report of the day

Crab dip.

Relatives' something-something-something relatives from North Carolina.

Turkey.

Conversation about superhero movies. (How did that happen?)

Green bean casserole.

Walk around the block.

Pie. Pecan for others, apple for me.

Leftovers.

exchange

It's present-gifting season, so I managed to hand off to appropriate hands some of the treasures I picked up in Portland last June.

From Powell's, I had a sturdy old copy of Things That Have Interested Me, a book collection of 1920s blog posts (really, that's what they read like) by the novelist and social commentator Arnold Bennett.

From Classical Millennium, I had the slightly misleadingly-named A White House Cantata by Leonard Bernstein, which is in fact the surviving releasable music from his infamously disastrous last musical, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It wasn't the music that was disastrous, although Bernstein's reaction was to withdraw the score and not allow any of it to appear during his lifetime. I hadn't realized that any of it had escaped perdition since then until I saw this CD on the shelf.

These went to hands that will most appreciate them.

In return, I got a variety of things, from a monogrammed bathrobe to a new biography of T. Woodrow Wilson by A. Scott Berg.

from the sublime to the

or, another musical weekend

Saturday, up the hill to the Redwood Symphony's precarious little college auditorium for a rousing runthrough of The Planets and a not-so-exciting Mozart piano concerto.

Sunday, I put on my dutiful husband hat to accompany B. to a potluck lunch at her church. The food was good, and the company agreeable, but I could have done without the karaoke machine and the guy continually operating it. The repertoire consisted of what sounded like 50s and 70s pop songs, none of which I'd ever heard before,* with the sole exception of the dreadful "Y.M.C.A.", a "song" which has been examined by scientists under high-powered microscopes without giving up any trace of a tune. Fortunately nobody tried to drag me up to sing anything, because I would have had to stand there in mute incomprehension.

*This included an almost-catchy number particularly beloved of the karaokists, something called "Achy Breaky Heart." I was aware of the existence of a song by this title, but I'd never heard it before. B. tells me that it was recorded by Miley Cyrus's father. I had no idea she even had a father. If so, where has he been?

oh to be a blogger

1. Yeah, this is about how it went down, in mirror image.

2. Nevertheless, anybody who's really serious about the holiday will look at this.

3. Typos, impressed into cement.

4. So this is the "hope and change" that Obama had in mind. Tell that to the next sneerer, and watch their heads explode.

5. Ta-Nehisi Coates finds a good analogy to explain why Blacks get to use the N-word and Whites don't.

Tolkien headdesk

1. News report that a bio-pic of Tolkien's life is in the works.

Of course, the chances are still high that this will never happen. I'm encouraged to think it won't by the fact that Tolkien's life, rather than "complicated and colorful," was - at least once he got back from WW1 and settled in Oxford - so domestic and uneventful (no, he wasn't a codebreaker in WW2, good grief) that his biographer struggled to find a story worth telling in it, deciding that the real action was in what was going on inside Tolkien's head. They already made a few movies of that.

2. Comics blogger finds Tolkien references in The Wizard of Id.

The news here is not The Wizard of Id, still less its writers' decision to give up on figuring out what the quotes mean. It's the blogger's statement "that all three quotes are from J.R.R. Tolkien."

No they aren't. Yes, the first one is from Chapter 2 of The Lord of the Rings. And the second one is from the last few pages of The Silmarillion. But the third one is FROM THE MOVIES.

