faucetry

This is but one of several cartoons I've seen over the years joking about the complexity of bath faucets. I never imagined our shower faucet would be among them. I turned it on to test it immediately on first inspecting this place as a possible rental.

But two successive plumbers - the generalist and the specialist - looking for a possible leak in the shower drain (turned out there wasn't one, so we're OK) could not figure out how to turn on the shower faucet.

You pull the handle. Twisting it left or right adjusts the temperature. To turn it on, you pull it. Had they never encountered one like that before, or known this was something you try?

not to drink

I see that Diet Coke is in the news again. Occasionally I drink that. Mostly I just drink water. I'll drink apple juice from two vendors: hotel breakfast bar juice machines and airplane drink carts. But once in a while I'm offered a drink where something carbonated is the default choice.

In that case, I usually ask for a Diet Coke. I have no brief for or particular fondness for Diet Coke. I ask for one because I want something that
1) is without sugar;
2) has a taste I can tolerate, particularly in regards to undelectable sugar substitutes, and Coke's machine-oil flavor is strong enough to obliterate any obnoxious sugar substitute;
3) they're likely to have in stock, which is why I don't ask for diet root beer, which might be my preference depending on which brand was available if any.

tv show themes

Uh-oh, Rolling Stone has named The 100 Greatest TV Theme Songs of All Time, and there's plenty to disagree with here. (Starting, no doubt, with their all being American.) I went through the whole thing, and ignoring that there were a few for which they had the wrong video, or there was no video, or it's been taken down already, I found I only recognized 30 of the 100 (101, actually). Of course that's largely due to how little television I've watched, though there are a couple shows (Cheers, All in the Family) that I recognize the songs even though I didn't watch the show. I know the Olympics fanfare solely from having heard it played on kazoo at Golfimbul awards ceremonies at Mythcons. On the other hand there are some shows I know I've seen at least a few episodes of that the song made no impact on my memory.

But what strikes me mostly is how bad or simply nugatory some of the listed items are. True, Seinfeld and Star Trek (among those I do remember) are iconic shows and their themes consequently historically important, but musically they're pretty worthless. Of the 70 themes I didn't know there were exactly two that I liked on first hearing: Terriers and Game of Thrones (yes, that's right, I have never seen this show: not one clip, until the opening credits just now).

Of the comedies I watched as a kid, I'm pleased they got in the two best musically: The Addams Family and I Dream of Jeannie, as well as several others which weren't quite so good (but not Get Smart?)

Turning to dramas, I see they also have two of the best songs from shows I watched, Mission: Impossible and Hawaii Five-O (an incredibly dull police procedural show, Hawaii Five-O was worth watching only for the theme song, and in those days watching the show was the only way to hear it). But for exciting and memorable drama show theme songs, nothing beats a British show which is probably thereby off their radar even though it played in the US, The Prisoner.

Another thing that astonished me is their inclusion of some anemic theme for the 1970s version of one game show, The Match Game, when the 1960s version of the same show had the catchiest song ever given to a game show, which was this. Somehow, unlike the songs for other shows I'd watched, this one had completely faded out of my memory until I heard the song without identification about 20 years later, at which point I started climbing the walls in frustration until I established what it was and where I had heard it before.

Well, we could go on.

two memoirs

Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (Spiegel & Grau, 2016)
I once remarked that, at the time of his birth, Barack Obama would have been illegal in half the U.S. states, and got a pedantic response to the effect that it was his parents' marriage, not his existence, that was illegal. That was before Trevor Noah's book was published with its bold and, it turns out, accurate title. There was a classification in apartheid law for mixed-race people, but they were assumed to have been that way for many generations. If the authorities had learned that Noah was the first generation of his mixed-race line, he as well as his parents would have been in big trouble.
Nor were his parents married. His mother, whom he depicts throughout this book as a truly remarkable woman, just decided to pick a white man of foreign origin and (with his permission, I assume) have a baby. Then she had to pretend she was just caretaking him whenever they went out in public.
Life in the black precincts of South Africa is a very strange thing to a white Western reader, but Noah is very good at explaining what's going on in a clear and light, amusing fashion even when the contents are dire. I had none of the "huh? I can't picture this; I don't get what's going on here" that I did on reading Kipling's Kim. Noah's most brilliant piece of explanation comes when he gets to his first local fame, as a DJ at dance parties in the ghetto. (Which he built up to out of previous success as a music bootlegger - another long story.) At these parties, he tells us, there'd often be a popular display dancer whom the audience would cheer on by his name. His name was Hitler.
Noah lets this surreal, actually goofy, scene of people cheering on the dancing Hitler go on for a while before he explains. South African blacks often give their children two names, one in their native language and one that white people can pronounce. The latter is often the name of a famous person, and to South African blacks, Hitler is just another famous person. He doesn't carry the charge that he does for whites. If a black could go back in time and kill one evil person, Noah says, it'd probably be Cecil Rhodes. It wouldn't be Adolf Hitler. And so, Hitler's namesake dances at DJ parties. Amazing stuff.

