movies with Benedict Cumberbatch in them

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

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

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

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

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

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

didn't go

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

more distress

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

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

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

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

sleep

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

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

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

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

I'm very tired of and annoyed by this.

Music@Menlo: more bites at the apple

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

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

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

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

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

Dave Nee, 1953-2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

groceries gone bananas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

added travel tips

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

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

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

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

after Mythcon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mythcon report

I'm back from my trip to Mythcon, and now's the time to write about the conference part of the trip.

Mythcon was held in the unlikely grounds of Weatherford, Oklahoma, because the library of the local college, Southwestern Oklahoma State University, is the home of the Mythopoeic Society archives. Our online records are hosted by their website, and - as I saw when I visited by appointment on Friday - the printed records are stored in their vault. All this is at the behest of enthusiastic Mythie and SWOSU library archivist Phillip Fitzsimmons, who also chaired the conference.

Our meeting venue was not on campus, but closer to our hotel (a quick mile's drive or so) in the Stafford Air and Space Museum, established by, or at least because, early US astronaut Thomas P. Stafford (always called "General Stafford" in hushed tones around here) was a native of Weatherford. I went to the museum exhibits and was hugely impressed, especially by the numerous, sometimes replicas and sometimes the real thing, of full-size aircraft, starting with a full-size replica of the Wright Brothers' original plane. I had never seen such a thing outside of grainy old photographs before, and this conveyed the nature of the craft better than do old photos.

The museum has - or had; I think they're in the process of converting it to new exhibit space - a large function room, divisible by temp walls like a hotel ballroom, which it rather resembles. We had it divided in three, registration and dealers in front, one programming room in the middle (mostly online speakers), and the other in back (mostly live). You have to walk through the middle room to get to the back, which could become tricky. I was leaving the back room just as a new session was beginning, and realized as I got to the middle room that if I didn't sit down, the online paper presenter would have only one person in the audience. So I did sit down, and listened to a paper whose fascination wasn't dampened by the fact that I hadn't even heard of any of the three books being discussed. Another time I passed through as the online speaker was explaining that Treebeard introduced Merry and Pippin to homosexuality. That time I just kept walking.

I missed a lot of interesting papers because I had to keep dashing back to the hotel to take naps, regular sleep being a rare function, and another got canceled when the presenter had to run off to the hospital (he's OK), but I did get to some good ones, including John Rosegrant's exploration of Tolkien's sound symbolism and Eric Rauscher's discussion of what Charles Williams's poetry got from Gerald Manley Hopkins and T.S. Eliot. I also heard both Guest of Honor speeches, which I'll not attempt to summarize here. The scholar Joe R. Christopher, still hale at 91, broke his arm in an accidental fall the day before the convention, and while he and his sling did attend, they didn't get there in time for his scheduled speech, which was read by Janet Brennan Croft. The author David R. Slayton delivered his rousing defense of literacy at the banquet. We were all - there were less than 100 in person - stuffed into the banquet room of Lucille's Roadhouse, the restaurant adjacent to and sharing a name and ownership with our hotel. This is clearly the place to dine in Weatherford; I had three dinners there and it never got tired. Weatherford apparently counts as in the South, and the food was mostly Southern in nature (my three entrees were ribs, chicken-fried steak, and pork chop), including having bacon in the green beans, a bit of a surprise if there were any vegetarians present, which I guess not, though the full menu does cater to them.

Plenty of conversations had between papers and late night (the hotel's breakfast nook doubled as an evening con suite) with old friends and new people, some of them wandering in from Signum University's Mythmoot, which I've been pressing for years as the best possible source for new Mythies.

It was hideously hot outside, but dry so not enervating; and we mostly stayed inside with pleasant but, unlike on some previous occasions, not violently overblown air conditioning. Pleasant, I'd say it was indoors. Parking was nearby and sufficient in quantity at both museum and hotel. The Procession marched from the museum's front lobby into the programming room, avoiding the outdoors altogether.

One oddity passed around the conference had been found in miscellaneous donated archives, a small ceramic jar labeled "Gopher Guts." None of the old-time Mythies present had any idea what that was, and Janet asked several people if they'd invent stories about it and write them down in a little booklet. I hope she publishes this; the two before mine were very clever. I thought for a moment and wrote down that it commemorated the ruler of a tiny German principality, Gofür (spelling varied). In this particular principality, probably inspired by L. Sprague de Camp, princes were subject to regular recall elections. Citizens voted by dropping a nut or pebble into one of two jars labeled Gopher Gut and Gopher Schlecht, I forget how I explained the extra "s", and this one had been taken as a souvenir by a US Army soldier after WW2, eventually finding its way into the MythSoc archives.

Into Oklahoma

Thursday I drove north out of Texas into Oklahoma. To avoid getting on the turnpike, I took minor highways and found myself in the town of Duncan. There I visited the Chisholm Trail museum, commemorating the huge cattle drives of the late 19C. A docent showed me around and told me a long anecdote about an early automobile they had on display, so when I saw an exhibit on determining a cow’s age by looking at its horns, I was tempted to tell her Buddy Hackett’s joke about cow horns, but I refrained.

Lunch in a round steakhouse that also had catfish, then onward. Mid afternoon got me to Anadarko, an old Indian agency town that had two tribal museums. My tour books hadn’t mentioned the one run by the Wichita tribe, who were the native inhabitants before the feds started moving displaced eastern tribes in. It was an excellent museum, full of well presented materials on their customs and their sad history. The other museum belonged to what it insisted on calling the Delaware, one of those displaced eastern tribes, though that’s a European name. It had a lot less to say, including not saying how to pronounce the tribe’s name for itself, which is Lenape.

I had wanted to eat dinner in Anadarko before heading on to Mythcon in Weatherford, because there’s not a lot of places in Weatherford and I didn’t want to use them up. But it was still early enough that I had time to kill. So I thought of doing the deep countryside exploring in search of weird rock formations, next on my agenda, and then circling back to Anadarko.

There was also the question, where in Anadarko would I eat? It’s far tinier than Weatherford even. A Yelp search had brought up just two promising places, a Mexican restaurant and a bbq place, the latter with no Yelp reviews whatever. I’d be the first! Turned out it had no reviews because it didn’t exist. The building was long deserted and had a notice posted on the door from the city ordering the property owner to clean up the abundant weeds and trash. I posted an update to Yelp.

The Mexican place had a promising menu, but by the time I was finished in the countryside, I was in no mood to return to Anadarko and then head back out again. My maps didn’t show how to get on the back country roads to Weatherford, but I guessed, and guessed correctly, and I had my bbq ribs there.

Fort Worth

Texas. In july. It’s perishingly hot here; the only mitigation is that indoors, the air conditioning is not equally punishingly cold. It’s comfortable. This may be a rural Texas or specifically Fort Worth thing, because I have found that super air conditioning even in Dallas.

I’m in Fort Worth because Mythcon next weekend is in Oklahoma and I took a nonstop flight to DFW. On previous trips here I went to Dallas, so this time I am trying Fort Worth. Dallas thinks of itself as a sophisticated Eastern city, but Fort Worth is the Gateway to the West. It has a Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, which I visited despite knowing nothing of any cowgirls except Annie Oakley. I might learn something, and I did. Turns out there were a lot of ranch-bred women skilled at riding and roping in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, though there’s not much in the displays about any of them. And these skills are still to be found among ranch women today.

Fort Worth also has a Stockyards district. It’s a small area bursting with a riot of local color, rather like Beale Street in Memphis. And in among the Western wear shops and the Western furniture shops and the saloons are some steakhouses. I couldn’t go to the Stockyards without having a steak, right? {And if ir wouldn’t appeal to you, you wouldn’t be much attracted to the Stockyards anyway,) Ah, it was a good steak, richly flavored without seasoning, crusty and textured and marbled and juicy just as I like them. One down

fuzzy suggestion

So it's an article about what people who've been "canceled" are doing to make a living. Kevin Spacey is selling stainless-steel rings with the initials of his character Frank Underwood on them.

