 18, 2018
books
I want to hold off on my latest musical excursions, so why not a piece on some of the books I've read over the past couple of months?
Eric Idle, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life (Random House)
Five of the six members of Monty Python have now published memoirs of one sort or another - the sixth, Terry Jones, due to his illness now alas never will - and I've read all of them. Terry Gilliam's Gilliamesque, despite its eccentric packaging and title, is the most conventionally written, discussing its author's wild imagination in a clear and sober tone. Michael Palin, though an excellent writer of many other books (see below) has never published a memoir per se, but has put out several volumes of diaries. I find their abbreviated style and discursive topics make them hard to read, but I did manage to get through an edited version called Monty Python at Work, which was just the entries about Python, concentrating on their business meetings. Graham Chapman's A Liar's Autobiography, which I got at a bookstore in Canada in the early 80s and have never seen another copy of since, contains much blunt self-revelation mixed with wild excursions into complete fantasy, and it's not always easy to tell which is which. John Cleese's So, Anyway ... is a self-analysis of what influences and character traits made him the person he became, consisting of detailed and very entertaining discussion of his baroque childhood and promising early professional experiences, drifting to a close with the formation of Python, though he's suggested a sequel may be in the works.
So now, Eric Idle. His is a descriptive account of his entire life, less self-analytical than Cleese or Gilliam or even Chapman, consciously a funnyman attempting to be serious for once. He doesn't want to spend too much space on his oppressively and tediously Dickensian childhood, and things brighten up when he gets to university and can finally learn to be himself. But when Python hits the big time - which Idle dates to their Canadian tour of 1973 - the book suddenly shifts into prolonged recounting of his subsequent life hanging out with his numerous celebrity friends. Mind, they're all creative celebrities, and a lot of valuable creative work gets done, and it is sweet revenge for his childhood, but it's not that much fun to read about.
Michelle Obama, Becoming (Crown)
This Obama claims not to be a politician, but this is a political memoir. But unlike most American political memoirs, which feel like they were put together by ghostwriters out of pre-existing bricks, this reads like a genuine personal account. Up until her life was derailed by her husband's run for President, Obama was a driven, professional career woman. She thinks her life made its big turn when she met Barack, but while that enabled the future change, it didn't interrupt her career. Not even the big personal crisis when she realized she didn't like being a corporate attorney, which is the job she'd been aiming at since schooldays, was a real hiccup. She just pulled out her contact list, switched careers, and went on without a pause. Obama is aware that she has far more options than her mother had, but like most people with enormous privilege, seems unaware of how enormous it is. I also don't think an aspiring politician would confess so much personal ambition, still less tell stories like the one from her childhood about convincing some other ten-year-old girl to respect her by beating her up.
Once Barack becomes President, we learn more than I ever had before about what it's actually like to live in the White House, of which the biggest revelation is that the staff will order more of anything they perceive you like to eat without even asking permission, no matter how exotic, and then at the end of the month they give you the bill. For while the staff services are free, the First Family has to pay for their food, though apparently they don't get to make out a shopping list. Obama also discusses all the public program initiatives she undertook as First Lady, so since this was genuinely worthwhile work it's unfortunate that it's not very interesting to read about.
Tom Shippey, Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings (Reaktion)
There is no more entertaining guide to the old North than Tom Shippey. Presents itself as an analysis of the Viking character, very strange to us (see the book's title), but is most enlivening delving into literary and archaeological sources. For instance, Shippey tells us there are five source texts for the tale of the Volsungs (and when he enumerates them, I realize that I have copies of four of them) and then goes into the plot differences between them, and what the authors are trying to accomplish and to reconcile, with the same zest that he once employed on varying Tolkien drafts. Very like, in fact.
Michael Palin, Erebus (Greystone Books)
I picked this up at the library because of the author (see above). He's a good writer of narrative history, less interesting when recounting his own travels to these exotic places. I knew that Erebus was the ship (actually one of the ships) of the Franklin expedition that was lost in the Canadian Arctic in the 1840s, but this is the ship's complete biography from manufacture on, of which the best part is its earlier quite successful explorations of the Antarctic. Frustratingly, Palin ends with the ships' recent rediscovery, but says nothing about any revelations about the crews' last days that may have been learned thereby.
