the annual year-end post

Here's the places (with the sometimes better-known postal addresses in parentheses) that I stayed in away from home this year:

Hillingdon, England (Hounslow) (twice)
Aberdare, Wales
Rohnert Park, CA
Luray, VA
Leesburg, VA
Ashland, OR
Burnaby, BC
Prairie City, IN (Brazil)
Champaign, IL
Hayward, CA
Tesson Ferry, MO (St. Louis)
West Covina, CA

Travels took me to 2 funerals (including my father's), 3 actual conferences (ranging in size from 18 to a couple hundred people), 2 trips expressly for concerts or plays, 1 vacation with no other purpose, and 1 solar eclipse. The only high-level jurisdiction I visited that isn't on the sleeping list was an arbitrary popping into the isolated Point Roberts, WA, during the vacation in BC.

During the year I had 28 concert reviews published, co-edited an issue of Tolkien Studies, and had some bibliographic and review material therein, and had one additional scholarly article published with a second supposed to be out this year but I haven't gotten a publication confirmation on that yet.

critical lump

John Simon on Music: Criticism, 1979-2005 (Applause, 2005)

I collect books of classical music criticism, but I'd missed this one, and now I see why.

To begin with, it'd be more accurately called "John Simon on Opera," as that's 90% of the subject matter. He also manages to avoid discussing any of the few operas I know anything about, so I skipped over most of this. If you like Janáček operas, you'll be better served.

There's also more than a bit about art song. Elsewhere Simon admits to a dislike for choral music, which would strike me as a severe handicap for an opera critic.

Near the beginning (the contents are in chronological order) are some book reviews which consist of nothing but snide and catty attacks on the reputations of the subjects of the memoirs or biographies reviewed (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Daniel Barenboim, Leonard Bernstein).

Later on are some more appreciative but rather dull articles, not focusing on opera, in praise of some slightly overlooked composers: Manuel de Falla, Jacques Ibert, Nino Rota (!). There's also one on what he calls "two pioneer women composers" despite the fact that he'd begun by mentioning several who long predate them: Amy Beach and Rebecca Clarke. Beach was the only woman in a group of turn-of-the-20C composers known as the Second New England School, and not even the most outstanding among this group of uneminent worthies. Clarke, English but with many American connections, is a much better composer but rather stringently modernist for my taste. My candidate for the first great American woman composer is Florence Price, but nobody writes about her.

There's also an article on the Shostakovich wars, in which Simon gets the right answer - Volkov's Testimony is a fake - but with advocates like this, justice doesn't need enemies. Simon actually thinks that Shostakovich's secret rebel status can be disproved by quoting from his groveling letters of thanks to Stalin and citing his service on official commissions. But the Volkov story is built around the disguises you needed to survive: evidently Simon missed the word "secret" in there. Volkov is a fake, but his thesis is more grossly overstated than entirely wrong.

This is going back to the library without regrets.

tofu replacement

I've mentioned before that San Jose Tofu, the little old fresh tofu maker in Japantown, is closing down at the end of the year - in fact, today is their last, as they're normally closed on Sunday. I'd been buying my tofu from them regularly for a couple decades. I thought about going down there yesterday for one last brick, but even at opening time there was a long line all the way down the block, and I knew they would run out before I'd get in.

So the one we had last week was our last, I guess. Sometimes it's best not to know beforehand that you're doing something for the last time.

Is that the end of tofu? Because I won't eat the factory stuff that comes in sealed packages and has a shelf life. (Fresh tofu has to be eaten within a couple of days.) The packaged stuff is full of preservatives and feels and tastes just nasty.

Not quite. The news articles on the closing carried an unspoken implication that, while they were the biggest fresh-tofu maker and the best, maybe they weren't the only one around here.

So earlier this month I went looking. And I found it. SJ Tofu was Japanese, but I found two small Vietnamese stores in east San Jose that make their own tofu fresh daily, and besides selling it themselves, wrap it up in plastic, put a store sticker on it, and put it in tubs in the back of a large Asian supermarket in those parts.