Tammy Duckworth, Every Day Is a Gift: A Memoir (Twelve, 2021)
I read somewhere that Duckworth was inspired by Noah's memoir into writing her own. Even if so, they're very different. Duckworth, if you need the reminder, is the half-white half-Thai Army helicopter pilot who lost both legs in Iraq and is now a Senator from Illinois.
But that's about all I knew about her. She doesn't say a lot about her mother, who's actually Chinese by ancestry but was born in Thailand and considers herself Thai. Tammy (a nickname: her birth name is the Thai Ladda) says a lot more about her father, a scion of old but poor Virginia stock who made his career in southeast Asia because, his daughter tells us frankly, he could be a bigger shot there than at home. For a while. Eventually his career sputters out, hope springs eternal but he can't get another job on the level he's had, and he's too proud to become whatever the equivalent of Walmart greeters is they have in Indonesia, which is where they're living at the time.
Tammy escapes from this by going back to the US - which she's barely previously visited - for an education and then joins the Army, signing up as a helicopter pilot because that's the closest a woman can get to combat. Eventually she gets too close for comfort, and tells the tale of the day her legs got blown off in a straightforward fashion, emotional only in the sense that you feel she wishes she could go back to Iraq and do it all again.
For if one thing is clear from this book, it's that Duckworth is a real Army grunt, if you can use that term for an officer. All the dirt and smudge and raunchy jokes - she tells a few in this book - are the life for her, even the packages of candy from home that melt in the Iraqi heat and arrive as masses of kludge. It's the details like that that make this a really readable book. For instance, she finds there's only one firm selling women's cotton underwear (you don't want nylon: it'll melt and bond with your skin in a fire) that'll ship to Iraq: Victoria's Secret, so that's what she wears. This becomes of importance when it turns out that, if you're wounded and taken away, everything in your kit is distributed to other soldiers.
After that, her time in the hospital and in physical therapy comes off as a doddle, though she insists that it was nothing of the sort. But she's so strong and determined, she brushes the challenge off.

after black friday

For years I made it a personal moral principle never to go out and buy anything on Black Friday, the big shopping holiday the day after Thanksgiving. But this must be, though I hadn't noticed it, the second or third year I've given that up, owing to our pandemic-inspired decision to pick up weekly grocery shopping, which we do on Friday. (A day originally chosen because, when B. was working, that was the only weekday she was never at work.)

So I went out on Friday on the usual errand of picking up our groceries and getting myself lunch from the Chinese take-out next door, feeling that I wasn't contributing to shopping madness because, when driving home from Thanksgiving at 5 pm, we hadn't seen anybody camping out in store parking lots as we had in previous years. The frenzy seems to have died down a little.

But then on Saturday morning, the newspapers - as is their wont - chose to attribute this to economic recession.

thanksgave

I didn't want to write about Thanksgiving until after it was over. We came home, fed the cats, skipped dinner. Then I took the nap I'd managed to avoid during the festivities. Then I placed the weekly online grocery order and extensively cuddled a cat at his insistence: he's probably anxious because I'd been away all day. And now, if he doesn't come back again and occupy both my hands to hold him up, I can write this post.

We were a little nervous about going to niece T.'s house for a gathering of relatives and T.'s friends, some of whom had flown in to be there and weren't too enthusiastic about getting covid tested, and one of whom was anti-vax. (I tried as inconspicuously as possible to stay far away from her.) B. and I were the only people there wearing masks, and of course at a meal we couldn't wear them all the time.