Joanne B. Freeman, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
Another book I happened to see on the library shelf. An outstanding study in my special period as a history student, early to mid 19C American politics. Anyone conversant with that period knows about the time a Southern congressman, infuriated by a Northern senator's anti-slavery speech, stalked onto the Senate floor and beat the guy to a bloody pulp, and then was cheered in the South for his efforts; or the time one senator pulled a gun on the floor on another senator, who responded by whipping open his jacket and crying, "Let the assassin fire!"; or the one time a congressman was actually killed in a duel with another congressman. All these occurred between 1838 and 1856; Freeman's genius was to say, "These may have been outstanding instances, but they can't have been the only ones," and putting together a thoughtfully analytic, not a tediously narrative, account of the quite extensive history of violence in Congress in those years. Her key discovery was a first-rate diary by a congressional clerk, who knew all the secrets but was separated from the conflict, and using that to throw light on the politely restrained descriptions of uproar on the floor in the printed congressional records.
Chris Offutt, My Father the Pornographer (Atria Books)
Offutt's father was Andrew J. Offutt, known to those who've heard of him, including me, not as a pornographer but as a science-fiction writer of considerable talent and imagination but whose career never took off. Turns out that, like some other SF writers, he kept the income flowing by churning out porn. This book barely discusses the writing, and that more the SF. It's mostly a description of what it was like having a childhood in the home of an eccentric and driven writer, regardless of what he was writing. The book itself is written in the pretentiously precious style of a modern realist novelist, which is evidently what the younger Offutt grew up to be. (I haven't read any of his fiction.) The most interesting chapter is of spending his pre-teen years being dragged to SF cons by his parents, who craved the social validation they couldn't get anywhere else. The son, however, bluntly states that he found SF fans to be totally obnoxious and repulsive people. He reports being stunned when, after publishing a note that his father had a grudge against Harlan Ellison, he gets a phone call from Ellison assuring him that the grudge was not mutual. What surprises him is that anyone would care that much about it, but it sounds to me exactly like what Harlan would do.
Eric Idle, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life (Random House)
Five of the six members of Monty Python have now published memoirs of one sort or another - the sixth, Terry Jones, due to his illness now alas never will - and I've read all of them. Terry Gilliam's Gilliamesque, despite its eccentric packaging and title, is the most conventionally written, discussing its author's wild imagination in a clear and sober tone. Michael Palin, though an excellent writer of many other books (see below) has never published a memoir per se, but has put out several volumes of diaries. I find their abbreviated style and discursive topics make them hard to read, but I did manage to get through an edited version called Monty Python at Work, which was just the entries about Python, concentrating on their business meetings. Graham Chapman's A Liar's Autobiography, which I got at a bookstore in Canada in the early 80s and have never seen another copy of since, contains much blunt self-revelation mixed with wild excursions into complete fantasy, and it's not always easy to tell which is which. John Cleese's So, Anyway ... is a self-analysis of what influences and character traits made him the person he became, consisting of detailed and very entertaining discussion of his baroque childhood and promising early professional experiences, drifting to a close with the formation of Python, though he's suggested a sequel may be in the works.
So now, Eric Idle. His is a descriptive account of his entire life, less self-analytical than Cleese or Gilliam or even Chapman, consciously a funnyman attempting to be serious for once. He doesn't want to spend too much space on his oppressively and tediously Dickensian childhood, and things brighten up when he gets to university and can finally learn to be himself. But when Python hits the big time - which Idle dates to their Canadian tour of 1973 - the book suddenly shifts into prolonged recounting of his subsequent life hanging out with his numerous celebrity friends. Mind, they're all creative celebrities, and a lot of valuable creative work gets done, and it is sweet revenge for his childhood, but it's not that much fun to read about.
