finding a balance

Can we condemn what goes bad and praise what's done right about the same institution at the same time? I think we can. I liked this in a column on the testimony of the police heroes of January 6:

Police aren’t perfect. And because they wield the power of life and death with the backing of the state, we have every right to hold them to a higher standard and to demand that they be held accountable when they get it tragically wrong. But this doesn’t blind me to the importance of law enforcement or their countless acts of heroism.

And I found a writeup from The Week of a piece by Max Boot about US history and the 1619 Project. (I don't know how old this is, as it's from a Week promotional pamphlet including some stuff that's at least two or three years old.) It says, quoting Boot in the middle,

Schools should find "a middle ground that fully acknowledges the sins of U.S. history - which continue to haunt us to the present day - while also showing that generations of Americans have struggled, sometimes at great personal cost, to realize the highest ideals of the Founders." Both of these stories are true.

Both of these stories are true. Hold on to that, and never forget to tell both of them.

concert review: Cabrillo Festival

Here's my latest.

This was a tricky review assignment, because the Cabrillo Festival this year, unlike Menlo, is entirely online. My editor asked me to cover the two commissioned works for orchestras receiving their premieres here. At least, with the concerts being left up afterwards, I could relisten to them several times, including with the video off so that I could concentrate on just the music.

I liked the music just fine, and complimented its virtues in the review. In particular, they avoided the problem in much recent music of saying what it has to say in ten minutes and then going on for another ten minutes with nothing to say.

But then you might say: wait a minute. With the entire orchestra's musicians each playing separately, with nothing but a click track and some notes for additional guidance, and then put together by an audio engineer - and how the heck did he manage to get something coherent out of that; his comments in the Q&A afterwards didn't even begin to address that question - how does it sound? How well does an orchestra play without a conductor or even each other around? (So-called conductor-less orchestras work out extensively in rehearsal.) How does the interpretive flow come out? Are they even together?

And I didn't address that matter because, frankly, I don't know. I can't really judge those matters in music I'm unfamiliar with, however fine my judgment may be in works I know well. I learned that lesson from my encounters in the 1970s with recordings by a pianist who'd re-emerged from decades-long obscurity and became a cult favorite for a while, though he was immensely controversial for an eccentric and individual performing style. His name was Ervin Nyiregyházi. He announced his return to the field with a double-album of pieces by Liszt. I listened to it, but I don't know Liszt's piano music very well. It sounded perfectly ordinary to me. Then Nyiregyházi released another record, including pieces by Grieg and Tchaikovsky that I did know. Oh, now I could hear his performing style, clear as anything. Yep, it was really eccentric. What's more, now that I knew what to listen for, I could detect it in the Liszt as well.

So that taught me a lot, including not to judge Cabrillo's method of putting its orchestra together until I can do so fairly. I stuck to the music. I know earlier works by both composers, so that I could judge.

our town

Our little play-reading group has just finished Our Town by Thornton Wilder. The third act is sad and poignant, but at least it lacks the injustice of the ending of The Crucible. We need a light comedy next. How about The Importance of Being Earnest, a play criticized when it was new for not being about anything of significance? Perfect!

Our Town is about things of significance, and one of the lessons of the third act is something I learned independently. When I was an adolescent I thought about the fact that anything resembling a normal lifespan would take my life through the year 2000, then still over 25 years away. Ooh, how strange and exotic. And I wondered, what would I know in the year 2000 that I would want my adolescent self to understand?

When it came to the year 2000, I remembered thinking that, and I cast my mind over what message I would want to send back in time. And I decided that it would convey something that my adolescent self would know intellectually, but that doesn't really hit you until it happens.

And that is, the number of people who would have died.

diary of a man housebound

1. We received a check of some size from the feds. It was labeled as a tax refund, but contained no further explanation. I called our accountant, who was also puzzled but suggested it had something to do with changes in the tax laws regarding unemployment insurance. A few days later we had a form letter from the IRS saying exactly that. Would it had come earlier.
By then I had deposited the check, despite all the ATMs at my local branch being unfunctional.

2. Several years ago, when I was last in Ontario, I picked up at a store a bottle of Manitoulin Island brand chili-mango hot sauce. Manitoulin Island is a large island in Lake Huron, where I've never been; but distribution of their sauce goes a little further than that, though not far enough. The sauce was really good and I've been using it, sparingly, ever since. But the bottle's finally close to empty, so I located their website and ordered some more. Or tried to; when I got to the checkout page it said they won't ship to my address. Is that because I'm in the US? I don't know. They don't answer their phone, or their e-mail either.

