recipe fixing

Sometimes this may be a cooking blog.

Yesterday, I found some chicken breasts on sale at the market, so I bought them. Then, on taking them home, I had to find a recipe to make with them. In the pantry, I found a packet of seasonings with a chicken recipe on it. Most of the other ingredients I had, in some form or another (substituting cider vinegar for balsamic - I'm not proud), although it did call for roasting plum tomatoes in the oven along with cooking the chicken.

I didn't have any plum tomatoes. We don't really like tomatoes all that much anyway. I could go back out and buy some, or, I could substitute. Hmm, what have we got?

Brussels sprouts. They're round. They roast well. We like them. We have lots. Let's use those. So I did. It came out pretty well, the sprouts, in fact, better than the chicken. Note to self, and I've mused on this before, but never taken it to heart: when the recipe says bake the chicken at 425, don't believe it. That's too high. Turn it down to 375 or so, and watch it in the last ten.

music for Halloween

It's about time that I got back to posting music clips. And as Halloween is in a couple of days - gotta make time today to carve the pumpkin - here is my all-time favorite scary Halloween music. It's the climactic movement of the Faust Cantata by Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998), a description of the scene when the Devil finally comes to git Faust.
Since it's in German, I'll give a précis, which is that a giant storm shakes Faust's house, strange disgusting snakes are seen, and Faust's voice is heard crying in anguish until it dies away. The following morning, when his students finally dare to peek inside, they find body parts strewn all over the room. Ugh!

I first heard this piece on a Swedish label sampler I picked up at a CD store in Bonn, Germany, for something like 5 Marks twenty years ago, and was instantly stricken. I mean struck. But this performance is much better, the finest I've heard. It's from a concert in the Czech Republic. The solo vocalist is Iva Bittová, who might be described as the Czech Laurie Anderson. She is quite fabulously expressive. By a quite amazing coincidence, because I didn't know this when I chose the video, Bittová is performing at the Freight in Berkeley - her own music, not Schnittke's - this Saturday. (Alas, I won't be there: I have something else to do.)

Caveat: Don't think you know anything about Schnittke's music from listening to this one rather Weillian piece. He was a Volga German (ethnic German from southern Russia) whose musical styles ran eclectically and unpredictably all over the map. This is one piece of his I enjoy greatly (the rest of the Cantata is not nearly so interesting); another that might appeal to newcomers is the Polyphonic Tango. His Piano Quintet is also extremely good in a "Shostakovich overload" mode. Other works I find impenetrably modernist. There's no predicting.

musical weekend

Besides going up to see Crissy Broadcast on Saturday, I attended two symphony concerts over the weekend.

First, on Friday, the Peninsula Symphony, which I previewed for one publication and reviewed for the other. It was not very inspiring.

Then, on Saturday, Symphony Silicon Valley, which also got a review. This was much better; not one of their A concerts, but a good A-. Having exhausted myself at Crissy that morning, even with a nap and a large blast of caffeine I found it a bit of a struggle to stay alert, no fault of the players. I wasn't so out of it, though, that I failed to notice what I was too groggy or something to remember to put in my review: a huge horn flub in the third movement of the Shostakovich, less notable in itself than in the awesomely flexible way the conductor and orchestra stepped around the problems it caused.

out standing in their field

Leaving aside how I finally got there, I did attend the first performance of Lisa Bielawa's Crissy Broadcast open-air musical event in San Francisco's Presidio on Saturday morning. It was an interesting experience, but not a very musical one.

The venue was a large grassy field on the bay shore, dotted with giant metal sculptures made of bits of building girders, that looked like they'd fallen off a skyscraper. In the background, the looming presence of the Golden Gate Bridge slowly emerged from foggy invisibility over the course of the morning.

As the starting time approached, groups of musicians, mostly teenagers, were standing around together in distinct but adjacent clots in the middle of the field - the San Francisco Girls' Chorus over here, the Lowell High School string orchestra over there, at least half a dozen others whose identities I didn't know. Many of them had musical parts taped to their backs so their fellows could read them; only a marching band was really prepared for the circumstances.

A much smaller number of audience members stood loosely around their perimeter. From the conversations I had with my fellows as we waited for the show, I may have been the only non-performer there who wasn't the parent of a performer. But then, it was 10 AM on a cold, foggy Saturday morning. Who comes out then except parents and truly insane music-lovers? A small cheer went up when someone announced the synchronized time as five minutes out.