Michelle Obama, Becoming (Crown)
This Obama claims not to be a politician, but this is a political memoir. But unlike most American political memoirs, which feel like they were put together by ghostwriters out of pre-existing bricks, this reads like a genuine personal account. Up until her life was derailed by her husband's run for President, Obama was a driven, professional career woman. She thinks her life made its big turn when she met Barack, but while that enabled the future change, it didn't interrupt her career. Not even the big personal crisis when she realized she didn't like being a corporate attorney, which is the job she'd been aiming at since schooldays, was a real hiccup. She just pulled out her contact list, switched careers, and went on without a pause. Obama is aware that she has far more options than her mother had, but like most people with enormous privilege, seems unaware of how enormous it is. I also don't think an aspiring politician would confess so much personal ambition, still less tell stories like the one from her childhood about convincing some other ten-year-old girl to respect her by beating her up.
Once Barack becomes President, we learn more than I ever had before about what it's actually like to live in the White House, of which the biggest revelation is that the staff will order more of anything they perceive you like to eat without even asking permission, no matter how exotic, and then at the end of the month they give you the bill. For while the staff services are free, the First Family has to pay for their food, though apparently they don't get to make out a shopping list. Obama also discusses all the public program initiatives she undertook as First Lady, so since this was genuinely worthwhile work it's unfortunate that it's not very interesting to read about.
Tom Shippey, Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings (Reaktion)
There is no more entertaining guide to the old North than Tom Shippey. Presents itself as an analysis of the Viking character, very strange to us (see the book's title), but is most enlivening delving into literary and archaeological sources. For instance, Shippey tells us there are five source texts for the tale of the Volsungs (and when he enumerates them, I realize that I have copies of four of them) and then goes into the plot differences between them, and what the authors are trying to accomplish and to reconcile, with the same zest that he once employed on varying Tolkien drafts. Very like, in fact.
Michael Palin, Erebus (Greystone Books)
I picked this up at the library because of the author (see above). He's a good writer of narrative history, less interesting when recounting his own travels to these exotic places. I knew that Erebus was the ship (actually one of the ships) of the Franklin expedition that was lost in the Canadian Arctic in the 1840s, but this is the ship's complete biography from manufacture on, of which the best part is its earlier quite successful explorations of the Antarctic. Frustratingly, Palin ends with the ships' recent rediscovery, but says nothing about any revelations about the crews' last days that may have been learned thereby.
Joanne B. Freeman, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
Another book I happened to see on the library shelf. An outstanding study in my special period as a history student, early to mid 19C American politics. Anyone conversant with that period knows about the time a Southern congressman, infuriated by a Northern senator's anti-slavery speech, stalked onto the Senate floor and beat the guy to a bloody pulp, and then was cheered in the South for his efforts; or the time one senator pulled a gun on the floor on another senator, who responded by whipping open his jacket and crying, "Let the assassin fire!"; or the one time a congressman was actually killed in a duel with another congressman. All these occurred between 1838 and 1856; Freeman's genius was to say, "These may have been outstanding instances, but they can't have been the only ones," and putting together a thoughtfully analytic, not a tediously narrative, account of the quite extensive history of violence in Congress in those years. Her key discovery was a first-rate diary by a congressional clerk, who knew all the secrets but was separated from the conflict, and using that to throw light on the politely restrained descriptions of uproar on the floor in the printed congressional records.
Chris Offutt, My Father the Pornographer (Atria Books)
Offutt's father was Andrew J. Offutt, known to those who've heard of him, including me, not as a pornographer but as a science-fiction writer of considerable talent and imagination but whose career never took off. Turns out that, like some other SF writers, he kept the income flowing by churning out porn. This book barely discusses the writing, and that more the SF. It's mostly a description of what it was like having a childhood in the home of an eccentric and driven writer, regardless of what he was writing. The book itself is written in the pretentiously precious style of a modern realist novelist, which is evidently what the younger Offutt grew up to be. (I haven't read any of his fiction.) The most interesting chapter is of spending his pre-teen years being dragged to SF cons by his parents, who craved the social validation they couldn't get anywhere else. The son, however, bluntly states that he found SF fans to be totally obnoxious and repulsive people. He reports being stunned when, after publishing a note that his father had a grudge against Harlan Ellison, he gets a phone call from Ellison assuring him that the grudge was not mutual. What surprises him is that anyone would care that much about it, but it sounds to me exactly like what Harlan would do.