Well, it was a good occasion. T. set out a fine spread, her husband brined the turkey before smoking it and that came out well, though the prime rib was vastly underdone. This time I brought a large casserole dish full of simply plain steamed broccoli, about the only vegetable that wasn't salad, and most of it was taken.

Among the more welcome seldom-seen visitors were T.'s youngest brother and his wife, who've just moved back here from Texas, which they'd decided they'd had quite enough of, and are now living in a house tucked up in a small fog-bound valley on the coast, which is exactly where B. and I would want to live if we were buying a house. We'd need one that didn't require stairs to get in, though.

My own out-of-town brother and his lady were there also, and I'd seen them earlier in the week when we'd taken an outing to the narrow-gauge railroad through the redwoods up in the mountains.

Hiding in the background at the party was the background music, which was Christmas songs. They're coming! But this was a greater variety than usual which made for a refreshing selection: I recognized a song from A Charlie Brown Christmas and a cover version of "You're a Mean One, Mr Grinch."

book review: The Eunuch

The Eunuch: A Novel by Charles H. Fischer (Gabbro Head)

The publisher, whom I know and who published an essay of mine in a scholarly anthology a few years ago, sent me an advance copy of this novel and asked me to write something about it when it was formally published, which it now has been. It is very long, about 470 pages, and I confess I have not finished reading it. I took it with me on our drive to Washington state, and read from it assiduously, but I was still less than half done when we got home and other more pressing tasks have swept me away since then, though I was not uninterested in what I was reading.

The book was recommended to me, specifically, because I am a fan of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast and the publisher thought The Eunuch shared a like air of grotesquery. I see the similarity, but I don't think they're really much alike. Peake's grotesquery is Dickensian, while Fischer's is vulgar and lewd (words of description, not condemnation) which Peake's is not. This book is filled with bodily functions, especially both the sexual - for reasons that will be apparent when I describe the setting - and the alimentary. There's much description of strange and repulsive foods, and of toiletry matters - the story is especially loaded with flatulence.

The story is a first-person narrative by a eunuch named Nergal, who is court harem-master to the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II. He wrote it all down in wedges on clay tablets, and this is the translation, though a (fictional) introduction suggests that the translator was rather free with the material. Which I have to wonder about: 470 pages of clay tablets? Fischer, or the fictional translator, is pretty good about using the words wedge or wedging instead of write or writing, and the result can be pretty funny, though occasionally he slips.

It's actually the complexity and intricate weaving of the governmental operations which are more like Gormenghast than the grotesquery, though in the manner of presentation rather than the specific content. The main plot concerns the king's responsibility to mate regularly with the inhabitants of his harem and sire lots of bastards. This will foster the health of his kingdom and make the rains come. Unfortunately this king is getting on in years and is rather impotent, and Nergal, who has to keep track of all this, is spending more time than he wants covering up the problem. Then, one day while he is trying to guide the king's member into doing its duty - yes, he's responsible for that too - the concubine absently caresses Nergal, which causes him to fall in love with her. He's a eunuch, but as has been made clear earlier, he's not entirely devoid of romantic or sexual feelings.

Oh boy. It was soon after that little plot crunch that I had to stop, but things do not look good for anyone concerned, and remember that, though some years after Nebuchadnezzar's death, Babylon fell.

The prose is fairly clear, and the storyline flows, though there's nothing slim or taut about it. It's a rather comic story in its particularly grotesque way. I think there are readers who will really enjoy this novel.

encores

There was an article in the Washington Post - probably you can't see this without a subscription, sorry - about the disappearance of encores. This was among pop music groups, most of which appear to be hard rock or punk groups, who say that they dislike the ritual or performative aspects of pretending they're done and then coming back, or that the process wastes time in which they could be playing another song or just leaving and letting everyone get home sooner.

The only pop music I attend is folk concerts at the Freight, and there the encore is always expected and entirely performative. You announce that what's next is your last song, there's a big final applause after it and you walk offstage during this, leaving your instruments, and then you come right back out and play another one. Then you're done. It's ritual, it's really rather silly, but the going off and coming back doesn't waste much time. I don't see that changing.