And this is all compared to the movie Tár, at the end of which the once-renowned symphony conductor Lydia Tár, having been immersed in scandals, is reduced to conducting concerts of music from video games.

But is this really so degrading? Pop and rock songs have been a feature of symphony orchestral repertoire for decades. The London Symphony recorded a whole album of orchestral arrangements of Rolling Stones songs over 30 years ago, for instance. I've been to a couple of symphony orchestra concerts featuring music from anime tv shows and what not. I thought the music was noisy and crappy, much worse than the music heard in Tár, but the conductors seemed to like it and to be playing it of their own will.

Or is the point in Tár that conducting such music isn't objectively degrading, it's just embarrassing for such a formerly elitist star? In which case her comedown is not really that dramatic, not the equivalent of a major movie star hawking cheap rings.

I dunno. It's as mystifying as the movie was.

fraud, Helen, time

1) So Trump gave his speech on election fraud. His real motivating factor here is his belief that he's so wonderful that nobody would vote against him (except his enemies, who hate him for unfathomable Reasons), so if he loses an election it must be rigged. Note his concentration on the presidential election he lost and not at all on the ones he won, though if there were fraud it would be widespread.

The substantive argument, which I've seen put forth in good faith by sincerely deluded people, is this: there are jurisdictions where the earliest-counted ballots trend Republican, but by the end of the counting they turn out to be heavily Democratic. It seems to them self-evident that Democratic election officials have dumped in loads of fake ballots to change the outcome.

What hasn't occurred to these people is that the earliest-counted ballots may not be representative of the whole. The first ballots counted are the absentees, and absentee voters tend to run Republican. But they'll be outweighed by the in-person votes that come in later.

Besides, if there were loads of fake ballots it would be easy to detect this, starting with implausible turnout figures.

I can testify, as a former Hugo administrator, that the first tranch of votes coming in will in no way predict the eventual winners, and there's no particular reason in the Hugos for the earliest ballots to lean one way or another.

Our election security is fine, and proposals to require ID at the polls, which wouldn't prevent the kind of fraud that's being alleged, are merely smokescreens to make it harder for Blacks, poor people, and other Democrat-leaning constituencies to vote.

2) Classics professor Denise McCoskey on the casting of Helen of Troy:

If you want to talk about historical accuracy, the Ancient Greeks would be far more upset that these things are not being done in Greek than about anything involving the appearance of these characters. To have Helen speak English is a far bigger transgression than to have her appear as a skin color that you don’t like. I think that’s something that is getting distorted for obvious reasons. And I don’t have a problem with that, if you want English-speaking audiences to engage with Helen—I teach English translations—but then you have to say that there’s a lot of ways we can translate Helen that has to do with our audience and what we want to think about today.

3) The bill enacting permanent Daylight Saving Time, which has passed the House, still needs to get through the Senate and the president's desk before it becomes law. Let's hope it fails one of these hurdles. People have forgotten that we enacted permanent DST once before, in 1974. But the outcry against morning darkness in the winter was so intense that it was repealed within a year. What this story proves is that DST can't really adjust the length of the day: what its supporters actually have a beef with is the axial tilt of the earth, and no legislation will help with that.

There's apparently a competing congressional bill that would return us to permanent Standard Time, what we had before DST was invented, and that I would support.

Music@Menlo: one bite at the apple

As I'm not professionally reviewing any more, I have no required commitments at the Music@Menlo Festival, and I'm going to be away for most of it anyway. It started today; for the brief period before I go, I squeezed in just one item, tonight's free Prelude concert by the young professionals of the International Program.

We had a firm and dutiful rendition of Beethoven's rather perky Op. 1 No. 1 piano trio, followed by a zippy and sizzling Dvorak Op. 81 Piano Quintet, notable for the soulful viola solo in the dumka slow movement from Rang Tae (she's from Korea).

Kind of leisurely; started at 5, wasn't over till after 6.30. Good thing I wasn't going to the evening lecture that started at 7, or I wouldn't have had time for what I did do, which was hunt down dinner offsite.

book review, no, adolescence review

Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin, 2024)

I'm not the audience for this book, which is addressed to the parents of tweens and teens and concerns the children's addiction to smartphones and other electronic devices. I read it because it was the topic for my public library's monthly book discussion group, and I was a bit surprised it was chosen, because usually even the nonfiction choices are primarily intended to entertain the reader, whereas this is hard informative facts about an urgent social problem.

I'll note that Haidt attributes the problems with children to two things: the lack of supervision of their online lives, and the over-supervision of their physical lives: that they lose the opportunity to learn in-person social interaction both from having all their communication being online (startling side effect, though: a decrease in teen pregnancy) and from not being allowed to go out and play unsupervised. (One of our book club members attributes this restriction to the reflex of suing the supervisory agency if anyone is injured.)

And I'll agree that children need to learn how to go out and take responsibility for themselves, because if they don't learn before they're adults, how will they ever do it as adults? The purpose of rearing children is to produce an adult as the end process, and certainly what I was able to do for myself in my 20s was the result of hard-won experience in my teens.

But otherwise this book mostly struck me as an illustration of how different I, and those I know, are from the norms described here. I don't know a lot of young people today, but those I do know do not suffer from the anxiety and depression described here, and they're not always leaving their heads buried in a screen. They're sharp and self-motivated, and I think that's what saves them from a syndrome which Haidt describes as widespread - so it is a major problem - but far from universal.

My own separation struck me in a chapter describing how young people crave risk, and they're not getting it. Crave risk? I never did that, or any of the stupid teenage tricks that illustrate it. I did do some risky things as a child - I rode my bicycle along twisty country roads that, when I drive them today, I'm astonished that I never got hit by a car, though traffic was much less heavy them - but they didn't feel risky. On the other hand, I never rode roller-coasters, which aren't risky but feel as if they are. When asked at the time by other kids why I declined, I always said the same thing I also said when asked why I refused to see horror movies: "Scary things are scary." It seemed to me self-evident that fright was an unpleasant sensation that was to be avoided when possible.

Haidt also talks of the addictiveness of videogames, especially to children. I expect I would have been immune to that. Admittedly, the games of my youth were not as sophisticated or engrossing as those of today, but they were plenty addictive enough. In my grad school years in the early 1980s, I had some friends who liked to hang out in the video arcades they had then, full of big consoles that displayed games like PacMan. I played those occasionally, but I was not strongly attracted. Others were.

Then there was Dungeons and Dragons. This is, or was in those days, a tabletop game played with paper and pencil and dice, so it's hardly a 21C video game. But it was massively addicting. My friends who took it up in college kept playing for decades afterwards, just not me. I tried it for a few weeks and then quit because I was bored. It didn't generate the kind of storytelling that interested me.

Then there's the point of social media as something children demand access to as a means of gaining social prestige and validation among their peers. I wonder how I would have fit into that environment were I a teen today, because at the time I was a teen, my social prestige and validation level was zero. I was a complete social nonentity in school, at least until I joined the science-fiction club, and part of my immunity from teen misbehavior was that I knew I would never fit in to the social networks so there was no point in trying. I suspect I would have shied away from social media for the same reason had it been around, but on the other hand its ability to enable the bullying and disparagement that were even then a major feature in the social nonentity's life - that would have made life very hard. So I don't know. I despaired a lot in those years, without any electronic media to make me do it, and I suspect its presence would only have made things worse. I would be lucky to survive adolescence today, most likely.

hot

The temperature the last few days has been approaching 100F, which is about as hot as it ever gets here. (We're in the first valley in from the coast; further in, it gets hotter, which is why we're not moving there.) The last couple of days I finally found it too difficult to bear, and I've been spending my whole daytime at air-conditioned public libraries, occupying my time by reading some of the books they have there.