Saturday, November 17, 2018
departures
Of recent celebrity deaths, William Goldman's is the one I mourn the most. I liked many of the movies he wrote, I was a fan of his novel The Princess Bride from long before it was a movie, and I absorbed his two big non-fiction books on movie-making, Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell? I used his first law of moviemaking, "Nobody knows anything," as an anchor in my article on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. Nobody knows anything; nobody knows what will succeed or fail; rules on what you have to do to the plot because it's a mooooovie are really no more than "what worked on the last successful blockbuster" and are liable to be overturned at any moment. I appreciated Goldman's work and his insights even in the anxious and highly-wrought context he expressed them in. He was a major figure in a precarious business.
Douglas Rain was an actor whose name few recognize, but they know him without realizing it. He was the voice of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. His creepy calmness was unforgettable, for reasons I've discussed. Some years ago, I saw a DVD of the 1957 Canadian Oedipus Rex film on an academic friend's desk; she was planning on showing it to her class. I pointed out the two unusual facts about that film: that it was the version that inspired Tom Lehrer to write his song of the same title as a "theme song" for the movie, and that the actor who played Creon went on to play HAL in 2001.
Fred Patten was an LA sf fan I would see around at conventions, but whom I didn't know personally. His command of his specialized areas of expertise, anime and furry fandom, was awesome, but they weren't part of my world.
Of Stan Lee I can merely say that I was aware of his existence. As with Gary Gygax, a figure whose death brought out the most startlingly deep mourning among many of my acquaintances, his work didn't mean much to me one way or another. But I'm not interested in denouncing it either. He did what he wanted to do, he pleased many, he acquired fame and, apparently, a degree of happiness. In Lee's own phrase, nuff said.
Douglas Rain was an actor whose name few recognize, but they know him without realizing it. He was the voice of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. His creepy calmness was unforgettable, for reasons I've discussed. Some years ago, I saw a DVD of the 1957 Canadian Oedipus Rex film on an academic friend's desk; she was planning on showing it to her class. I pointed out the two unusual facts about that film: that it was the version that inspired Tom Lehrer to write his song of the same title as a "theme song" for the movie, and that the actor who played Creon went on to play HAL in 2001.
Fred Patten was an LA sf fan I would see around at conventions, but whom I didn't know personally. His command of his specialized areas of expertise, anime and furry fandom, was awesome, but they weren't part of my world.
Of Stan Lee I can merely say that I was aware of his existence. As with Gary Gygax, a figure whose death brought out the most startlingly deep mourning among many of my acquaintances, his work didn't mean much to me one way or another. But I'm not interested in denouncing it either. He did what he wanted to do, he pleased many, he acquired fame and, apparently, a degree of happiness. In Lee's own phrase, nuff said.
Thursday, November 15, 2018
All the Way
A few years ago I saw the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's production of a play they'd commissioned, The Great Society by Robert Schenkkan, telling of the 1965-68 period of Lyndon Johnson's presidency in the format and manner of a Shakespearean historical tragedy. I found it an awesome play, and was sorry I'd missed their production of its predecessor, All the Way, about the first year of Johnson's presidency, 1963-64, the one that went on to a celebrated Broadway production with Bryan Cranston.
So when I saw that a local company, the Palo Alto Players, was doing All the Way, I figured I had to see it, and I just have. Well, they're not OSF, but it was pretty good. Michael Monagle doesn't look anything like LBJ - in fact none of the actors looked like the people they were playing, the Hubert Humphrey more resembling Walter Mondale, and the Ev Dirksen looking like a retired Confederate general, white beard and all - but Monagle was good with the Johnson style and at being the strong center of the cast. Some of the others, though they were all competent actors, looked a little fatigued by the intense pace in the second act. Best all-around were the scenes with the Black leaders (King, Abernathy, Wilkins, Carmichael, et al) which formed the main counterpoint to the white politicians.
Covering a much shorter period than the sequel, it's differently constructed, with less sense of the pressure of multiple events pushing down on Johnson. But it does have the same snap and quick scene changes. Thus, the first scene is set with Johnson in his seat on Air Force One flying back from Dallas. Then he stands up and delivers his first speech to Congress.
The first act is all about the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and manages to say more about the political maneuverings that got it past various hurdles than does Robert Caro's biography of that period of Johnson's life. This is, alas, more an indictment of Caro than a praise of the play.