In classical, the encore occupies a different position. In non-pops concerts the final work is usually a big and heavy one, so the encore occupies the position of a light dessert, quite different from a pop concert where it's usually another song like all the others. (Though sometimes pop bands do something different: Steeleye Span used to do encores of acappella pop-song numbers after their concerts of electric folk.) Nor are encores entirely obligatory in classical but seem to be affected by the reception: I've rarely experienced an encore when the applause wasn't highly enthusiastic, and a performer doing a series of concerts on successive evenings may play an encore one night but not the next.

There are also unwritten rules in classical as to who performs an encore. Soloists in concertos with orchestra: sometimes. Whether the evening's schedule can afford the added time seems to be a factor here. Visiting soloists giving recitals: often. Visiting ensembles, from chamber groups to orchestras: usually. Ensembles playing in their home auditoriums: almost never.

Encores are traditionally rousing and lively, but in recent decades I've noticed a tendency towards slow and quiet encores, if only to calm the audience down and make them stop applauding so the orchestra can leave. Classical custom is that conductors, and soloists if any, go on and off stage ("curtain calls" it's still called though there is no curtain). The orchestra, which had stood up at the conductor's motion to share in the applause, sits down again when the conductor walks off, and by established custom can't leave until the applause ends. I've seen conductors short-circuit this by grabbing the concertmaster by the hand and dragging him or her off with them; then the rest of the orchestra can follow.

Sometimes the conductor or soloist announces the encore. Sometimes you can't hear what they're saying. Once I was reviewing and misheard what they were saying; that was embarrassing. Sometimes when reviewing I have to contact the concert management afterwards and ask. Sometimes they don't know but think they do: that, too, can be embarrassing. Rarely when a piece sounds distinctive or familiar but I don't know what it is, I hum it into a voice mail to myself and then look it up when I get home, usually in Barlow & Morgenstern's theme index.

assaulted by battery

The nearly four-week saga of our nonfunctioning garage door opener is over.

It was back in the last week of October that this automated device, which we'd had installed three years ago to replace a rattling old one, started to beep, persistently and annoyingly.

Step 1. Find message on the wall-mounted control that says the battery needs to be replaced.

Step 2. Fail to find a manual.

Step 3. Online queries reveal where the battery is to be found in the device.

Step 4. Remove the battery. This is no pocket-sized 9-volt or D-cell. No, it's a huge honking four-inch cube of a lead battery which must weigh at least 30 pounds. Two metal tabs stick out of the top, around which slip plastic cuffs at the ends of wires that come out of the battery compartment, and therein lies the rub. At least removing it causes the beeping to stop.

Step 5. Phone various door installers in hopes they will sell me a battery. They don't keep them in stock.

Step 6. Fail to find batteries listed in the manufacturer's online parts catalog.

Step 7. Phone the manufacturer. Uninformed fellow there can't tell me which kind of battery I have, as the model number on the battery isn't the parts number in their catalog, but he does tell me where on the website to find the right box to fill in the word "battery."

Step 8. Order what looks like a likely battery. It arrives in 2 days. Alas, wrong kind of connector, wires with plastic cuffs on this part instead of the other part.

Step 9. Phone up the manufacturer again. Better-informed fellow tells me how to ship the wrong battery back (I haven't yet learned if I'm getting a refund), a little saga of its own because FedEx, even though they shipped the thing to me, is afraid of batteries; manufacturer fellow also confirms that some other battery in their catalog is the right one, which I couldn't tell because the photo on the web site doesn't show the tabs. But he also tells me the same battery may be had for less expense at Home Depot.

Taking this advice is a mistake that costs me nearly three weeks.

Step 10. Visit Home Depot, only to find they don't have the batteries in stock. They have to be shipped to the store. Actually they don't have the same battery but one listed as "compatible" with it. I should have stopped there, but I order it. This is a Monday. It's supposed to arrive on Wednesday of the following week.

Step 11. On the Thursday, having had no word, I phone the store. A voice-activated message tree takes me to the wrong department, but the guy there is willing to look up my order. It's arrived but has to be "prepared," he says. How long will that take? For that, he has to transfer me to the right department, whose person declares that no, the battery has not arrived, no further explanation available.

Step 12. Phone Home Depot corporate customer service. They find a notification that it had arrived the previous week! But they can't reach anyone at the store to explain this, so they offer to re-order the battery at no extra cost. I roll my eyes at this but agree. (After this call I get an automated satisfaction survey. I was pretty satisfied with this person, but fortunately there's a question about whether you would shop at Home Depot again and I gave the strongest NO available.)