I'm finding that several hours of coolth inures me slightly to the heat when I emerge out of it, but it's still tough. Reports say the temp will drop somewhat tomorrow; I sure hope so.

latest scare

So now it's our turn to be terrified of cyclosporiasis. No more green salads for a while - which is a nuisance, as B. often has salads for lunch, and it's my custom to make Asian chicken salad, with romaine lettuce, for dinner on really hot days, to avoid cooking. And we have some really hot days lining up for this week.

An informative e-mail prior to Iolanthe yesterday named some restaurants in the neighborhood recommended by theater staff. By far the closest was a ramen place. Ramen restaurants here do not serve the cheap hot-water-and-noodle dish loved by impecunious college students everywhere. This is a big bowl of really serious Japanese soup, and unlike much Japanese food it's been known to appeal to my tastes. I went by the restaurant, and saw on the menu posted outside that just about everything came with scallions. I like scallions, but as a garnish they're frequently served raw, and they're among the most frequent cyclospora vectors. So I passed, and ate somewhere else.

Gilbert and Sullivan review: Iolanthe

The Lamplighters, San Francisco's Gilbert & Sullivan troupe, is reinventing itself, due to the financial pressures facing local theatrical groups of all kinds now. No more large-scale productions carted around to big regional theaters around the Bay Area; they're commencing small-scale productions in small local theaters in the City. This Iolanthe's entire run was sold out before the first performance, so I can't send you to it even though it'll be running next weekend; all I can say is that they'll be doing Pirates of Penzance in the spring.

The venue was the ODC Theater in the Mission district, just three blocks from the BART station, a small space converted from a brick warehouse by installing a steeply raked bank of merely nine rows of seats on one side. Since it looks like one anyway, the setup was a backstage theater area, with costume racks and other paraphernalia floating around; the setting was simultaneously the London of the original 19C show, with a bit of San Francisco salted in, and the backstage it looked like. Private Willis was converted to a stagehand, and made several nonspeaking appearances in that capacity in Act 1 before his first canonical appearance in Act 2, for instance.

There were a few other tinkerings with the text, mostly to change outdated references. Strephon is now "a parliamentary Costco: he carries everything." When Mountararat says "This comes of women interfering in politics," he's roundly booed, and the conductor, former Lamplighters star soprano Jennifer Ashworth, says, "Watch it, baritone."

The costumes, however, were scarfed from the Lamplighters' extensive costume shop which covers decades of productions, so they were full-scale. Mostly pretty conventional, though the fairies were in dark and eerie hues.

The performances were lively and full of imaginative stage business. When the fairies want to run around but not be seen, they put big signs reading "Invisible" around their necks. The only thing that didn't work was the fairies' ability to control the peers' movements, which made hash out of the "don't go" song. The best singer all-round was Ash Hurtado as Phyllis. Her voice was a quite spectacular combination of the light and delicate with the strong and powerful. The dialogue between Mountararat (John Melis) and Tolloller (Jacob Bronson) where they're trying to negotiate over claims to Phyllis's hand was also quite delightfully done. Iolanthe (Rose Waldman) dominated the show rather than being buried underneath everyone else as often happens. Strephon (newcomer Matt Skinner) was bluff and intense, the Fairy Queen (Sonia Gariaeff) was fierce when she ought to have been, nd the Lord Chancellor (veteran Chris Uzelac) was played with heft but a minimum of eccentricity.

As an experiment, this worked, but I hope they come up with different new and original ideas for subsequent shows.

dental prosthesis

I've mentioned that I had as broken tooth extracted. This leaves a space which has to heal for a period of several months until an implant can be placed. In the meantime, there's a gap, and to keep the neighboring teeth from moving over and filling the gap I've been given a prosthesis. This isn't just an artificial tooth to fill up the hole; the artificial tooth is embedded in a hard plastic device that fits over my entire upper teeth and was made by taking a putty impression of my bite.

I can't eat with this thing in, and I'm not expected to wear it more than half the time. I've been putting it in after dinner and leaving it there until breakfast, taking it out briefly if I have a late-night snack. It's very snug, hard to get in place and equally hard to remove. I've been assured it will loosen over time, and even after only several days I'm noting a bit of that, just a bit. It's transparent and close to invisible from outside unless you look closely, and it doesn't interfere much with my speaking, though yesterday when I told B. I had been watching the old movie Mr. Deeds Goes to Town she thought I'd said Mr. Bean.

And that's going to be my duty for the next few months. This is just one of the medical regimens that shape my life right now, but it's the easiest to write about.

cleverest remark I've heard lately

"I poured root beer into a square glass. Now I have just beer."

quiz lolly

Slate has been running a daily quiz of six questions each with four multiple-choice possible answers, which runs the gamut from six questions I know the answers to offhand to six questions I have absolutely no idea of.

Occasionally there's a clever question or set of answers, and I liked one of today's in a cultural quiz; the question was, what were the names of the other two members of Josie and the Pussycats? Though I've seen the movie, I didn't remember the answer - which was Valerie and Melody - but I got it right because of what the wrong answers were. They were 1) Veronica and Betty, 2) Violet and Patty, 3) Velma and Daphne. I could remember where all three of those pairs came from, though two of the sources I've had no contact with in a long time, so elimination gave me the right answer.

concert review: TACO

So I did, Sunday afternoon, attend an Independence Day celebration of a sort. The Terrible Adult Chamber Orchestra, that group of nonprofessional musicians who get together to practice purely for the fun of it, was holding one of its rare public concerts, in the grass-lined amphitheater bowl in the park at the Mountain View civic center.

B. plays violin in this orchestra, so I chauffeured her to the event - a lot easier than driving in by herself - and stayed to listen to the concert. The conductor, knowing I was coming, even labeled one of the ADA chairs with my name. I was grateful for the chair: sitting on the ground at the top of the bowl, as the rest of the audience did, would not be in my repertoire these days.

For a patriotic program, they played not the usual custom of American classical standards like Gershwin and Copland, but resurrected one of standard patriotic songs, most of them in very fine arrangement. We had the national anthem, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, America ("My country 'tis of thee"), and America the Beautiful. We had a couple of Sousa marches (Stars & Stripes Forever and the Liberty Bell, of course). We had a few popular songs of patriotic cut: George M. Cohan's Grand Old Flag, Irving Berlin's God Bless America (on seeing that title, I always wonder if America sneezed), and Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land.

Most of these were instrumental, though the national anthem and one other were sung by a 13-year-old female student with an impressively powerful voice but some rather irregular, TACO-like, ways of expressing it, plus a pop-singer-like way of circling around the final note in a phrase before landing on it. The orchestra needed a second try on one or two of the numbers, but handled most of it pretty well.

One catch with a volunteer orchestra is that you can't control what instruments you get. For this concert, there were no oboes. Fortunately, a clarinet in C can cover the oboe part and serve as - brace for it - a fauxbo.

on the need for Alex Ross

There is no need for me to write about the soul-crushing news that Alex Ross, probably the finest classical music critic of all time, is retiring from his regular job as critic for The New Yorker, where he would occasionally - too rarely - write long and thoughtful articles, far beyond quotidian concert reviews, about the state of music. He'll continue to write, not always about music (as not always in the past, either), but it's not the same.

I don't need to write about it because it's already been said eloquently by Joshua Kosman, Will Robin, and Lisa Hirsch. And here's Ross's own thoughts in reaction to this.

I've met Alex Ross a couple of times. He would occasionally come out to speak in my area, and I was able to chat with him after the talk. I particularly remember thanking him for his then-recent article about Florence Price, whom I'd been erratically pushing as the first great American female composer. Now I had Ross's endorsement of her greatness, and it later turned out to have kicked off a virulent Price revival, whereby her previously obscure music is now heard all the time.