The second act is on the 1964 presidential election, and has a weirdly sour feel as the play depicts Johnson consistently on the verge of losing to Goldwater (who never appears on stage), which is not at all how the election played out.
It was consistently gripping, and I'm glad I saw it. It's on through this Sunday, so locals can still go.
So when I saw that a local company, the Palo Alto Players, was doing All the Way, I figured I had to see it, and I just have. Well, they're not OSF, but it was pretty good. Michael Monagle doesn't look anything like LBJ - in fact none of the actors looked like the people they were playing, the Hubert Humphrey more resembling Walter Mondale, and the Ev Dirksen looking like a retired Confederate general, white beard and all - but Monagle was good with the Johnson style and at being the strong center of the cast. Some of the others, though they were all competent actors, looked a little fatigued by the intense pace in the second act. Best all-around were the scenes with the Black leaders (King, Abernathy, Wilkins, Carmichael, et al) which formed the main counterpoint to the white politicians.
Covering a much shorter period than the sequel, it's differently constructed, with less sense of the pressure of multiple events pushing down on Johnson. But it does have the same snap and quick scene changes. Thus, the first scene is set with Johnson in his seat on Air Force One flying back from Dallas. Then he stands up and delivers his first speech to Congress.
The first act is all about the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and manages to say more about the political maneuverings that got it past various hurdles than does Robert Caro's biography of that period of Johnson's life. This is, alas, more an indictment of Caro than a praise of the play.
The second act is on the 1964 presidential election, and has a weirdly sour feel as the play depicts Johnson consistently on the verge of losing to Goldwater (who never appears on stage), which is not at all how the election played out.
It was consistently gripping, and I'm glad I saw it. It's on through this Sunday, so locals can still go.
concert review: Estonians
The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra are making a world tour in honor of the centenary of Estonian independence (of course, the country spent half that period with its independence voided, but I don't expect that the Estonians like to dwell on that), and Stanford was one of the few U.S. stops.
I thought about asking to review this, but I'm glad I didn't bother, because it would have been a difficult concert to review adequately. Instead I just went on my own hook, and my own nickel, too. Unlike the times I've gone to concerts by the Venezuelans or the Kazakhs, nobody in the audience brought any national flags to wave.
I'd had the impression it was to be an all-Arvo Pärt concert, which is why I was eager to go, but instead it turned out to be a half-Pärt concert. It began with the orchestra playing Pärt's Cantus, technically very well, but strongly accented and emotionally dry. This was followed by two Pärt choral works with the orchestra, neither as enchanting as I'd hoped, and both mostly notable for the sheer quality of the choir. Salve Regina had attractive choral phrases running over tiny wisps of sound from the orchestra (strings and celesta). Adam's Lament, setting a text in Old Church Slavonic, was heavier and thicker.
The other half consisted of experimental pieces that required the choir to whisper a lot and grunt a little. Strangely, they were still good at this. One was Carlo by Brett Dean (an Australian composer), which takes a Don Carlo Gesualdo madrigal and runs it through the kind of changes associated with losing a radio station signal. The other, Concerto per voci e strumenti by Lepo Sumera (yes, an Estonian composer) sets nonsense texts that are supposed to sound like Estonian without actually being it. A lot of syllables beginning with K. Odd but interesting.
I thought about asking to review this, but I'm glad I didn't bother, because it would have been a difficult concert to review adequately. Instead I just went on my own hook, and my own nickel, too. Unlike the times I've gone to concerts by the Venezuelans or the Kazakhs, nobody in the audience brought any national flags to wave.
I'd had the impression it was to be an all-Arvo Pärt concert, which is why I was eager to go, but instead it turned out to be a half-Pärt concert. It began with the orchestra playing Pärt's Cantus, technically very well, but strongly accented and emotionally dry. This was followed by two Pärt choral works with the orchestra, neither as enchanting as I'd hoped, and both mostly notable for the sheer quality of the choir. Salve Regina had attractive choral phrases running over tiny wisps of sound from the orchestra (strings and celesta). Adam's Lament, setting a text in Old Church Slavonic, was heavier and thicker.