Step 13. Wait another week for the re-order. This time the battery arrives and I drive to Home Depot to pick it up. And when opened it ... has little plastic cuffs sticking out of the top. Doesn't fit onto the cuffs on my machine's wires. Not "compatible."

Step 14. Back to the manufacturer's web site. Order what the second guy had told me was the right battery. It arrives in 3 days. It has tabs. They fit in the plastic cuffs. Stuff the heavy battery back in the compartment, wait a day for it to charge (as advised by the web site instructions). Door now opens. Success.

So next time the battery fails - which may be in only another three years, because this model has lots of online reviews complaining about its short lifespan - I can hop from step 4 directly to step 14 and skip all the others.

three concerts

1. It seemed to me that, of the Music at Kohl Mansion concerts this season, the one most worthy of reviewing should be the 40th anniversary celebration, so I covered that. In addition to commissioning a new work for the occasion, they revived selected movements from two previous commissions.

I once got some reader feedback for describing the Kohl audience as "mostly elderly Hillsborough gentry," Hillsborough being an exceedingly wealthy nearby suburb, but my impression of them as very conservative in their musical tastes was confirmed by the program book's story of how the first commission, in 1987, was made to Ernst Bacon because he was a fairly conservative composer who wouldn't disturb an audience that "was comfortable with Beethoven and Brahms, and only ventured hesitantly into Bartok."

Nevertheless, as basically tonal as the Bacon work was, and far more so than the querulously academic David Carlson commission that followed, it was as nothing to the placidly agreeable, though well constructed and crafted, piece by Shinji Eshima premiered tonight. The audience loved it.

It was written, without any clogging or congestion in the ensemble, for a quintet of assorted instruments including a marimba. The one previous occasion Kohl had featured a marimba was by the same composer. This time they didn't try to lift the marimba intact onto the performing platform (when they did that before, all the mallets and sheet music piled on top fell off), but assembled and disassembled it on stage.

2. Last fall, MTT canceled half of the second week of his two-week return visit to SFS, due to being weak from still recovering from brain surgery. This year he is in much better health - he looked healthier - and did the whole two weeks. I attended the second one, an all-Brahms program featuring the Serenade No. 1, a rarely-heard huge expanse of gentle tranquility. And then they played the Piano Concerto No. 1, which is supposed to be stormy, in the same gently tranquil, extended way. It was supposed to be 40 minutes but lasted closer to an hour.

Emanuel Ax was soloist, and for an encore MTT, announcing a theme of "Old Jews play the old masters," sat down at the piano next to Ax and they played a four-hand rondo by Schubert. I'm sure Brahms would not have objected.

3. I also ventured up to the Freight for a band called Altan, because I felt it was time for a little more Irish folk music in my life. Four-to-five piece group - fiddle(s) and accordion, guitar and bouzouki - gave a typical mix of fast dances and slow songs, with a reedy vocalist. Enjoyable, which is what I was there for.

Garth speaks

John Garth gave a talk at Marquette University today in connection with the Tolkien manuscript exhibit. I listened in via Zoom.

At one point he quoted from The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf musing how he'd like to be able to wrest a palantír to his control, "to look across the wide seas of water and of time to Tirion the Fair, and perceive the unimaginable hand and mind of Fëanor at their work." (Doing what? Creating the palantíri, among other things.)

And John said how much he'd like to be able to perceive the unimaginable hand and mind of Tolkien at their work - creating The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, among other things.

Yes. Sigh.

on beyond zebra

Back in late July, I visited my doctor for a check-up, and while I was there, a couple nurses' aides came in and jabbed me with a pair of vaccines I needed, one in each shoulder. (This had nothing to do with either covid or the flu, both of which were handled separately at other times.)

One of those was for shingles, and I was told that this would require a second shot in 3-4 months. The aide sat at the exam room computer to make an appointment for my second shot, stopped, made a phone call, then told me it was not possible to make an appointment that far in the future. That's 3-4 months. I thought I'd had appointments longer out than that in the past, but that's what they said. So I made a note in my calendar to contact them in October about this.

Before I could contact them, they called me. This is mid-October now. Ah, yes, you need your second shingles shot. Let's see, our earliest available appointment is ... in March.