There's nothing worse you can do in this field than mix up the books and the movies. TOLKIEN DID NOT WRITE THE MOVIES. HE IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THEM. THEY HAVE NO AUTHORITY OVER HIS WORK. WOULD YOU CREDIT BORIS KARLOFF'S MAKEUP TO MARY SHELLEY, OR "OVER THE RAINBOW" TO L. FRANK BAUM?

neglected anniversaries

As I generally keep a rule of posting only one substantive post a day, and I used yesterday's up on music written in memory of JFK, I was unable to point out that yesterday was also:

1. The 50th anniversary of the deaths of both C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley. The coincidence of all three of them dying on the same day had one unfortunate consequence besides the latter two being overlooked at the time. That consequence was that, a few years later, one Lewis enthusiast had the idea of writing an imaginary conversation in which the three of them meet up in a waiting room in Limbo. The discussion consists largely of the author's Lewis figure (not much like the real Lewis, I hope) pompously and wordily lecturing the other two on the ultimate meaning of life, the universe, and everything, in a detached manner almost Kafkaesque in its lack of a sense that the participants are grappling with the idea that they've actually just turned into cockroaches died. It's a good nominee for the position of the worst book ever published about Lewis, although there's a lot of competition. (Don't miss the Freudian analysis of Narnia.)

Ironically, although the coincidence of the deaths may have overshadowed Lewis's at the time, the weight borne by JFK anniversaries has since drawn Lewis's along with it. I don't recall anybody in the Mythopoeic Society making a note of the 50th anniversary of Charles Williams' death, or any anniversary of Tolkien's death (although the Tolkien Society does like to commemorate the anniversary of Tolkien's birth), but Lewis's gets noticed. I am not aware of any Aldous Huxley societies.

2. The 100th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten. This has been celebrated all year, but yesterday was the actual day. Benjamin Britten, when he was still very young, wrote this:

a JFK memorial concert

I was interested by the news that the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, biting the bull with the teeth (or whatever the metaphor is), is playing this weekend a JFK memorial concert, and I was no less interested by the program.

Of course they're playing Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, without whose Funeral March no orchestral memorial concert for anyone would be complete. (And here's proof from the day itself.) They're also playing Sibelius's Violin Concerto, apparently for "its brooding Nordic character," a quality for which it is not at all outstanding among Sibelius's works. It's actually an ironic choice, as, the day after the assassination, the great violinist Isaac Stern abandoned a scheduled performance of the Sibelius Violin Concerto (in San Antonio, Texas, by the way) and played the Bach Chaconne instead.

Also on Dallas's program are a newly commissioned work by a very young composer in memory of JFK, and they're also resurrecting Darius Milhaud's Meurtre d'un grand chef d'état (Murder of a Great Chief of State). Now that interests me as a curiosity, because such specific pièces d'occasion rarely get revived. So I found it satisfying that I could dig out recordings of five JFK memorial works written by well-known composers in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. Somehow these have a tang of immediacy that works written in longer retrospect lack. So here they are: two by foreign-born composers who lived in the US, one from England, and two by composers who were natural-born US citizens. Between them, they typify the conventional music styles of the 1960s. Most are not particularly ingratiating, but then, the assassination wasn't an ingratiating event.

They're all quite short, and it'll take just over half an hour if you want to listen to the lot.

1. Darius Milhaud, Meurtre d'un grand chef d'état
First out of the gate, Milhaud was a French composer who, because he was Jewish, spent the World War II years as a refugee. He came to California and began teaching at Mills College in Oakland, and spent half his time there for most of the rest of his life. He happened to be back in France, though, when Kennedy was shot. Always a fast and prolific composer (this is his Op. 405), Milhaud wrote this mournful little elegy the Monday after the shooting on commission from the Oakland symphony, which performed it one week later.

2. Igor Stravinsky, Elegy for JFK
Stravinsky commissioned a text from W.H. Auden, with whom he'd collaborated before, and set it for voice and three clarinets in his most uncompromising late style. This performance is sung by Cathy Berberian, the indispensable soprano for anything avant-garde in the 1960s.

3. Herbert Howells, Take him, Earth, for cherishing
This unaccompanied motet, setting a translation of an early Christian hymn, is probably the finest and certainly the most often performed of these immediate JFK memorial pieces. Howells was an English composer, an associate of Vaughan Williams and Holst, who specialized in choral music, usually of an elegiac quality already.