The other half consisted of experimental pieces that required the choir to whisper a lot and grunt a little. Strangely, they were still good at this. One was Carlo by Brett Dean (an Australian composer), which takes a Don Carlo Gesualdo madrigal and runs it through the kind of changes associated with losing a radio station signal. The other, Concerto per voci e strumenti by Lepo Sumera (yes, an Estonian composer) sets nonsense texts that are supposed to sound like Estonian without actually being it. A lot of syllables beginning with K. Odd but interesting.
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
concert review: Music@Menlo
I was sent off to review Menlo's first winter-series concert on Friday. This one was, as described in the review, tied in with a lecture on Thursday. Usually I go to any associated events with a concert; the pre-concert talks at Symphony Silicon Valley, for instance, are often exceedingly useful for background information on the performance. But despite the importance of this lecture to explaining the literary background which was the purpose of choosing the repertoire for this concert, I didn't go. I was up in the City Thursday evening listening to the SF Symphony play Borodin and Shostakovich.
Maybe I should have skipped out on that for the lecture. But I read the program notes, which were written by the lecturer (who does most of Menlo's program notes and other audience curating), and buttonholed him for a quick interview during intermission, to try to replicate a sense of his presentation. I did present this as best I could in the review. But it was still fuzzy: for instance, he told me that the connection of Beethoven's "Ghost" Trio with sketches for music for an unrealized version of Macbeth has been debunked, but the program notes describe it as real. I could have delved into the Stanford library and researched this, but I didn't have time before the review was due, because I was attending two more concerts that weekend and reviewing them too. (One was the piano recital I described here; the other hasn't come out yet.)
Maybe I should have skipped out on that for the lecture. But I read the program notes, which were written by the lecturer (who does most of Menlo's program notes and other audience curating), and buttonholed him for a quick interview during intermission, to try to replicate a sense of his presentation. I did present this as best I could in the review. But it was still fuzzy: for instance, he told me that the connection of Beethoven's "Ghost" Trio with sketches for music for an unrealized version of Macbeth has been debunked, but the program notes describe it as real. I could have delved into the Stanford library and researched this, but I didn't have time before the review was due, because I was attending two more concerts that weekend and reviewing them too. (One was the piano recital I described here; the other hasn't come out yet.)
Sunday, November 11, 2018
concert review: Henry Kramer, piano
The smoke from the Camp Fire - which is 200 miles away, but brought visibility down to about a mile here on Saturday - has slowly begun to clear, and I ventured down to the Trianon in San Jose on Sunday afternoon for a piano recital sponsored by the Steinway Society, having chosen it for the interesting repertoire.
The young pianist, Henry Kramer, was jacketless and wore a high-collared white shirt with too-long sleeves. At first I was inclined to think of his playing style as heavy, but then I realized that his clean and emphatic articulation was overshadowing the lightness he could bring to filigree passages by Debussy or Liszt, and that it would be more accurate to describe his style as thick and full.
The virtuosity here was demonstrated when he got to "Clair de lune" in Debussy's Suite bergamasque. The sound was remarkably, and consistently, light and hazy despite the clarity of the touch. Though each note was distinct, the feel was entirely impressionistic.
Elsewhere in the suite, and in the far more harmonically murky L'isle joyeuse, Kramer made the most of Debussy's occasional excursions into rhythmic melodism. That's the inevitable, and highly welcome, result of his emphasis on articulation.
Another large portion of the program was given over to Liszt: late Liszt, pieces you rarely hear: transcriptions of two orchestral pieces from his enormous oratorio Christus, a cradle song and the march of the Three Kings. The former was a quiet piece filled with shining light, and the latter jutted formally until succeeded by a more rhapsodic middle section and ending with big shifting chords.
There was also a piece by Scriabin, played straight, as far as I could tell, without the rhythmic irregularity which tends to bring this composer alive for me. That would be alien to Kramer's performing style. The program said the piece was the Sonata No. 2, but I think it was probably something else. (I'm not a Scriabin expert by any means.)
But the music I was really there to hear was Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy, a favorite piece that received about as clearly-shaped and finely-chiseled a performance as it's ever likely to get. Had Kramer put out road signs, he could not have communicated the shape and direction of this music any more clearly. His ability to play loud and dramatic passages forcefully yet without distortion or abandon, then turn the same controlled style to softer and gentler ends in other passages, assisted but did not fully explain his command over this large meandering work's form. The thunderous conclusion wrapped the concert up with a bang.