Such was the respect in which Ross was held and the influence that his statements had. As a sometime music critic myself, I can say that he was the highlight, the monument, of my profession.

Tolkien in the old days

One feature of the early Tolkien fandom days of the 1960s whose import is hard to recapture today is the little cries of bliss that Tolkien fans would emit whenever a major publication dared to acknowledge that Tolkien existed, and maybe was important, by publishing an article about him.

One such article appeared in the Saturday Evening Post issue with a cover date (normally the date the issue goes off sale, but whatever) of exactly sixty years ago today, July 2, 1966. It was titled "The hobbit-forming world of J.R.R. Tolkien" - puns on the word 'habit' were almost obligatory in media coverage of Tolkien in those days - by Henry Resnik, and you can read it on the SEP website here.

One thing you'll notice if you read the article is that, despite some useful factual information on Tolkien and how he came to write The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - Resnik could have drawn a lot more than he did from his telephone interview with Tolkien which is transcribed here, starting on page 37 - it's mostly about what the article calls "Tolkien people," i.e. American fans, whom Resnik has also interviewed in quantity. As with most such articles, the interviewees are better at demonstrating their intense devotion to Tolkien than at explaining what about his work excites or moves them so.

Despite its prominent publication, then - and it was the only article the SEP ever published on Tolkien, by the way - I find this a trivial and rather useless article for anything other than recording testimonies to this devotion. The presentation of the article - the tireome-pun title, Tolkien's photo inserted in a drawing of flowers, with photos of buttons reading things like "go go Gandalf" in Tolkien's alphabets running down the page without explanation - suggests that the editors didn't take the article very seriously either, and sure enough, they didn't.

This is from a memoir by Otto Friedrich, then managing editor of the Post, describing the editors' attitude towards the whole phenomenon of 'teen articles' (the youth of Tolkien's fans is emphasized by Resnik):

It was the celebrated youth movement, though, that precipitated the most vehement and irreconcilable arguments. Emerson [William A. Emerson Jr., the editor in chief], who had two adolescent daughters, regarded the whole phenomenon with a mixture of horror and fascination. His commercial instincts, however, convinced him that this was a subject that would sell millions of magazines. [After the magazine's first Beatles cover] sold out, and a second Beatles cover did the same, Emerson knew that nobody cared very much about explanations. A cover story on Sonny and Cher sold very well too, and so did one on Bob Dylan, and Drugs on the Campus, and Teen-Age Drinking, and the Peril of Pep Pills. Our younger editors were still not satisfied with this paternalistic approach, however, and in time the youth fad became almost a religion among magazine editors, and so we went along with the herd in publishing stories on body paint and old-costume fashions and various weird rock groups.
Whether this was really good journalism was a matter of endless debate. I myself strongly opposed the whole trend, arguing that most Americans do not dance to rock music or smoke marijuana, after all, that all the teen-agers together represent a relatively small part of the population, and that the median age in this country is not getting younger, as many people think, but older. In short, as the times changed, my own role gradually changed from that of the young militant to that of an aging conservative. ... I vetoed the whole subject of Tiny Tim. (Decline and Fall (Harper & Row, 1970), p. 218; Friedrich was 36 at the time, Emerson was 43.)

I think the condescending and dismissive attitude that reeks from this passage, which clearly applies to the Tolkien article - Resnik says the Tolkien Society of America was so wildly popular it had 800 members! 800! - is also evident both in the presentation and the content of the Tolkien article.

And that's what we had to deal with, back then.

two 19C history books

Robert Strauss, Worst. President. Ever.: James Buchanan, the POTUS Rating Game, and the Legacy of the Least of the Lesser Presidents (Lyons Press, 2016)
The publication date explains how it was still possible to attribute this superlative to Buchanan, who sat there unmoving as the nation plunged towards civil war, having already endorsed the Dred Scott decision, which essentially negated the free states' anti-slavery laws.
The book starts out as whimsically as its title, with the author pawing through his father's history book collection for info on Buchanan - there isn't much. But it mutates into not just a full biography of the man, but a history of his political times. There's an entire chapter which has very little on Buchanan, but is a detailed account of the political background behind the presidential election of 1856. There's also a comparison of Buchanan with other Bad Presidents, explaining why he's worse.
The one thing Strauss doesn't do is explain how Buchanan could be such an active, even belligerent executive in other areas - the Mormon rebellion, the Pig War, he even launched an invasion of Paraguay (Paraguay?!) after the government there fired on a US ship - and yet be so inert at southern threats to take over US forts. Some of the other books on Buchanan that Strauss mentions - he's quite thorough bibliographically - get into this, but Strauss doesn't allude to it. (Basically, he was secretly sympathetic to their cause, but this motivation got buried in postwar historical analysis.)

Speaking of which, there's
Jonathan Horn, The Man Who Would Not Be Washington: Robert E. Lee's Civil War and His Decision That Changed American History (Scribner, 2015)
The decision was, of course, the one to resign his US Army commission and go with his state Virginia's decision to secede, even though he thought secession was a bad idea, had nothing but misgivings about the war to come, and he wasn't enthusiastic about slavery despite being a major slave-owner himself.
What Washington had done was declare himself primarily a citizen of the US as a whole. He would never, Horn says, have supported a state's secession. Why didn't Lee? Why did Lee decide that the one thing he couldn't do was raise arms against his native state?
Horn doesn't really answer this question, and despite the title doesn't concentrate on the decision. This is a full biography of Lee, though it skips lightly over some of the eventless years in the peacetime army. There's nevertheless a lot of interesting background, especially about his personal and family finances. Did you know that 1) Lee was available to lead the Harper's Ferry campaign against John Brown, although he was stationed out in Texas at the time, because he was home on leave after his father-in-law died? 2) that for many years Lee was not a legal resident of Virginia at all, but of the District of Columbia, because Arlington was in the west bank portion that was part of D.C. until retroceded to Virginia in 1846? 3) although he'd previously worn a mustache, he didn't grow his beard until after the Civil War started?

no movie

There's a new movie that's been getting a lot of enthusiastic recommendations, called The Sheep Detectives.

It turned out to be on Amazon Prime, so I could see it for no added cost.

I watched the first few minutes.

I hated it.

concert review: Redwood Symphony

Saturday evening was Redwood's annual outdoors concert, held in the courthouse square downtown. It's right near the train station, so I took the commuter train up. It runs every half an hour, well into the evenings, on weekends, and the parking garage down at my end won't be full.

Advertising for the concert advised bringing lawn chairs. I don't have one, and wouldn't be inclined to lug it on the train anyway. I figured I'd arrive early and sit on one of the low stone walls that surround the plaza. But what I found was that a large number of slat chairs had been arranged in front of the orchestra's tent, so I could sit in one of those.

The orchestra was under a tent, and was festooned with microphones, the speakers for which gave a tinny and metallic sound to the music, especially the strings. They played Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, which I'm always up for hearing, sloppy and warbly in places, but the Largo and finale came out pretty much OK.

Also on the program, the waltz from Swan Lake, and two extremely catchy military marches, the second of which conductor Eric Kujawsky is convinced was an homage to the first: the "Colonel Bogey" March, and the main theme from the movie The Great Escape, by Kenneth Alford and Elmer Bernstein respectively. I know both marches well, but this was the first time I'd ever heard either in concert.

When I was very small, 3 or 4 I guess, "Colonel Bogey," then in the flush of fame coming off its appearance in The Bridge on the River Kwai, was my favorite piece of music. I wrote lyrics to it about my baby brother, the first line of which is all I can remember and which went, "Mikey, he is a pike-pike boy." What a pike-pike boy may be, I can alas no longer remember.