3. Also in the consumables department, at Galco's - the retro-obscure-sodapop store in LA - I found a bottle labeled MacFuddy's pepper elixir. Curious as to what that might be like, I bought it and have now finally opened it. I should have paid more attention to the name. It tasted like Dr. Pepper, a concoction I have no use for. Others may disdain Moxie, or New Coke: I disdain Dr. Pepper.

4. The three-episode "mini-series" - I don't think the name applies, as it's really a 3-hour movie in 3 parts, but that's what they call it - seems to be a British specialty. I found "A Very English Scandal" a splendidly-made show, and now the same applies to "The Pursuit of Love," much superior to a couple earlier adaptations of the Nancy Mitford novel that I've tried to watch. In particular, Dominic West really gets into the cold blustery heart of the terrifying Uncle Matthew.
It's the story of a young woman (Lily James) in the 1930s, a bit younger than and a bit like Mitford herself, who is unable to connect spontaneous lust with lasting romantic attraction and is consequently doomed to have mad affairs that end disastrously. It's told from the perspective of her cousin (Emily Beecham), who is comfortably but drearily married and wonders what she's missing. The cousin's name is Fanny. I thought that was a Really Naughty Word in Britain, so how is it also a respectable name for girls? Maybe it's in the same category as Dick.

5. I dreamed that Lyndon Johnson served me doughnuts. No, really, he was the man behind the counter. But he kept getting my order wrong. I asked for "the chocolate one over there" and he gave me a maple bar. Turned out he couldn't see the chocolate one from where he was standing, and when he finally reached for it he fell over and dropped the doughnut on the floor. At that point I just left.

breakfast out

Today, being more convenient than tomorrow which is the actual anniversary, we celebrated B.'s birthday by having breakfast out, since that's her favorite meal of the day.

So we went early, before it was crowded, to a popular place in the boutique downtown of Los Gatos. We've been there before, but not for a long time. It's notable for the option of pancakes with blueberries and bananas, which makes B. very happy. I eschewed the tempting shrimp with grits for an egg scramble with spinach and ground beef. Unfortunately one bit of the ground beef was not browned all the way through, tsk.

This is one of the many inner-town sidewalk-facing restaurants that's set up an outdoors patio in the parking spaces facing it on the street, with a wooden platform underneath and a tent overhead. All the waitstaff wore masks; not all the bussers did; the customers mostly didn't, even before their food arrived, but none of them were too close.

So we managed, but I expect that's the only sitdown meal out I'm likely to have for a while.

news of the world

1. The increased transmissibility of the Delta variant, its increased general permeation of the environment, plus, even though I'm vaccinated, my being slightly more susceptible to a serious infection than most people, have led me to back down slightly from my June-July willingness to take outings. But if any of these clowns become governor and model our pandemic response after Florida's, I'm going into full hibernation.

2. A Pentagon police officer was assaulted without provocation and killed with his own gun. The NRA is always telling about attack situations which, however improbably, could have been stopped by a good guy with a gun. Well, here's a situation in which the good guy might have survived (he was also stabbed) if he hadn't had a gun. I suspect that cases where the bad guy gets hold of the good guy's gun outnumber the other kind, but if there's statistics to prove it, they'd hardly be released.

3. Greenville - I've been there, though only a long time ago - is now the second California town to be completely destroyed by fire.

4. And here's an unexpected victim of global warming: the trees that make the best violin wood. We may have to make them from carbon-fiber from now on.

5. In other music news, Michael Tilson Thomas has been seriously ill. He's had surgery, so let's hope he gets better.

English suites and others no. 46

In the generation after Dvořák, one of the leading Czech composers was Vítězslav Novák, whose works include a South Bohemian Suite. (Not surprisingly, south Bohemia is where he was from.) I like this one for its March of the Hussites.

oh, he's Jewish enough

Only the most occasional echo of Olympics news is making it into my cortex, but here's one: upon Artem Dolgopyat, an Israeli male gymnast, becoming only the second Israeli ever to win a gold medal, his mother gave a press interview "to complain that Israeli religious law is keeping her engaged 24-year-old son from tying the knot because only his father's side of the family is Jewish."

Yeah, it's the religious law that says you're only Jewish by inheritance by the maternal line. Otherwise you have to go out of the country to marry, and Dolgopyat has been too busy training. (But hey, he was just in Tokyo. But I guess he was still busy.)

And why is she so much more anxious about her son's marriage than apparently either her son or his fiancee is?

"'I want grandchildren,' she said Sunday in an interview with Israeli radio."