The young pianist, Henry Kramer, was jacketless and wore a high-collared white shirt with too-long sleeves. At first I was inclined to think of his playing style as heavy, but then I realized that his clean and emphatic articulation was overshadowing the lightness he could bring to filigree passages by Debussy or Liszt, and that it would be more accurate to describe his style as thick and full.
The virtuosity here was demonstrated when he got to "Clair de lune" in Debussy's Suite bergamasque. The sound was remarkably, and consistently, light and hazy despite the clarity of the touch. Though each note was distinct, the feel was entirely impressionistic.
Elsewhere in the suite, and in the far more harmonically murky L'isle joyeuse, Kramer made the most of Debussy's occasional excursions into rhythmic melodism. That's the inevitable, and highly welcome, result of his emphasis on articulation.
Another large portion of the program was given over to Liszt: late Liszt, pieces you rarely hear: transcriptions of two orchestral pieces from his enormous oratorio Christus, a cradle song and the march of the Three Kings. The former was a quiet piece filled with shining light, and the latter jutted formally until succeeded by a more rhapsodic middle section and ending with big shifting chords.
There was also a piece by Scriabin, played straight, as far as I could tell, without the rhythmic irregularity which tends to bring this composer alive for me. That would be alien to Kramer's performing style. The program said the piece was the Sonata No. 2, but I think it was probably something else. (I'm not a Scriabin expert by any means.)
But the music I was really there to hear was Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy, a favorite piece that received about as clearly-shaped and finely-chiseled a performance as it's ever likely to get. Had Kramer put out road signs, he could not have communicated the shape and direction of this music any more clearly. His ability to play loud and dramatic passages forcefully yet without distortion or abandon, then turn the same controlled style to softer and gentler ends in other passages, assisted but did not fully explain his command over this large meandering work's form. The thunderous conclusion wrapped the concert up with a bang.
Saturday, November 10, 2018
Friday, November 9, 2018
concert review: San Francisco Symphony
The big piece on last night's program was the Shostakovich Violin Concerto No. 1. For some reason, though I like his piano concertos, I've never got on with Shostakovich's string concertos, either violin or cello. The orchestration is vintage S., in sound and style, but the meandering solo part doesn't have the melodic incise I otherwise expect.
Soloist Karen Gomyo, who while playing takes on the severe dour expression of David Oistrakh, for whom the concerto was originally written, gave her part an exceedingly raw and rough tone, sounding every bit like an inescapable evocation of horsehair scraping over catgut, regardless of whatever it is her Stradivarius (yes, that crass sound came from a Strad) actually uses. She switched to a more commonplace smooth dephysicalized style for her encore, a slinky bit of Piazzolla.
But I was there mostly to hear Borodin's Second Symphony, in hopes of exorcising from my mind the last time I heard this out-of-fashion piece in concert, over a decade ago, when its thick and heavy orchestration congealed into a wad of unpalatable mud. And that was from a visiting Russian orchestra! This time was far better and succeeded in pleasing. The secret of the diacritically enhanced Czech guest conductor, Jakub Hrůša, seemed to be the vigor and clarity he gave to the rhythms, phrasing, and accents.
I slipped out of the hall before the last piece, Bartók's Miraculous Mandarin, a work described by its own composer as "hellish" and by me once in a review as sounding like a hideous traffic jam on the freeway. It still can be fascinating to listen to, but I've heard it three times in concert in the last few years, and that's enough.
Soloist Karen Gomyo, who while playing takes on the severe dour expression of David Oistrakh, for whom the concerto was originally written, gave her part an exceedingly raw and rough tone, sounding every bit like an inescapable evocation of horsehair scraping over catgut, regardless of whatever it is her Stradivarius (yes, that crass sound came from a Strad) actually uses. She switched to a more commonplace smooth dephysicalized style for her encore, a slinky bit of Piazzolla.
But I was there mostly to hear Borodin's Second Symphony, in hopes of exorcising from my mind the last time I heard this out-of-fashion piece in concert, over a decade ago, when its thick and heavy orchestration congealed into a wad of unpalatable mud. And that was from a visiting Russian orchestra! This time was far better and succeeded in pleasing. The secret of the diacritically enhanced Czech guest conductor, Jakub Hrůša, seemed to be the vigor and clarity he gave to the rhythms, phrasing, and accents.