When we went to a record store to buy a recording of "Colonel Bogey," my parents encouraged me to make the request. "Do you have 'Mikey Is a Pike-Pike Boy'?" I asked. The clerks disclaimed knowledge of this until my parents told me to sing it. Then they said, "Oh yes, we have that."

vacation planning

I'm planning a major vacation, or what counts as major by my standards, next month. This started as a convention trip, but I hanker to tootle around what's strange country to me while I'm there. And having made plane, car, and hotel reservations, I've been exploring the matter of what to do and see, and just as importantly what to eat, while I'm there. This involves checking out a whole host of tour books - I'm partial to Moon and Lonely Planet - from various libraries, jotting down notes about tempting things located where I'm going, and then checking everything online for accuracy and up-to-dateness. Detailed planning, with lots of options rather than a rigid schedule, whets the appetite for the trip.

There's two catches. One is that things closed on the one day of the week that I'll be there are a specialty everywhere. And also, some areas are better covered by tourist guides than others. I'm visiting four states on this trip, and I find that while there's plenty of tourist information on Texas and New Mexico, for Oklahoma and Kansas the material is more limited. I have some old AAA tourbooks, from back when they were still covering restaurants, and both states have entries in the sketchy but intermittently useful "Off the Beaten Path" guidebook series, which I was able to find at one cozy library. That helped.

Having made my lists of sites and restaurants, I then print out a series of maps from Google Maps of the various towns and small cities I'm visiting, and mark on them the locations of my sites. Bigger cities are more difficult to handle this way, but photocopies of urban area insets from the state maps, and of tourist districts from the tourbooks, serve as substitutes.

What am I seeing? I'm inclined to history museums, mostly - not the little local ones that collect miscellaneous junk, but serious explorations of the history of a region. And some scenery, so long as I don't have to take a hike to see it, since long walks are beyond me now. And as for eating, I follow the way of the Trillin, which is to look for solid but not fancy expressions of the local cuisine. In Texas and Oklahoma that means steakhouses and barbecue, and in New Mexico lots of green chile. Also, Louisiana cuisine - my favorite US regional - leaks over as far as central Texas, so I'm noting that as well. There's lots of Mexican and Tex-Mex places too, and I'm noting those for when there's nothing else or when I simply want a change, but since those are cuisines well-supplied at home, I'm not prioritizing it for the trip.

Now to turn my attention to preparing to pack, and shopping for anything I'll need.

I will

All the signing and stamping have been done, and B. and I have officially created our wills. It's a rather complicated procedure; we're establishing a living trust and putting some of our assets into it, with the trust as the sole heir of each of us. Then, after we're both deceased, come the bequests and the distribution of the residue of the estate. This, our financial advisor explained, will simplify matters and avoid probate. I won't live to see it, of course, but I hope it works out that way.

After getting the documents drafted, for which we employed an online legal service, we needed witnesses - for which we asked the nearest nephew & his wife - and a notary. Then we needed the relevant assets transferred to the trust, which meant visits to brokers and a lot of paperwork which isn't complete yet.

Our medical provider had already nudged us into filling out advance directives using their forms (a lot better drafted than the ones the legal service provided), and we're keeping those with the same documents.

the file vanishes

This has happened to me more than once lately.

I'm using a library computer, saving files onto my USB drive. I check the directory frequently; the files I've already copied are all listed as saved files. I've chosen my USB's directory, no other.

When I'm done, I carefully use the "eject" command before removing my drive.

But when I take the USB drive to another computer, the files I've saved have all vanished. They're completely gone, no trace.

How do I stop this from happening?

concert review: Garden of Memory

Owing to scheduling glitches, I missed last year's edition of the annual walk-through avant-garde concert held at Chapel of the Chimes, Oakland's ornate columbarium and mausoleum. But I got there this year, nabbing a nearby parking space by arriving 2.5 hours early, with my lunch packed in my car.

Unfortunately many of my favorite performers didn't get there this year. So instead of focusing on them, I decided to emphasize the walk-through aspect and prowl around until I found things worth sitting and listening to for a while.

Garden of Memory always begins at 5 pm rather unpopulated, but although the organizers limit attendance, it tends to get more and more crowded over its four-hour length until it becomes deucedly uncomfortable. So I figured I'd start at the part of the building that gets the most crowded later on, the east end of the old wing, and I headed straight for the room designated the Garden of St. Matthew. Instead of being a niche like many of the "garden" rooms, it's along a major pathway. When I've been there before, interesting music was always going on, but I could never stop and listen to it but had to proceed directly towards the exit on the other side of the room, and the reason was that the room was so crowded that, if you stopped, you were blocking the only (and invariably busy) pathway.

So this time I got there early to get a spot where I could stop and listen, and found singer-songwriter Majel Connery on double-tracked vocals and electronic keyboard, accompanied by Felix Fan on electronic cello. I'd actually heard Connery here before, and was impressed with what I heard, but I'd never sealed her down as one of my favorites. I have now. I found this stuff enrapturing; unfortunately nothing of hers online really sounds like what I heard, so I guess you'll have to take my word for it.

Proceeding onward, I wound up in Laura Inserra's old stomping grounds (she's not there this year), the Garden of Eternal Wisdom, where I found violinist Shira Kammen, hammer dulcimer player Robin Petrie, and Celtic harpist Shelley Phillips playing what sounded like Celtic folk music with a Middle Eastern edge to it. I was able to grab the only chair in the room and sat in comfort for quite a while to listen to this charming stuff. Getting lost in the building is part of the experience, the publicity says, and as always in this room I noticed someone starting at the event map trying to figure out which room they were in. (I whispered it to them.) When I left, I found the twisty passage leading to the room was packed with people waiting for an opportunity to enter and listen, so again I had been wise to get there fairly early.

At this point, I found it was time for a set I wanted to hear in the largest venue, the Chimes Chapel, customarily shared by 3 or 4 performers. This was a contemporary classical art song recital, mezzo Silvie Jensen accompanied by pianist Sarah Cahill (founder of this concert series and a regular performer here) in songs by Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, and some other younger composers whose names I didn't know and didn't catch. The Glass and Monk sounded very typical of their composers although I hadn't heard these particular pieces before.

I then hung around for the next set, which was the women's chorus Kitka - which I first encountered here, many years ago - applying their standard nasal vocals to their usual repertoire of obscure Eastern European and Central Asian folk music. As always, a half hour set by Kitka is easier to take than a whole concert. Talking with the people next to me beforehand, I found they'd never heard Kitka before. This is going to be unusual, I warned them.

By this time it was 7:30 and I moved onward to the new wing, which I'd avoided earlier in the day, as it's more spacious and is consequently better saved for later when things are more crowded. Here I passed by a lot of performers of ambient noodling, none of which attracted me enough to make me want to sit down and listen for a while. So eventually I meandered back down to the entrance and left just before the closing time of 9 pm.

MTT memorial, pt 2

The second MTT memorial was the annual Pride Concert of the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony, a group of LGBTQIA+ and allies, held at the SF Conservatory's concert hall. It was pretty well packed.

The highlight of the concert was the local premiere of a song cycle by Jake Heggie, titled "Good Morning, Beauty," to poems by the performance artist Taylor Mac, who refers to the poems as "a present to queers in long-term relationships," and they're about the long-termness of it. It says: "Good morning, beauty / How are you here? / How has it happened? / Year after year?" The art song settings with elaborate orchestration was conducted by music director Robert Mollicone and sung by mezzo Nikola Printz, who went ambigender in an outfit that was a man's black suit on the right and a woman's white dress on the left. And the dedication in the program book read "to the memory of Michael Tilson Thomas and Joshua Robison, whose fifty years together embodied everything the piece celebrates."

Also on the program, a suite reconstruction of the orchestral music for the 1939 Wizard of Oz, a movie with iconic status in this community, composed by Herbert Stothart (who won an Oscar for doing so), based partly on the song melodies by Harold Arlen (who also won an Oscar for that).