The most interesting-looking instruments on the field were two of those enormous, eight-foot-long alpine horns (actually Tibetan, or so I understand) whose far ends rest on the ground. They were wielded by a middle-aged man and a younger woman. I happened to be standing nearby, admiring the horns, when another woman, possibly the composer, walked up to the players and said, "6, 5, 4, OK, you can start now."

The hornists started playing long, low notes. At a pause, first individuals, then whole groups, of the other musicians surrounding them began playing repeated motifs, passing them around. So far, it was not totally uninteresting.

After about ten minutes, the groups began to separate. In clumps, they'd pick up their instruments and tromp maybe a dozen yards away and stop. A few minutes later, they'd tromp further away again. Within another ten minutes, they were all so far apart that any you didn't happen to be standing near were less audible than the foghorn coming from the Bay, until that too ceased with the rising visibility.

Any groups you could hear would spend most of their time standing in silence. Then, reading from a time cue, their individual conductor would direct them in a few tweets or blats, and then they'd fall silent again. Eventually they'd repeat the same tweet or blat.

This quickly became non-productive. I tromped back to near the starting point and sat down on a girder to read for a while, hoping that the heat-death of the universe would reverse itself and they'd all come back together. But they never did. I was slowly working my way outward in the direction I was intending to leave by, and happened to be near a clot wielding Chinese instruments, when its director said, "OK, that's it," and they started to disperse, so I knew the hour-long event was over. Scattered applause drifted through the air.

It was a long trudge down the road to the Marina District, where I was hoping to have lunch (which I did eventually find), and most of the musicians passed me on the way. The notes that some were noodling on their instruments as they walked were at least as interesting as anything I heard during the concert.

I was having lunch at a restaurant with a big screen TV showing ESPN. This chance viewing of a station I never otherwise see is probably the only way I'd ever learn that there is a professional basketball player named Paul George.

It seems to me we have to engineer a meeting between this guy and the military SF author John Ringo. Because, I mean, what are the odds?

you can't get there from here

I've been thinking about going up to the City on Saturday morning for the first iteration of Lisa Bielawa's Crissy Broadcast, a mass outdoor musical event on Crissy Field, the former airstrip that most of the iconic photos of people standing with the Golden Gate Bridge behind them are taken from. The rareness of such a musical event intrigues me. It sounds like it'll be something like Stockhausen without the toxic politics. It would be something to be able to say, I was there.

The problem is, getting there. I'm dubious about driving. I don't know much about parking in the area, I'm doubtful about the feasibility of what I do know, and I might not be the only person trying it. Not to mention that I have no idea how the hundreds of performers are getting there, or how much parking they might take up.

It's when I checked the project's own "directions and parking" web page that I got nervous, and wonder if anyone organizing this has any idea what they're doing. I'd be taking CalTrain, and they recommend, as they do from several other directions, transferring to the PresidiGo shuttle.

A little checking established a few problems with this idea:
1) The PresidiGo shuttle doesn't run on weekends;
2) Even if it did, it requires a pass for morning runs;
3) You can't transfer to it directly from CalTrain, as it doesn't go anywhere near the station.

Also, for further transit planning information, you need to go, not to www.511.com as they instruct, but www.511.org.

So if I take the first CalTrain run of the day, which leaves here at 7:14 AM, that will get me up in time to catch a 37-minute bus ride through some of the City's more colorful and congested neighborhoods which will dump me out in the Marina, at what it says here is a 20-minute walk away, with 34 minutes to walk there before the starting time. So assuming that's not packed, and I just have to hope it isn't, it's doable, and the sole remaining question is, will I get up early enough?

Because if not, I'm going two miles from home to see the Met broadcast of The Nose instead.

(Why not go to one of the other performances of Crissy Broadcast? Time conflicts, and the probability that, being at more reasonable hours, they'll be more crowded.)

concert review: Jon Nakamatsu, piano

I didn't know I was going to be reviewing this concert until just before I went. Fortuitously, we (my mother and I) had been planning to go anyway: the opportunity to hear Nakamatsu perform Schumann's Carnaval was not to be missed.

I didn't have to refresh myself on Carnaval, which I know pretty well ("Reconnaissance" is the one that is best imitated by blowing raspberries as you hum), but Chopin's Third Sonata I definitely needed to get to know better. So I listened to YouTube performances by Martha Argerich and Murray Perahia. Talk about different approaches. And Nakamatsu is different from either.