4. Roy Harris, Epilogue to Profiles in Courage: JFK
Though born in Oklahoma, Harris spent most of his life in the Los Angeles area. Mostly self-taught in music, he was one of the composers who shaped the American nationalist style in the 1930s. This orchestral elegy, of a similar mood as Milhaud's but in a distinct musical dialect, is typically rugged Harris stuff. It's in three sections: dramatic, anguished, and more quietly mournful.

5. Roger Sessions, Piano Sonata No. 3, "Kennedy"
The epitome of a 20th century American academic composer, Sessions spent most of his life teaching at Princeton. This is typically bristlingly formidable music from him, but I have to admit it grew on me.

and who shot him?

It may be telling that, in responding to comments to my previous post on remembering JFK's assassination, I twice found myself moved to quote from The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's possible that absurdist philosophical satire is the most sane response to the tragedy that is the human condition.

We could do with some good satire on the assassination conspiracy theories. Oswald's motivations remain murky and I doubt we'll ever get to the bottom of them - heck, it's hard enough to explain Guiteau, and we know everything about him - but the actual physical facts of what happened are clearly established: three shots, one rifle, sixth floor, nobody else, nothing mysterious. Anybody who claims that there was anything impossible about this scenario - that Oswald couldn't have shot that fast, or that the bullet that hit both Kennedy and Connally would have had to turn in mid-air (the "magic bullet" theory), or that the movements of Kennedy's body mean he must have been shot from the front (the Oliver Stone theory)¹ - is selling you a bill of goods. Here's a little something about that.

At this point I get to declare a personal interest in the matter. David W. Belin, one of the Warren Commission lawyer investigators who concluded that one bullet hit both victims, was a close family friend of ours. He'd known my mother since they were in college together, and he married her BFF (to use today's terminology).² Here he is, with his characteristic bow tie, looking as I remember him from my childhood, on the job in the Texas School Depository building, with his colleague Howard Willens.

David wrote two books³ expounding the Warren Commission's conclusions about the facts of the assassination; he was particularly keen on pointing to the Tippett shooting as a key to Oswald's actions. The books are not easy reading, I'm afraid, and you might prefer Gerald Posner or Vincent Bugliosi for more lucid expositions. But David was as adamant as those authors that the Commission had come to the right conclusion. I remember once telling him about Greg Benford's novel Timescape, whose alternate-history plot depends on Oswald being Kennedy's sole assassin, as proof that not all of popular culture was against him. Friends who were at his deathbed say they knew he was gone when they'd whisper "Oswald didn't act alone" in his ear and not get a reaction.

So: yes, a lone assassin can kill a President. It doesn't require a world-spanning conspiracy or corrosive internal treachery. The world really is that tragic, and that preposterous. Time to break out the absurdist philosophical satire.

1. This would in any case point to the triple overpass rather than the grassy knoll, and that was originally considered, but there were too many people on the overpass and not enough murky shadows in photographs of it, so that was out.
2. B. and I still have on our coffee table the crystal bowl that David and his second wife (his first wife, my mother's friend, had died) sent us as a wedding gift. It's this bowl that keeps coming to my mind when I try to describe the shape of the auditorium in Disney Hall.
3. Yes, the third book is by him, too.

remembering JFK

All over the web and even newspapers that I read, people have been posting their memories of learning of the assassination of JFK. Except in LJ. Well, I'd been thinking of writing on this anyway, and I'd better do it now, because by Friday the topic will feel stale already. (Besides, I have something else appropriate for then.)

I recall as a child feeling annoyed at the media assumption that everybody remembered where they were at Pearl Harbor, because some of us were not around then. The open invitations to post memories of JFK's assassination must be equally annoying to anyone younger than I am, and I'm not young. I was six at the time, and that's about as young as it's possible to remember such things. It's not my earliest memory, but it's my earliest precisely dateable one.