So after leaving Japantown yesterday, I drove down there. It was around 9:30 AM. The tubs were in a refrigerated case but the tofu was still warm. I bought a brick, took it home, and made my basic tofu stirfry dish with it for dinner.

And it was good. Firmer and less creamy than SJ, but B. likes it firm. Not quite as good, but certainly adequate enough to keep buying.

And so the peril is no more. The quest for the tofu can continue.

imponderables

I don't listen to podcasts - and someday I may tell you why - but I did enjoy reading the list of imponderable questions asked on Slate's recent one. To which I have my own comments:

Would you rather put clean clothes on your dirty body or dirty clothes on your clean body?
I've done both. The former feels marginally less disgusting.

Your cellphone somehow connects to cell towers in 2025. You don't know how long you have to stay connected. What do you do?
This one I genuinely had trouble figuring out. Why wouldn't it connect to cell towers in 2025? Will they no longer exist by then?
But this is 2017.
I know this is 2017. But in 2025, it will be 2025.
It means that your phone today connects to towers in the future.
Oh. Then why didn't it say so? How would you know that it had?

Would you rather work for a great boss who's a terrible person OR work for a person who's terrible at his job but a great person?
Define how a terrible person could be a great boss.

Would you rather stop aging at 30 and live for 30 more years OR stop aging at 70 and live for 70 more years?
For this to be a conundrum requires a couple assumptions I'm not sure are warranted. First, that life at 70 is significantly worse than life at 30. There are some things about being 30 I'm glad to be rid of. Second, that you'd want to live for 70 more years. If I were 70 in 1947 - so I'd have been born in 1877, about the time the telephone was introduced, and long before the airplane, radio, or automobiles utterly transformed society, not to mention the atomic bomb - I don't think I'd want to live until today, even without further aging. Too much further transformation of society that I wouldn't be able to digest, not to mention global warming and Donald Trump.

What would you do if you found out William Shakespeare behaved like Harvey Weinstein?
Nothing. What do we do because Richard Wagner behaved like Richard Wagner? In Israel they (unofficially) ban his music, but that strikes most people as a little excessive.

Is it insulting to get someone the gift of a cleaning service?
Probably. When I was a boy, my grandmother decided that the gift I needed was an etiquette book.

theatre review: Watch on the Rhine by Lillian Hellman

This Berkeley Rep production got good reviews, but though I knew a little about the author, I knew nothing about the play but the premise, and avoided reading further before I saw it. It was a highly up-to-date current-events play when written in the middle of sizzling world events in 1940, and that fact attracted me, so up I went to see it. It runs through Jan. 14, and I'd recommend it to anyone similarly interested.

It's the early stages of WW2, before the US enters the war. (Though it could just as easily been slightly pre-war.) Two men, one a Rumanian ex-diplomat who spies for the Nazis, the other a German anti-Nazi resistance secret agent, happen to meet when simultaneously houseguests to a wealthy American family. How they react to each other when they deduce each other's secrets (without difficulty), and how the Americans respond to being caught in the middle, makes the play.

When it was filmed in 1943, Bette Davis played the German's wife (daughter to the American family, which explains what they're doing there), but - as Davis tried in vain to point out to the publicity people - hers was a secondary role. The lead woman is her mother, the lady of the house, played on stage here by the crisp Caitlin O'Connell. The German is played by Elijah Alexander (Orsino in the last Ashland 12th Night - OSF alumni often wash up at the Rep) and the Rumanian by Jonathan Walker, both with thick enough accents that, combined with the Roda Theatre's less than ideal acoustics, make me advise the assisted hearing devices for anyone who might even remotely think such a thing would be useful.

I'd found a couple old BART tickets in my "various stuff" drawer, and used those to get there, but curse BART machines for not properly printing the current value on the ticket, because mine was worth a lot less than it said and socked me with a large unexpected AddFare fee on exiting. OK, but that meant I had no idea how much my other ticket was worth either, which combined with having little cash on me made me reluctant to give any of it to panhandlers - of which downtown Berkeley now has as many as the City does; f anyone who says times aren't hard - which made me feel uncharitable.

world according to cat

Our cats are very loving, and a recent discussion with B. led to the conclusion that there is only one thing they want from their humans more than love, and in turn to a rousing chorus of "All You Need Is Food."