That gave me the grounding to write the review in terms of the performer's overall shaping and form, which is the aspect of performance evaluation I'm most comfortable with.

Ah, and then the encores. I recognized both as being by Chopin, but I couldn't have told you which pieces they were, except that I guessed that the first one was probably a polonaise. God bless Barlow and Morgenstern. All I had to do was glance over the print edition's pages of Chopin themes and find ones that looked like what I'd heard, and there they were.

something about Paul McCartney

This falls in the category of, why did nobody ever tell me about this?

You know I'm a Beatles fan, but my knowledge of post-Beatles is pretty much limited to the first subsequent decade. I know a lot of Lennon's later work, some of which I like ("Watching the Wheels" is my favorite of his solo songs), I've heard some of Harrison's, I know a lot of McCartney's work from the Wings period, and while I enjoy some of it, the oft-noted treacliness is also really there.

After that: well, I wasn't doing anything so radical as to buy anybody's new albums myself, so at the time I had to depend on what I might overhear on the radio, and the early 80s was the one period in my life when I actually listened to pop radio of my own volition.

In 1982, Paul McCartney released two songs, both collaborative, that were all over the radio. You didn't have to turn it on yourself to hear them. They were the gawdawful "Ebony and Ivory" and the even more execrable "The Girl Is Mine." These songs were evidently popular, because they were unavoidable for a while, but they were so bad as to lead me to conclude that, whatever shreds of his talent he'd retained in the 70s, he had now entirely lost.

And I've paid no attention whatever to his more recent work since. (Reviews I read of his ventures into classical did not encourage exploration.)

Until now. I found this little article giving the author's choice of Sir Paul's best post-Beatles songs. The first four, from the 70s, I knew. I had never heard, or even heard of, any of the subsequent six.

What throws me is not just that they're all at least OK and some are quite good, but that the very best of them, a song that instantly hit my list of favorites, is also from 1982 and in fact from the same album that "Ebony and Ivory" is on. Why did I never hear this at the time? Why had I never heard of it in all the interim? True, I don't go seeking them out, but lots of things that appeal to me a lot less track themselves across my path without my volition; why did it take this one thirty years?

(Of the links at the bottom of the page to similar lists, I have so far explored those of the Beach Boys, which confirms my opinion that they only ever had about two-and-a-half good songs, one of which isn't even on the list, also that they could not sing; and Richard Thompson, whose work I like a lot better, to the extent that I can grouse over the choices and object that no list omitting "When the Spell Is Broken" and "The Poor Ditching Boy" can possibly represent his best.)

it's a political day in the neighborhood

This year's Sunnyvale city council election covers 3 of the 7 seats. The LWV forum was last week, and I attended, because I find that seeing the candidates speak in person gives a far clearer impression of their approach and knowledge than any literature does. Slothman's analytical eye was also gazing over the scene.

City politics has heated up this year, as the main fracture line that's governed elections here recently has now hardened up into what's effectively a two-party system. The candidates don't formally run as slates, but the alliances are clear, and most of the campaign literature endorses one or the other set.

One of the two parties could be called the Establishment. It has all the big-name endorsements, and most of the money. Its candidates consist of the one incumbent eligible for re-election and two members of the city planning commission. Advantages: they're well-versed on city issues, seem seriously dedicated to public service, and speak clearly and coherently. Disadvantages: some of them are vague in the way well-meaning people have (Q: What would you do about problem X? A: We need more communication), and it's hard to avoid their opponents' charge that the establishment has been too much in the pocket of real estate developers, bending the city general plan backwards to allow the construction of high-rise developments, which might be understandable in a built-out area, except that there's no way available to mitigate the traffic and other congestion issues that arise therewith. Tiny banner ads for one of the establishment candidates have been showing up on my Daily Show page. For a city council candidate! Though they have the guy's photo, they're not paid for by him, but by the realtors' association. My feeling is that if the realtors want to elect him that badly, there must be something wrong with him.