And Brahms's Third Symphony. Why Brahms, who as far as we know was straight? Let Mellicone explain: "This felt like a great tie-in for Pride not only due to the broad spectrum of emotions involved, but also because of the musical code embedded in the opening (and recurrent) statement of the work: Frei aber Froh, or 'Free yet Joyful.'" It was a somewhat hairy performance, with things oddly sticking out of Brahms's mellow texture, but nicely and passionately performed.

MTT memorial, pt 1

(pt 1? Yes, pt 2 is coming along in a couple of days)

Regular San Francisco Symphony guest conductor James Gaffigan was scheduled to lead Beethoven's Ninth this week. After former music director Michael Tilson Thomas died two months ago, management decided to repurpose this concert as a memorial to him.

This was appropriate, as the Ninth was a signature work for MTT. He performed it in his inaugural concert as music director in 1995, and I heard him conduct it at least twice - when he recorded it in 2013, and in the last concert by him I ever heard, in 2023.

To the Ninth - which was originally scheduled as the whole concert - management added new material as a first half. It began with brief appreciation/reminiscences by representatives of the orchestra, the chorus, and the symphony board - all women, by the way. I particularly enjoyed the chorus member talking about the time that MTT, with a combination of curiosity and whimsical joy, scheduled a fiendishly difficult choral work by the Italian ultra-modernist Giacinto Scelsi. Thanks to MTT's attitude, both performers and audience had a great time.

Then, three brief works - a lullaby movement from Brahms's German Requiem, done just as a memorial, I guess; Ives' The Unanswered Question, because it was a favorite of MTT's; and a raucously Bernsteinian squib by MTT himself, titled Agnegram.

Gaffigan took the three instrumental movements of the Ninth with broad imperturbability, satisfying without trying to dazzle. The Ode to Joy was bolder and busier in its instrumental presentation. The chorus burned through the score with unspeakable power, towering over everything Beethoven forced them to do. Principal soloist bass Peixin Chen gave an impressively deep sound, with a hollow tone that sounded as if he were singing from within a very large cave. Tenor Thomas Cooley was lighter and fleetier, with a pleasing strong tone quality. The two women don't get enough solo material to judge, but soprano Jessica Faselt and mezzo Kelley O'Connor were both strong and clear in voice, topping each other in turn as they sang together.

that was strange

I was up in the middle of the night, and occupying my time watching a YouTube clip of a John Oliver segment, when all of a sudden the picture froze, though the sound kept sailing on. As this went on for a while, I force-closed the browser, re-started it - the tab was cued to just before the picture stopped - but it only played for a couple of minutes before this happened again. Repeat, rinse, and again.

I got through the entire video eventually, but then the browser - I use Firefox - started freezing whenever I tried doing something else. Rebooting the computer didn't help. I'd start Firefox, it'd work fine for a couple minutes, then it'd freeze - and it wouldn't unfreeze; at one point I left it alone for an hour to see what would happen.

Then it got to the point where it was freezing as soon as I'd start it. Before it got that far, I'd searched for help, and the only clear advice was to uncheck something called hardware acceleration, which I'd already done to solve some other problem. Beyond that was things I couldn't do, and I was thinking about taking the computer in to the software wizards when they opened in the morning, when all of a sudden the problem stopped, and the browser works fine again.

Well, this computer is nearing the end of its lifespan anyway, so sooner or later I'll have to do something, but in the meantime I'm just going to hope this doesn't recur. If I'd been asleep when I should have been, I'd never have noticed anything.

another day

Last week's searing temperatures have calmed down, and we're back to the merely uncomfortably warm. B. runs the fans in the bedroom all night, and this enables us to sleep - in fact, I need to keep a heavy robe on because of the moving air.

All we have to worry about locally right now is the World Cup. My interest in this is best measured with a zero, but I do have to worry that when a game is scheduled at the big local stadium, the traffic closures can extend as far as the passing highways, which I sometimes use. So I've put little "avoid 237" stickers on my pocket calendar for days that games are scheduled, one of which is today. But I don't think I'll have to go that way any time soon.

listen to Elim Chan conduct

In search of online interviews and other such publicity material about Elim Chan, the San Francisco Symphony's new music director, I found a number of full-length concert videos of her conducting various European orchestras in standard classics of the repertoire. They were all good performances - I listened to the bunch of them with full appreciation - but two struck me as particularly outstanding. They captured the fervor and intensity that these pieces had when new and bold, they were led and played with full commitment to the music, and they had me captivated on the edge of my seat throughout - an experience I find rare enough in concert and even rarer in recordings. But this is the amazing conducting that I heard in person when she led Holst's The Planets in a guest appearance at SFS a few years ago.

One of these particularly outstanding renditions was of Brahms's Fourth Symphony, his last and most experimental essay in the form, and my long-time favorite of his. Compelling and urgent.



The other was the monster itself, Beethoven's Fifth, the work that originally sold me on the heavy classics. If bad performances have led you to find this work dull and routine, just listen to this fiery attack.



The other full-length recordings I listened to of Elim Chan conducting included:

Tchaikovsky's Fifth

Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade

Shostakovich's Fifth

Shostakovich's Tenth

Beethoven's First

critical mutterings

Dave Hurwitz, executive editor of ClassicsToday.com, has over the last several years been publishing literally hundreds of videos on YouTube featuring him talking about various aspects of classical music: reviews, lists of the greatest (or worst) this and that, opinion pieces, and on. He mostly eschews music clips for copyright reasons, and I wish he had transcripts, because it's tiring to listen to him yammer for half an hour where you could read it in five minutes.

Anyway, one of his latest opinion pieces was billed as a praise of the San Francisco Symphony for hiring Elim Chan as its new music director. I say "billed as" because much of it was actually a complaint, and as often when listening to Dave (I call him by his first name because he's so personalized and intimate in his presentations) I begin to think he's yammering more than he can coherently and judiciously talk about.

Let's start with what Dave gets right. First, he's absolutely correct that picking a fairly young and well-regarded conductor like Chan was a wise choice. After Michael Tilson Thomas retired, another senior conductor like Esa-Pekka Salonen was a good idea, because Salonen had the authority and seasoning not to be overshadowed by the long and fabulous reign of his predecessor. But after a fairly short Salonen regime - and we weren't expecting a long one, just perhaps not as short as we actually got - now's the time to raise someone younger, experienced but not encrusted, up from the next tier and see what she can do.

Second, Dave is concerned that ten weeks a year will not be enough time for Chan to really put her stamp on the orchestra. A great music director has to really commit to their post; they can zoom off and guest conduct elsewhere, sure, but they can't be a jet-setter just dropping in for a couple weeks once in a while.

But what Dave didn't note is that Chan's contract says ten weeks only for the first year. Maybe she already has a lot of other commitments for that year. Starting with her second year she'll be here longer; maybe not long enough to meet Dave's standards for commitment, but it's a step in the right direction. Also, even the ten weeks is a contractual minimum; it's possible she could manage more.

My other complaint is his characterization of Esa-Pekka Salonen flouncing off in a huff because he didn't like the orchestra's policies. That's unfair. You have to remember that Salonen didn't need another music director job when he came to SFS; he didn't even want another one; but SFS sold him on it by offering him an irresistible opportunity to do things he really wanted to do. And then, because of budget concerns which really didn't make any sense, they took those things away. And I'm not talking, as Dave is, about the superfluous European tour that got cancelled; I'm talking about special programs like the SoundBox and the Collaborative Partners initiative.

And Salonen didn't flounce off; he didn't renege on his contract. He simply said that this was not what he signed up for and declined to renew his contract when it expired. I think he had every right to do that, no call to be criticized for it, and it was the right thing for him to do considering the circumstances. It was the circumstances - the orchestra's unnecessary retrenchment - which was at fault.