Christmas report

By popular demand, I made my roasted broccoli recipe as a side-dish contribution to the family dinner. This is designed to be eaten straight from the oven, but I find it keeps if I simply put the juice and oil it's to be mixed with in one small sealed container, the toasted pine nuts (carefully drained) in another, and the shredded cheese and pepper in a baggie, and mix them in with the broccoli just before serving.

The main dish was two smoked turkeys carried in from the back yard. Someone remarked on the amount of turkey skin I'd put on my plate, so I sang, after Allan Sherman, "You've gotta have skin / Skin's what keeps your insides in."

I have new shoes, not scuffed up like my old shoes, and a couple interesting books to read.

Went out the next (quiet) morning to do a little necessary shopping. I wonder if the Christmas-enforcing theocrats think it's OK to say "Happy holidays" now, because that's what the store clerk said, or would they insist on "Eventful Epiphany"?

all about (Christmas) Eve

Christmas season seems to have been sneaking past rather quickly this year. As a church musician, B. is particularly busy, for having Christmas Day on a Monday means that the fourth week of Advent (Advent weeks always begin on Sundays) has to be crammed into one day. I think that's how it works, anyway; Catholic liturgical calendars are still an exotic topic for me. If I've counted up right, she's participating in four masses today, and my job is to be ready to pop dinner out when she arrives home between two of them.

Meantime, here's a few accumulated blog points:

1. I've seen all of Alexander Payne's previous movies, but I'm hesitant over Downsizing. This review codifies my mistrust, as well as providing a brilliantly deflationary summary of one of its predecessors, The Descendants, "which began as a film about dealing with grief and ended up being a lesson about land ownership."

2. Hey, U.S. federal government officials of all kinds who have to check ID: not only do you need to learn that New Mexico is not in Mexico, but also that the District of Columbia is not in Colombia.

3. For dog-ear reference later on, an evaluation of the 15 top Democratic presidential candidates for 2020. When I found one of these for the Republicans four years ago, Trump wasn't on it.

4. I'd known that Rimsky-Korsakov wrote an opera about Mozart and Salieri. What I hadn't known is that someday it would be staged locally. Assuming that Alameda is local. I'm thinking about going to this.

English suites no. 16

I gave you Malcolm Arnold's English Dances, set 1. Here's set 2.

one memoir

Not So Good a Gay Man: A Memoir by Frank M. Robinson (Tor, 2017)

A couple years ago I read and reviewed memoirs by a pair of science fiction writers who had since died, Daniel Keyes and Jack Vance. Like them, Robinson got into the field in the years immediately after WW2, and where they both served in the merchant marine, Robinson was in the US Navy. For this one, the author died before the book was published. But he's like Vance in one other respect, having little to say about his fiction, or how or why he wrote it.

One theme that runs through the book is of trying to figure out his homosexual identity in a time and place where the world was trying to tell him that did not exist, and of his relief and self-understanding when he finally found an open community to belong to. But that's incidental for most of the book, and there's just as much on his experience as an editor, mostly for men's magazines. (Keyes also had a lot of experience in editorial trenches.)

Like a lot of first-drafted (presumably), self-written memoirs, much of it is very disjointed. Most of the anecdotes read as if half the story was scissored out. It gets much more coherent near the end, when he moves back to San Francisco in the early 70s and meets Harvey Milk; this is also the point when he began collaborating with Tom Scortia, and begins saying a little more about the fiction-writing as well. But the accounts of his part in Milk's career are an undifferentiated mixture of what he experienced, what he was told at the time, and what he read about later. Then it quickly moves on to the AIDS epidemic, and then the Milk film, and ends. Except for his brief early stint working for Ray Palmer and Howard Browne, at no point in the book does the science-fiction community play any part, though local SF societies are where I knew Frank from.

Interesting book, and I'm sorry there's not more to it.