I slipped out of the hall before the last piece, Bartók's Miraculous Mandarin, a work described by its own composer as "hellish" and by me once in a review as sounding like a hideous traffic jam on the freeway. It still can be fascinating to listen to, but I've heard it three times in concert in the last few years, and that's enough.
Thursday, November 8, 2018
election results sites
The Guardian has an easy-to-use page showing Congressional and gubernatorial results.
This should amuse anyone who knows their way around California: county-by-county results for state races including the propositions. The gubernatorial results are a typical liberal-vs-conservative pattern for the state these days; some of the others are just weird.
This should amuse anyone who knows their way around California: county-by-county results for state races including the propositions. The gubernatorial results are a typical liberal-vs-conservative pattern for the state these days; some of the others are just weird.
Monday, November 5, 2018
continued in Seattle
Close readers of my previous entry will have perceived that I'm in Seattle. "Why are you here?" asked most of the friends and acquaintances I saw at the regular social event on Saturday (not accusingly, as this somehow sounds, but as in "What's the occasion?") I replied, "Because there is no Potlatch." This semi-regular literary sf convention kept me (and B.) semi-regularly visiting Seattle for years, but its demise removed the specific impetus. Realizing that I hadn't been back since the last one a few years ago is what inspired me to plan this visit with no other occasion but itself.
It did, however, require a lot of planning, particularly in arranging for and juggling the schedules of visiting those closer friends who, for one reason or other, are not active in the social community I saw on Saturday. That mostly worked out, and I've been over the territory from Kent to Lynnwood, from Queen Anne to Woodinville.
Woodinville. It's out in the far reaches, mountainwards, and I'd hardly ever been there before. Woodinville, I muttered. Someday it hopes to be a real ville.
On the way there I drove through Bothell, another place whose name begs to be used in a sentence. "Oh, Bothell!" said Winnie-the-Pooh. Q. Who arranges for the rain in Bothell? A. The chief Bothell-washer.
At about this point in my musings, the friend I was in company with started bopping me over the head.
So, in agreeable company I've eaten Mexican, Chinese, Thai, Mediterranean, and German apple pastry. Out on my own I got to Pike Place Market, where I headed straight for the chowder vendor, and then the Turkish Delight vendor, and then the shop that sells the fine vegetable seasoning, and then was inveigled by another vendor into buying dried cherries, which are tastier than it sounds.
I've visited a few bookstores, including the one with the cats (Hardy, Eleanor, and Buster were out being visible when I was there). A few blocks away, on a walk to check out for lunch a famed boutique restaurant that I decided was not for me, I walked by a small half-basement bar that described itself as "a cat cafe", and sure enough ...
It did, however, require a lot of planning, particularly in arranging for and juggling the schedules of visiting those closer friends who, for one reason or other, are not active in the social community I saw on Saturday. That mostly worked out, and I've been over the territory from Kent to Lynnwood, from Queen Anne to Woodinville.
Woodinville. It's out in the far reaches, mountainwards, and I'd hardly ever been there before. Woodinville, I muttered. Someday it hopes to be a real ville.
On the way there I drove through Bothell, another place whose name begs to be used in a sentence. "Oh, Bothell!" said Winnie-the-Pooh. Q. Who arranges for the rain in Bothell? A. The chief Bothell-washer.
At about this point in my musings, the friend I was in company with started bopping me over the head.
So, in agreeable company I've eaten Mexican, Chinese, Thai, Mediterranean, and German apple pastry. Out on my own I got to Pike Place Market, where I headed straight for the chowder vendor, and then the Turkish Delight vendor, and then the shop that sells the fine vegetable seasoning, and then was inveigled by another vendor into buying dried cherries, which are tastier than it sounds.
I've visited a few bookstores, including the one with the cats (Hardy, Eleanor, and Buster were out being visible when I was there). A few blocks away, on a walk to check out for lunch a famed boutique restaurant that I decided was not for me, I walked by a small half-basement bar that described itself as "a cat cafe", and sure enough ...