That's where I think Dave Hurwitz is off-base, and Joshua Kosman - former critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, whose judgments heavily informed mine - has a better take on it.

a miscellaneous Jane Yolen memory

Jane Yolen has passed on. She certainly accomplished a lot while she was among us: author of literally hundreds of books. Many of them very short children's books, but some were longer. I have about 35 of them. I probably cherish most some of the short story collections, but my strongest memories are of some of the full-length novels: Briar Rose, Cards of Grief, The Devil's Arithmetic. I am also particularly glad to have an essay collection on fantasy, titled Touch Magic.

What really sticks with me about Jane Yolen, though, is that for some years we were pretty good friends. As in, if we'd see each other at a convention we'd sit down for a long chat. I think this began as a result of her first (of two) appearances as Mythcon Guest of Honor, in 1984. I was editing Mythprint in those days, and I wanted some celebratory material on the GoH, and I recall writing her with some bibliographical questions - she was prolific even then. We had some mutual friends in the apa Apanage to which she belonged, so that was a seed for acquaintance. That must be how it started.

During that period - it must have been about 15 or more years before we fell out of touch - I visited her at her home in western Massachusetts twice I think. But what I remember most is a visit somewhere else. In the summer of 1992, I spent a week in Edinburgh in Scotland. At that time, Jane and her husband David were renting a house in St. Andrews, not far to the north, so I drove up one day to see them. The rented house was an impressive semi-Gothic structure, but my particular memory comes from Jane driving me over to a modern suburban neighborhood, to the home of friends of theirs. These friends had decided to hold an American-style backyard barbecue, complete with hamburgers fired on a grill; and I was Jane's guest. Soon after I arrived, it started to rain pretty heavily, so we all grabbed the fixings and retreated inside. But this was Scotland, where a rainy day at any time of year is normal, and despite my limited experience there I knew that. What puzzled me was that any of the natives should have been surprised at the rain.

busy day

Wow, did I have a busy day on Monday. First I had a doctor's appointment at noon to discuss the results of my test from last week. I had to take a roundabout route to get there, because there was some event going on at the Apple spaceship, which is along the regular route.

That gave me half an hour to get home before the regular starting time of my Zoom play-reading session. I made it, ten minutes to spare. This week we were finishing up Dion Boucicault's London Assurance, our latest successful venture into obscure 19th century comedy. This one features a man who convinces his father that he is not himself but a random lookalike. Then he keeps forgetting that there are things he therefore shouldn't know.

When we finished that, I had enough time to grab a hasty lunch before heading over to the other side of the urban area for another visit to the specialized dentist who is taking care of the hole where my extracted tooth used to be. Done there - uncomfortable but not painful, as my previous visits have been - I stopped by the nearby excellent tamale makers for dinner makings before heading home.

After dinner, another Zoom session. The Lamplighters, the local Gilbert & Sullivan society, were presenting an hour's introduction to Iolanthe, their next production, focused on Sullivan's music. I know Iolanthe pretty well, but I thought I might learn something, and I did pick up a little. (The oboe solo at Iolanthe's introduction is the only extended instrumental solo in the entire G&S canon.)

After that I fell asleep early, and no wonder.

venue review

Review of a new pop-music concert venue in my area, the Siesta Valley Bowl. Only it's not new, it's the amphitheater that used to host the now-defunct California Shakespeare Festival.

You know, I stopped going there long before Cal Shakes died, and the reason was the acoustics. The bowl was not focused, and the unamplified actors had to shout to be heard. That's assuming that a plane landing at or taking off from the nearby Oakland Airport wasn't passing overhead, which they did frequently, because that would rip a few pages out of the script entirely, making the actors inaudible no matter what they did.

So, all in all, this is a better venue for amplified pop music than it was for unamplified theater, assuming it doesn't bother the neighbors. Though I will say that I was curious enough to go and listen to what the review said was probably "the finest song in [the performer's] entire catalog," and all I can say is that if that is his finest song, I'm really glad I don't have to hear any of the others.

driving

B. and I had received an invitation for Saturday. Our great-niece, T., has graduated from high school - and beyond that, owing to an arrangement between her high school and a local junior college, a lot of extra classes, and four years of summer school, she also completed an A.S. degree, normally two years full-time of junior college, at the same time. So she goes off to university this fall a couple of legs ahead.

So T.'s parents, A. and C., decided to host a big late-afternoon party to celebrate. We've been invited to some earlier birthday and other celebrations but were not able to attend. So since we did have this day free, we decided to go.

The thing is, T. and her family live three hours' drive and a mountain range away from here, in a large and comfortable home out in the boondocks far from anything, so it's a major investment in time to go there. I drove us, we spent an hour and a half there, and then B. wanted to get back, partly to perform evening ablutions before it was too late. It took even longer to get home, thanks to a brush fire in the freeway median, but we did that too. Amazingly I got us home without feeling too tired out on the way.

Not a trip we may ever take again, at least not together, but we did get a chance to congratulate (congraduate) the honoree, and chat with parents and grandparents. It was a good outing, despite the trouble it took to get there.

automation

This is very 1963, but it's also disturbingly relevant today:

one thing about doctors

and dentists is that - I suppose depending on their specialty - is that they love looking around the inside of your body, where all the blood and guts are. (In the case of dentists, close-up views of the gums and around the tongue.) If they have cameras floating around in there, they want to show off the view to the patient, and are rather hurt if you decline on grounds of ickk.

voting for the least annoying candidate

Here's a clue, politicians. If you're running for a relatively low-profile down-ballot office, like state legislature or a county office, don't deluge the voters with endless flyers or giant ads on tv or in newspapers. Because all you'll do is make me wonder, "Who's funding this person?" and make me reluctant to vote for you.

Indeed, for one local office there were two candidates, of which I was very skeptical of the incumbent. But the challenger's ads were so glaring that I got even more uncomfortable with him. I voted for the incumbent, who won.

ok, here's the story ...

I was asked to tell about Shostakovich and the San Jose Symphony, so here it is.

This happened in 1992, after long-time music director George Cleve was persuaded to retire. Those who heard Cleve in later years may think of him as a mellow Brahmsian figure, but that's not what he was like when he was younger. Everyone agreed his music-making was inspired, but in rehearsal he could be tempestuous, even tyrannical - B. sang with the symphony in those years, and can testify to the long rehearsals and the tantrums - and eventually it was just too much.

To hunt for Cleve's replacement, the symphony held one of those "seasons of discovery" that orchestras in search of a new music director are sometimes fond of. A set of prospective conductors were invited to lead one concert each which served as an audition. One of the finalists, who didn't get the job, was Marin Alsop, now probably the most renowned female conductor around. But remember this was 1992, she was young and still little-known - it was the first I'd heard of her - and it may be a good thing she didn't get the job, because it meant she didn't go down with the ship. But I get ahead of myself.

The successful candidate was a Ukrainian named Leonid Grin (pronounced Green). His audition concert featured a dark, somber and compelling rendition of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, preceded by Grin's own brief talk about what this music meant to him. It was a stunner of a performance, and it was probably responsible for him getting the job.

Unfortunately, it turned out that dark, depressing Russian music was the only thing that Grin could really do well. His attempts at being light-hearted were particularly cringe-worthy; I remember a rendition of Ravel's Bolero that was especially pathetic. He put the snare-drummer (regular percussionist Galen Lemmon) in front of the orchestra on the grounds that this was a snare-drum concerto, and it just didn't work.