March? That's in five months! Back in July, you couldn't make an appointment as far off as 3 months. And quite unsuitable for the shingles shot, being 8 months after my previous one when it should be 3-4.

So they offered to look up others of their locations and found a medical office building some ten miles away where I could get one in a few weeks. Much less of a backup.

So thither I drove yesterday and had no trouble, beyond discovering that afternoon commuter traffic was already heavy at 3 pm - I don't often go that way in the afternoon - so I ducked off the freeway and took obscure back roads that I knew about offhand because I've been absorbed by street maps of the area since I was four years old.

The vocational nurse who gave me this one told me that I'd definitely suffer some cold- or flu-like side effects from this jab by the evening, but so far I haven't, just the usual sore arm.

Bizarre as the scheduling process here has been, it's much less complex than the saga of replacing our garage door opener's battery, which is approaching three weeks and still ongoing.

concert review: Meta4

A rather painfully elaborate name for a string quartet. My editors sent me to review them because it seemed like one of the more intriguing things that Stanford would be putting on this term.

The concert was in the Studio, a small cube in Bing's basement. Ostensibly the reason to put concerts here is for more intimate, smaller-scale performances, and I repeated the party line in the review, but regardless of the unusual repertoire this was just a string quartet concert, the kind which Bing's acoustically excellent main space can handle just fine. I suspect the real reason for putting concerts in the cube, as has been when I've been there before, has been their narrow audience appeal. It would be too dismaying to face a sea of empty seats in the main space. Even the cube was far from full.

But it was an enriching artistic experience, not least because I finally heard a piece by Kaija Saariaho that I really like, and one by Amy Beach that isn't all wet. For once I knew beforehand for sure that I'd have two tickets, so I invited an athenais along and she was also enriched. The only problem was chairs not made for concentrated sitting. Now I'll associate Sibelius's string quartet with having a sore butt.

one thrilling play

I've been to the Tabard Theatre in downtown San Jose before, most recently for The Odd Couple, which was well done, but a small audience meant for rather anemic laughter. I thought maybe a serious thriller might work better if it were a good enough play, and this one looked promising: Wait Until Dark by Frederick Knott and Jeffrey Hatcher.

It's set in a basement apartment in New York some time probably in the 1950s or maybe 60s. It's got a complicated plot but it ends up with the woman who lives there being menaced by a psychopathic criminal who is sure she has the valuable missing MacGuffin. The gimmick is ... she's blind, so she turns the lights out on him.

Only a small part of the play actually takes place in total darkness, and there's another small part where it's just light enough to see shapes; the rest there is a light on somewhere, even if it's only coming from an open fridge. (But why, if she's pulled all the fuses, is there power to the fridge at all?)

The principals, Jaime Wolf (who is not blind) as the blind woman and Brandon Silberstein as the psychopath, are Tabard veterans and were excellent, but so was the rest of the cast who are mostly new to the company. Despite the rather confusing, dumped-in-at-the-deep-end opening, the plot proceeds apace, and our heroine's preparations for the confrontation which she knows is coming contribute to the suspense.

It turned out to be a good show and well worth the effort everyone put into it. It started out as a Halloween show, but it's still playing through this Sunday, so I'd recommend it to locals.

the Butler did it

It has been brought to my attention, by someone who actually follows Twitter, that "Sir David Butler, the father of psephology, or election science, died [on Tuesday] at the age of 98."

The person posting this was Michael Crick, who published a biography of Sir David a few years ago. I read that book and wrote here about it and the acknowledgment therein of my small contribution to it.

Crick writes in his tweets that Butler "promoted the word 'psephology' to describe the new study of election science." He writes carefully. Butler promoted the word, he didn't invent it. My contribution was to assist Crick's researchers in discovering who did invent it.

It was C.S. Lewis and the Inklings.

concert review: CaIifornia Symphony

Last weekend I also got up to Lesher for the California Symphony, a professional ensemble that's worth the hour-plus drive to get there, for not only good performances but appealing programming, the latter being a quality that Symphony San Jose seems to be opting out of.