The other party may be called the Insurgents. They're all people who have found dealing with city government to be frustrating, and who make a fetish out of not accepting corporate campaign contributions, which is why they're running their campaigns on shoestrings. One of them has run (and lost) before; the others got involved in city politics via a movement to limit city workers' pensions, a big topic in several local cities. Advantages: Despite a regrettably loose command of facts, their objections to the establishment network by which things get done without effective outsider input is trenchant and well-taken. There are voices here that need to be heard. Disadvantages: Mostly, they're flakes. Of this year's candidates, one is a know-it-all goofball who talks from the seat of his pants, proposing offbeat notions with no relationship to reality, and going off on tangents that may have some relevancy in his mind, but whatever that may be, he's neglected to communicate it to his listeners. Another has a chip on his shoulder the size of the unbuilt new Apple HQ in Cupertino, and his passion on the pension issue rises to the level of union-hatred (he's the only candidate who's a business-owner; most of them, this being Silicon Valley, are software engineers). Only the third seems relatively normal, and consequently is the only one with a hope of getting my vote.

There's also a seventh candidate, a law school student who points out that he's the only young person (23) and the only minority (Hispanic) in the race; also, that there are no women. (One woman, not up this year, currently sits on the Council, a typical number in recent history here.) I'd like to support him, both for the voices he'd represent and for the fact that he's the only candidate who seems to understand that the purpose of pensions is to keep retirees from becoming destitute, not to pointlessly gouge taxpayers, but, like extra-wheel candidates in previous elections, he is sadly not ready for prime time.

The current council contains 5 Establishment members and 2 Insurgents. One of the Insurgents is a 6-year veteran who calmed down immediately on first being elected and became far less flaky; he now limits his insurgency to things like being the only vote against the motion to censure the other Insurgent (yes, they did this), who was elected 2 years ago on the basis of his incisiveness and a supremely foggy Establishment opponent. But Insurgent no. 2 is a litigating attorney with the people skills of a piranha, and a tendency to emit pre-set little speeches on any topic, instead of actually engaging with whoever he's talking with. Consequently he is not doing his causes any favors.

One of the slogans of the Establishment party is to "restore civility in city government." This was taken up by the local paper, whose endorsement of the Establishment weighed heavily on the fact that the Insurgents agree with councilman piranha-fish on many issues, so, although it admitted that none of them are remotely as contentious as he, it shadily tried to tar them with his brush. The editorial calls them his "friends," which can't possibly be true. He doesn't have any friends.

My question is, how would electing the Establishment enact their slogan? The incumbent candidate actually pointed out at the forum that 6 of the 7 current councilmembers get along perfectly fine. But, that being so, how would replacing the two retirees with two more of the same stripe change anything? Goofball Guy from the Insurgent slate, in by far his best line (and even that he couldn't deliver very well), pointed out that his election is what would improve civility, because he's not accepting corporate contributions which are Insurgent No. 2's principal beef (he believes they bias decision-making, and I'm not at all sure he's wrong about that), and consequently he would be immune from attack on that front.

So I'm leaning towards splitting my ticket: one Establishment (the incumbent, who's very experienced, very communicative, and very sharp), one Insurgent (the non-flaky one), and one ????

name confusion

With Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan, I know they're two entirely different guys. I just can't remember which name applies to which guy. (And if you feel moved to tell me, you're missing the point. I could look it up. I have looked it up, more than once. But then I always forget again.) The problem is probably that I'm not very interested in the work of either.

With Reese Witherspoon and Rene Zellweger, I didn't realize that they were two different people. I had an amalgam of them in my head, who had done all the work I knew of both, and whenever I saw a reference to either, I thought of the amalgam, not remembering that, on previous occasions, she had a different name. I only discovered this when I looked up one's Wikipedia entry and was puzzled at not seeing listed movies that the other one had made.

Even after that, I still have not, however, sorted out in my head which one is which. The same applies to Norman Mailer and Philip Roth. I know there's two guys, but I can't remember which one did what, nor can I bring myself to care enough to read it.

I also sometimes have trouble remembering which opera titles are by Giuseppe Verdi and which by Giacomo Puccini. I have no trouble telling the men apart, and I'm sure of the assignation of many of the operas; I just can't always be sure. This comes of not caring much about opera, and it's the only case of this trouble I have in classical music. Might I confuse the Symphony No. 5 of Sergei Prokofiev with that of Dmitri Shostakovich, for instance? Of course not; I know both almost by heart, and they're totally distinct.

I also have no trouble remembering, at least for after the early period, which Beatles songs are by John Lennon and which by Paul McCartney. Since they're all officially listed as collaborations, this is tricky for a lot of people, but not me. And, again, the reason is: I care about the work.

This post brought to you courtesy of a long, indulgent article about Norman Mailer in the New Yorker.