I don't say that ten years of this ham-handedness was solely responsible for the symphony's decline and eventual bankruptcy - an incompetent management was the primary cause - but it didn't help. After the orchestra's demise, an entirely new management hired most of the same musicians - nothing wrong with them - and founded a new and more successfully-run orchestra initially named Symphony Silicon Valley, now Symphony San Jose. Grin has never been seen here since, though SSV did eventually bring back the older and mellower George Cleve as a guest conductor.

two outings

On Friday, the Redwood Symphony put on another of its occasional spectacular Sondheim semi-staged productions, this one of A Little Night Music. B. came with me to this one. I was unfamiliar with the show and hadn't heard much of it, and what most struck me on this encounter was how little it sounds like standard-issue Sondheim. His usual ticks are completely absent. I enjoyed most of the music; the closest thing to a catchy song in it is "The Glamorous Life" and the most tiresome and irritating is "A Weekend in the Country," which I had heard before somewhere.

The orchestra - this was Tunick's rarely-heard full symphony orchestration - did very well, but the singers were mixed. Fredrik had a weak voice, and Anne was whiny and annoying, which undercut both the character and the plot. But Desiree (Annmarie Macry) did a good job with "Send in the Clowns," and William Giammona as Carl-Magnus had complete command of his character's infinite self-regard; he was even better than the guy on the original cast recording.

Sunday I headed out to the local area's most popular ethnic event, the Greek festival put on annually by a local Greek Orthodox church in the forlorn hope that attendees might be distracted from the food and the dancing long enough to pay regard to the religion. Instead, I spent two hours eating the like of lamb chops, dolmas, and a new offering of fried cheese (saganaki) that was quite delicious. Having arrived at opening, I was able to get in some of this before the lines became insanely long, and at that point I just left.

However, I did unusually run into someone I knew, and thus spent a considerable part of my eating time in the company of the marketing director from Music@Menlo, whom I've had a lot of professional contact with, plus her husband and two small children, whom I hadn't met before because she doesn't bring them to work. We chatted on a lot of music gossip, such as the appointments of new music directors in both San Francisco and L.A., hopeful signs both of them, and I told stories like how Shostakovich led to the fall of the old San Jose Symphony.

Bay Area Book Festival

I spent much of Saturday attending four politically-oriented panels at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley, all of them in the rented facility of the Freight and Salvage stage.

I was unfamiliar with the names of any of the participants, but they turned out mostly to be authors of books, usually non-fiction, on the topics of their panels. But the subjects interested me.

The first panel was something of a damp squib. Titled "Mindful Democracy," it was full of activists who said that democracy wasn't, or shouldn't be, a war between two hostile tribes, but a communitarian act of compassion and connection. But they offered no way to get there from here, or to solve the mutual suspicions that characterize our political world.

The second, though, was a dazzler. The topic was detention of immigrants, and the highlight speaker, buttressed by the others, was a historian from Stanford named Ana Raquel Minian, who argued that detention of immigrants is a long-standing US practice and who summarized her book tracing that history back to 1900. I was impressed enough with Minian's speaking that I went to the sales table afterwards and bought that book, titled In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention.

Moderator for this panel was a local named Piper Kerman, whom I didn't know by name but who turned out to be the author of the original book of Orange is the New Black.

The other panels, all like the second full of hard advice on what to do about it, featured the topics of press freedom (support independent journalism) and academic freedom. Particularly excoriating speakers in the latter, notably UCB professor Hatem Bazian, who ran off the rails a few times but who was most impressive saying that public education is a public good that should not leave students shivering in debt and consequently fearing to speak out because of potential damage to their careers.

on my way home

Having spent Wednesday morning of my LA trip doing library research at UCLA, I was able to get as far on my drive home as Pismo Beach to stay overnight. ("What's in Pismo Beach?" asked my LA hosts, wondering why I was going there. "Hotels," I replied.)

That gave me enough time on Thursday to do something I'd only done once before: drive along the narrow and twisty coast road, the Big Sur highway. This is often closed for extended periods because of landslides or storm damage, but it's open now. Lots of lovely scenery, visible through the intermittently intense rain that fell that day, and the number of stretches of road covered in loose rocks that had fallen from the cliffs above were notable. I stopped at Willow Creek, where you can drive down below the bridge to the tiny stone beach where the creek hits the water. Despite the dicey weather, lots of surfers plying their trade out on the waves. Also, much further north in Big Sur, the Henry Miller Memorial Library, which is not a library but a bookstore specializing in literature with moral content. Both Tolkien (The Two Towers and The Return of the King) and Lewis (The Screwtape Letters and A Grief Observed) made appearances, as did Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick.

And one more stop. I'd made a reservation to tour Hearst Castle, which I'd also been to only once before, many years ago. Checking their menu of tours, I'd found one designed for the walking-disabled, with no stairs. I am able but very slow on stairs, so that was the one for me. There were only three of us on this tour, guided by a Bryan Cranston type named Phil, who talked very fast and rather quietly. He kept leading us into rooms occupied by a much larger regular tour group (the same one each time), so he'd huddle us into a far corner and talk even faster and more quietly, so I didn't absorb much of what he was saying. I did gather two things: first, that the not particularly devout Hearst was fascinated by collecting medieval Christian iconography; second, that his expectations of what visitors should do and how behave meant I would not have enjoyed a visit here in his time.

B. would find the decorations fascinating, but I'm not taking her here. Opportunities to sit during the tour were few, and the shuttle bus going up to the castle from the visitor center took the winding and twisty road at breakneck speed. Even I was a little nauseous.

concert review: Los Angeles Philharmonic

I had wanted to hear Gustavo Dudamel conduct one more time in LA before he left its music directorship for that of New York at the end of this season. But I was in no position to visit LA this season until April, and then Dudamel was gone until late May. Of his last programs after his return, the most likely was his semi-staged production of Wagner’s opera Die Walkure. It’s a very long opera, so they divided the three acts into separate days. I picked Act 3, because that’s the part with both the Ride of the Valkyries and the Magic Fire Music. I bought my ticket for a pretty penny and Sunday I went to Disney Hall and heard it.

The orchestra was displayed on the stage, with the singers mostly up on a balcony behind them, though for part of the conclusion Wotan and Brunnhilde moved to a catwalk in front of the orchestra, very close to my seat at the front of the side terrace.

The music making was pretty good, though the Ride of the Valkyries was too fast and lightweight. The Magic Fire Music, though, was slow and powerful, making a grand conclusion. As for the long part between, purely a dialogue between Wotan and Brunnhilde, that wasn’t too boring, mostly because I didn’t have to sit through Acts 1 and 2. I spent more of it watching Dudamel than paying attention to the singers, Ryan Speedo Green and Christine Goerke, though they had strong voices and had no trouble being heard above the mostly not very loud music. Back during the much noisier Ride, though, the Valkyries could often not be heard over the orchestra except when all eight of them were singing together, which was pretty thrilling.

Staging was minimal. The Valkyries stood in front of papier mache statues of horses, one of which appeared to be a unicorn. Costumes were fairly traditional. Wotan kept adjusting his eyepatch.

This was only the second time I’ve seen Wagner staged, the first being a college production of a semi-staged Rheingold many years ago. I could do without any more, though I don’t consider my time wasted. I enjoyed this.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

The outstanding feature of guest conductor Cristian Macelaru’s rendition of Dvorak’s New World Symphony was its clarity of form. Every section of every movement stood out as its own entity, and the whole passed on in crystalline goodness. And the solo passages from the individual musicians! Just marvelous.

And we also had Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto. According to the program notes, the original version of this concerto sounded like any other late 19C piano concerto, but the revised version, which we heard, sounds like Rachmaninoff. Well, a bit, but not as epically as the Second or Third, problematic as they in their turns are. Soloist Simon Trpceski thundered away dramatically, but to what end?

Lastly but first on the program,the premiere of a tone poem, Embers, by Tyler Taylor. How about that, another composer with the names of two US Presidents. Taylor is a horn player, so he knows the orchestra from the inside. His music featured a well-blended mixture of grinding strings (secret: they left the practice mutes on but played loudly), ghostly winds, and clonking percussion. It was a hefty chunk of chaotic tonal noise.