This concert was all music for strings, and except for Dvorak's Serenade for same, which came out a little gruff, they were all intriguing back-burner items. The Introduction and Allegro by Elgar, and the Concerto for String Orchestra by Grazyna Bacewicz (Poland's greatest woman composer: I wrote about her before when Bard Music West devoted a small festival to her work) both had a seasoned texture to them which suited the works very well. It brought out the Brahms in Elgar and the Bartok in Bacewicz.

The last item was even more unusual, the Eclogue by Gerald Finzi, which is the slow movement from an otherwise incomplete concerto for piano and strings. The pianist, Elizabeth Dorman, got mostly soft unaccompanied passages and a little rumination with the strings. The music exuded Finzi's native quality, best describable as Vaughan Williams and water. Oh, come on: it was pleasant enough.

The rest of their season will feature the most amazing selection of symphonies: the now-neglected Franck Symphony (I don't have a ticket for that one: maybe I should go anyway, despite it also featuring a Chopin piano concerto, snore), Walton's First, and the Symphony by Hans Rott, something I never thought I'd hear live in this lifetime. The Walton either, actually. This is the kind of stuff I'd drive to Fresno to hear if Kuchar were still there, and Walnut Creek isn't nearly so far away.

concerts review: Israel Philharmonic

The Israel Philharmonic made a rare local appearance, under its new music director Lahav Shani, so I decided to hear this noted ensemble. They gave two concerts - that I knew about - one at Davies, an auditorium so large only a massive orchestra can sonically fill it, and one the next day at Bing, an auditorium almost too small for a full orchestra, though it managed to contain the full blast this time, which hasn't always been true in the past.

Repertoire the first night was Mahler's First, the only one of his symphonies I really like, and a curiosity, the First of Paul Ben-Haim, most distinguished of the generation of Israeli composers active in the mid-20C. I'd heard some of his music before, but not this one. It was a well-argued symphony of weight and power, especially notable for a march segment at the end of the first movement. For the second night, an all-Prokofiev program, all well-known stuff: his Classical and Fifth Symphonies and excerpts from Romeo and Juliet.

This is an orchestra of crispness and sparkle rather than power or drive. Not that their flow was listless, but it didn't reach the status of awesomely compelling that you'd expect of an ensemble this good. The pinpoint exactitude of the sound, however, was amazingly vivid, and they kept it up for two whole concerts. Fast figurations came like hardened crystal of extreme detail and complexity. Shani is an impressionistic conductor who waves his arms around in general phrases rather than beating time or giving cues. Usually in a top ensemble this is a sign that the conductor has already done his job in rehearsal, the players know how to do the music, and the conductor is still there mostly for show.

At Davies but not at Bing there were protesters in front of the hall (which fortunately is soundproofed). In the absence of Gergiev-like endorsements of atrocities, which so far as I know there haven't been in this case, I don't hold cultural groups responsible for their government's misdeeds. And if I did, I'd start with the U.S.: I note that the protesters held the U.S. complicit in Israel's actions. But I'm not going to boycott all U.S. orchestras so I won't an Israeli one either.

Both concerts began with the playing of both the U.S. and Israeli national anthems. I stood up for both, out of respect. I don't approve of various things done by governments of either nation, but I believe firmly in both countries' right to exist and I want to acknowledge that.

didn't know that

I know about Shostakovich's 1934 opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. That's the one that Stalin disliked so much he caused an editorial to be published in Pravda titled "Muddle Instead of Music." Its threatening tone - no idle thing in an autocracy - supposedly kept Shostakovich, though loaded with honors, nervous for the rest of his life.

I also knew that the opera was based on a story, which on looking it up I see was written by Nikolai Leskov and published in 1865. And I presumed the title reflected the idea that here was a woman like Lady Macbeth except she lived in this place in Russia.

What was new to me came when I borrowed an obscure library book I needed for an article on Tolkien. It also had an article on Turgenev, whom I've never read and know almost nothing about. And from browsing through this I learned that Leskov's story was part of a trend, because Turgenev had some years earlier written a story called "Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District." And he also wrote one called "King Lear of the Steppes," though that one (undated in the article) may have come later.

And yes, here it's explicit: Turgenev considered Shakespeare's characters to be basic human types, so he wrote about those types recurring. In his "Hamlet," the narrator meets a man whose real name he never learns, and who considers himself an ineffectual nebbish. Just like Hamlet! Or at least one view of Hamlet.