Which leads me to conclude: he may only be Jewish on his father's side, but has he ever got a Jewish mother.

insolicitation

The phone said, "Hi, this is Sean. How are you doing today?"

And I replied, "I do not take phone calls from people who introduce themselves in that manner," and hung up.

Why? What manner?

First off, only close personal friends should announce themselves by first name alone. But a surname is not what I'm looking for from a stranger. You should begin by saying who you represent or in what capacity you're calling, and giving the reason for your call. Remember that the person you're calling has no idea who you are (which "Sean" doesn't help with: you could be Sean Penn or Sean Hannity for all I know) or what you're calling about. I don't make small talk with a complete black box.

The time to begin a conversation with "How are you doing today?" is if I come into your office and are shown to see you. Then you stand up, stick out your hand (if it's pre-pandemic) and say, "How are you doing today?" In that case I already know who you represent and what the topic of conversation will be, so a little social lubrication beforehand is appropriate.

The only reason to cold-call someone and without any explanation begin by saying "How are you doing today?" is to try to bamboozle people into getting sucked into a conversation before revealing that you're a salesperson or shyster whom the callee would have hung up on already if they'd known it from the beginning. But that trick doesn't work on introverts.

Halfling Mythcon, day 2

I got to the computer in time for my 9 AM Zoom panel (11 or 12 for the other panelists) on Tolkien's poems "Errantry" and Bilbo's song of Eärendil and their startling similarity. My job was to describe the writing process by which one poem turned into the other, a description aided by the existence of 22 varying drafts, quoted in full or part in the posthumous books. Janet Croft in her contribution to the panel suggested that not only are they the same poem, they're the same character, and "Errantry" is some sort of hallucination that Eärendil suffers during his first, frustrated attempt to pass the shadows that protect Valinor. I'm not sure I believe it, but it's an interesting theory.

Someone in the chat function chided my pronunciation of chalcedony, a key word in the poem, but they didn't attempt to correct most of the speakers' persistent mispronunciation of Eärendil. Those two dots over the a: that's a diaresis, indicating that the two vowels are separate sounds. It's something like AY-ah-REN-dil, not AIR-an-dil.

Such post-panel discussion as there was time for went well, and I hoped more of the audience would follow over to the chat function on Discord, but in the end there were just three of us posting, though we got a lot said.

An interview on MythSoc history was another program I hoped would spill over onto Discord. This time I went to the AV channel and found just one other person there. Fortunately it was an old friend and we chatted affably; gradually a few other people, both known and unknown to me, showed up and we passed some time agreeably.

The other full presentation I got to today was a panel on Tolkien and racism. This was highlighted by discussions of Tolkien's co-opting by the alt-right, from a scholar studying that, and a first-hand account by the administrator of the recent Tolkien Society seminar on Tolkien and diversity of all the ignorant abuse he had to go through over that. What do you do about such people? Well, don't let them in to your society, that was one definitive suggestion. I don't think we need worry about that much here. The MythSoc is too small and obscure. We have a few paleoconservatives, but no alt-right types that I know of.

Some useful comments about Tolkien's own racial views were made: I was particularly struck by the observation that, though the good guys in LR are diverse, that's only within the context of their all being white. (Or we presume they are. Another presenter showed fan art depicting Silmarillion elves as brown or black. Apparently fan artists are willing to do that there, but not for characters in stories of which movies have been made.) Although there is a notable passage where Tolkien humanizes a dead brown-skinned enemy soldier, he clearly had a long way to go. That was a fair criticism. But I was astounded to be told that this passage from Tolkien's letters - "I have in this War a burning private grudge against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler, [for] ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light" - showed that Tolkien was just like Hitler, only not as bad. What? Is there really no such thing as innocuous pride in one's own ethnicity's distinctive character? I thought what made the Nazis' ethnic policy evil was that they sought to elevate themselves, to lord it over other ethnicities and persecute them. Tolkien did nothing of the sort. You can praise your own without putting down others. Well, if charges like this are to be made, Tolkien is right about one thing: Hitler has made Germanic ethnic pride for ever accursed.

Summary of the online Mythcon as a technical achievement: The program items were superb. They allowed people who'd never manage to get together in person to converse, the post-talk discussions for the rest of the time slots were lively and invigorating, and the tech support was utterly vigilant and always helpful. The rest of what makes Mythcon, not so much. It's not the fault of the tech people who set them up that not much seemed to come out of the Discord sessions, at least the ones I attended (I didn't get to the Bardic Circles), but it wasn't too successful. Perhaps if we'd been pushed more directly at the Discord AV channels ...