Kennedy was shot at 10:30 AM our time, and his death was announced an hour later, but nobody had a radio in our school, so the news didn't arrive instantly. I must have gone off for lunch, either home or with a bag lunch to a far corner of the schoolyard to be by myself (as socializing with my peers was my lowest priority throughout my school years), because what I remember is coming back to the playground area and finding everyone standing around in clumps, rather than off playing. I asked what had happened.

I knew this was big news - I couldn't remember the last time there was a change in President - but what I could not grasp at all was the enormity* of it. I knew who the President was, but I didn't know enough to have any particular feelings about him, nor did I have the emotional experience to be shocked by assassination. What did draw my attention was a self-irritation at the fact that, although I knew that, if the President dies, the Vice President succeeds him, I could not remember or did not know the current Vice President's name. I felt I ought to have known that, and, ever since, I have kept up to date on such things. It is still typical of me to be drawn to such fine points.

Naturally, I spent the weekend in minor annoyance at the pre-emption of my favorite TV shows. All right, this was a big deal, but did it have to be on all the channels?

But one grows up quickly. It was not much more than a year later that Churchill died, and, while I'm not sure I had ever heard of him before, and he was, in any case, full of years, I was by that time equipped to appreciate what a momentous passage this was. (And I remember avidly reading about it in the newspapers: this tells me that I was already reading newspapers at seven, which I was apparently not - though I could and did read - at six.) If you wanted me to actually feel stunned by a tragic event, the assassinations five years after JFK's did that.

*And yes, I'm using that word correctly. Look it up.

concert reviews

Yes, it was a musical weekend for me. On Friday, the Afiara Quartet, a visiting ensemble at Stanford - whose main concert on Saturday was sold out already, at dear prices - was giving a free noon concert at Campbell, the little recital hall. And it was only half-full! They played one of Haydn's weirder late-middle quartets (Op. 33/3), and one of Dvorak's slightly less garrulous early efforts (Op. 51).

I returned for the first part of a master class they gave later that afternoon, but didn't stay for the whole thing, partly because I wasn't that attracted to the repertoire, but also because, as teachers, the Afiara were more than usually pedagogic. I did get to hear a massively muscular reading of the first movement of Prokofiev's Flute Sonata, though.

Saturday evening I lured B. back to Stanford with me for a Chamber Chorale concert in Memorial Church of unaccompanied "motets of the millennium," kind of the motet version of "1000 years of popular music." I liked the wide variety of repertoire: from the older half of the millennium, Josquin, Ockeghem, and Palestrina (whose gloriously simple Alma redemptoris mater was the highlight of the evening); from the newer, Brahms (yes, Brahms wrote half-a-dozen motets), Bruckner, Frank Martin (one of those "composers' composers" vastly admired by the few people who know his work), and a couple by the guest conductor himself, Jameson Marvin of Harvard. Interesting music, strongly and vividly sung.

I didn't know for sure till Saturday which chamber music I was going to be reviewing Sunday afternoon, piano quintets in San Francisco or string quartets in Berkeley, or, indeed, if I was going to be reviewing anything at all. That made prep more than usually exciting. It finally turned out to be the string quartets, so I drove to the City, picked up the friend I'd invited when I thought that's where I'd be going, turned right, and headed to Berkeley across the new span of the Bay Bridge for the first time during the day. (Awesome open feeling. As a work of art, it meets my approval.)

Here's the review. I felt more than usually a sense of having a specific reaction to the playing but not being sure how best to put it in words. This is the fifth professional review I have written of Beethoven's Op. 132. All right, this work does never get old, especially considering how many different ways there are to play it, but it's outnumbering even the other late Beethoven quartets by 5 to 2, 5 to 1, even 5 to 0. So what's with this, anyway?

And paired with Mendelssohn's Op. 13, making about as dour a pairing as imaginable. Fortunately I know them both well by now, but this did not look to be a really fun concert in the offing. It was, however, interesting and impressive.