Interesting that there should have been this trend, but I'd never seen it mentioned in connection with the opera.

changing the frickin' clocks

I got home late last night, with a preassigned duty of changing those clocks that B. couldn't reach or that she didn't want to deal with.

The challenge was the time display on our new stove. There's nothing in the manual on how to change it, but I know I managed to do it back in April or whenever that was. I found that I'd written an instructional note down in the margin of the manual. It said:

"To change clock: Push buttons at random until display changes to '----'. Then you can enter the new time."

This time I figured out how to handle the buttons, and changed the note.

a drip of news

1. According to a news article, only 17% of the voters in our state have voted so far. But I am one of them. I dropped my ballot off at the deposit box at the city library on Wednesday (the little statue out front of a man reading was still dressed up in Halloween costume) and got the e-mail from the state on Friday saying it had been counted.

2. There's been a little rain this week.

3. Best obit for Geoff Nuttall, best because it really captures his character. "inspiring and infectious energy that radiated on stage" ... "charming and ebullient manner, boundless enthusiasm, and a disarming sense of humor" ... "energetic and physical musical performances, jumping out of his chair, bouncing around on stage, and enthusiastically moving his whole body" ... "playing with such visceral intensity, exuberant joy, incredible sweetness, and depth of sorrow." Yes.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

I had just gone to a concert featuring Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto and Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances; why (by pure coincidence, I trust) another one? I thought about not bothering to go, but I realized why I went after I got there. Because a volunteer orchestra managing to play at professional level is one thing, but a truly world-class orchestra is quite another. And it's because SFS is such an orchestra that I go to the trouble of going up there.

Juraj Valčuha (native of Slovakia, newly appointed music director in Houston) conducted like a flowing stream of water in human form. Behzod Abduraimov (from Uzbekistan) played the Prokofiev piano part; the integration of this with the orchestra was the striking feature, quite different from the bold separation I heard before.

Although the Rachmaninoff's program note writer has been dead for over a decade, it was news to me that one briefly-appearing melody is a serene transformation of a stormy theme from the composer's First Symphony, a work he'd withdrawn and which was therefore unknown at the time the Dances were new. I'd never noticed this before. But I paid attention when it came up here, and sure enough, it is. (Much of the time I find I don't believe such offered equations.)

The difference in the program was that, instead of a Mendelssohn march for wind band, this concert had a recently-composed opener, The Spark Catchers by Hannah Kendall, a Black British composer in her 30s. It sounded a lot like John Adams's Short Ride in a Fast Machine: jangly, abrupt, and bumpy.

cat daddies

Terrible title, but a great movie if you like cats. B. found a blurb for this online, and forwarded it to me, and when I found it was playing in the City, a block from one of my favorite BART stations (the one next to the great burrito place, where I of course stopped for food on the way in), I decided to go.

It's a series of documentary interviews with about ten men who have cats. With plenty of footage of the cats, of course. Men from around the US, mostly men with pretty traditionally masculine lives, some of whom were a bit surprised to find themselves cat people. A truck driver who's taken his cat to 45 states. An outdoorsman who takes his cat hiking. An entire fire station full of men who've adopted a cat they found behind the station. It lives in the bay with the fire engines - doesn't like to come inside - but knows enough to get out of the way when the engines head out. A shaved-head bruiser of a stunt man whose girlfriend, a fellow stunt performer, fell for him when he sent her a photo of him cradling his cat, a 25-pound Maine Coon. (That men having cats will impress women is a minor but continuing theme in this movie. Don't hold your breath waiting for incels to notice this.) The founder and CEO of a cat neuter-and-release nonprofit in Brooklyn, who got the idea from walking the streets and seeing all these feral cats around, and who gives most of the film's narration about the virtues of cat ownership.

But the most touching part is a series of segments tracing events in the life of a homeless man in Manhattan who rescued a dying kitten he found and nursed it back to health, and has become utterly devoted to this cat. Then he had to go in the hospital for several months for a series of operations; fortunately he'd befriended a woman, a secretary who worked in the area he hung out, who volunteered to take the cat in while he was hospitalized. I hope their friendship survived the scratches from her cat that he's tsking over on his cat when we last see them.

Most of the cats are disconcertingly placid. But some like to ride on their humans' shoulders or lick their faces, things that Tybalt does to me. So I know I'm not alone in having a cat who does that.