little blue turtle

Of all our cats' toys, their favorite is a little blue plush turtle, about two inches long. I haven't seen the cats carrying this in their mouths, though B. has, but I've certainly seen that it gets around. I will see it lying on the floor upstairs. Two hours later I will see it downstairs. Two hours after that I will see it upstairs again. We only have the one.

On several occasions recently I've awoken from a nap to discover I was sharing my bed with a little blue turtle. When I went to do my laundry a couple days ago, what should be sitting on top of the dirty laundry but a little blue turtle. It's certainly a busy and active little beast.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Last week, I was back at SFS for my last concert of the season. The previous week, Igor Levit had played one of the most famous and often-played concertos in the repertoire, Beethoven's "Emperor." This week, he played what's probably the least-known and most rarely-played piano concerto by a composer with any "name" value whatever, Ferruccio Busoni's. It's 75 minutes long - at least twice as long as the average - and requires a chorus (male) in its finale, that's why it's so rare.

But despite being long, and dating from the height of the Giganticism period in classical history (1904), it entirely lacks the garrulous waffling quality of Giganticist icons like Mahler and R. Strauss. Though it has interesting and unusual harmonies, it's pleasant to listen to and carries the listener's interest along, at least in this performance led by EPS. It's not a display concerto: the piano part is complex but it mostly rumbles along in the background.

Most times that an orchestra plays a piece of this length, they stick something else brief in the program to fill it out. This time they didn't, so the paradox is the long work made for a short program. Even with applause and an encore, we were out within 90 minutes of starting time.

Sheldon Harnick

ah me, oy vey, Sheldon Harnick has died. He was the lyricist half of Bock and Harnick, who wrote Fiddler on the Roof, Fiorello!, and She Loves Me. He also wrote musicals with other people, and before he settled in musical theater he wrote words and music for cabaret songs, a couple of which were popularized by the Kingston Trio.





This song is often credited to Tom Lehrer, because it has a similar dark humor, but no, it's by Sheldon Harnick.

Now, on to the then-acclaimed, now often forgotten Fiorello!, the tale of La Guardia's political rise. We have 1) the professional politicians preferring to play poker than to pick a candidate; 2) Fiorello's secretary frustrated after he phones to break a date with her because he's too busy working; 3) the secondary love story; 4) the politicians mocking the corruption hearings for the competing Walker administration.









And lastly, some numbers from Fiddler, just a little offbeat this time:

I just want a phone

An article in the Washington Post (behind a paywall, no doubt) says that only 27% of US households still have a landline phone, a percentage that's dropped markedly in the last few years. The highest rates are with older people in the Northeast.

We're old, but we're not in the Northeast. (The Northeast factor is due to the dominant company there being Verizon, which pushed customers to sign up for advanced Internet plans early, when landlines were still common, so those were part of the package and most of the customers still have them.)

So why do we have one? It's not just because we've always had one, though that's a factor. The main reason is that, at least in our situation, a landline is more reliable. And that's an old copper-wire landline. Most people still with landlines have voice-over-internet, the article says. I was almost lured to sign up for that, but I'm so glad I didn't.

1. If the power goes out, your internet is out, and so is your phone if it's over internet. Copper-wire phone systems rarely go out.

2. Our internet service is unreliable. On warm days it regularly goes out at intervals. We've been trying to get this fixed for 15 years, but no luck.

More generally about cell phones:

3. Cell reception at our home is rather bad. We live half a mile from Apple world headquarters, but we can't get a reliable cell phone signal.

4. I don't like talking on cell phones. It's uncomfortable, the reception is often bad, and all that radiation going off right next to my brain doesn't put me at ease, either.

5. Cell phones in regular use have to be recharged all the time. Another nuisance. A landline doesn't have to be recharged.

6. True, landlines get more spam calls. But at least on a landline you don't have to pay for them.

No question, a cell phone is useful. Using pay phones was tolerable so long as there were still pay phones everywhere, but with their disappearance the cell phone became superior and I got one. But at least as long as we're at this house, I'm keeping the landline. And if we move, my default intention is to get another one.

let me get this straight

This is my understanding, from what I've read. Maybe it's wrong.

1. The mercenaries were advancing to invade Moscow, and then they just ... stopped?

This may actually be the dodging of a disaster. I'm not at all sure that replacing Putin with a mercenary general would be a good idea. Especially not for Ukraine, for instead of stopping the war he'd be likely to prosecute it less incompetently.

2. So the guy who ran the submarine knew that the carbon-fiber shell was not rated for multiple descents, but he built and used it anyway? Using aftermarket materials??

I read some editorial defending the guy on the grounds that you can't push the envelope of human achievement without taking risks. I'm familiar with that argument from discussions of NASA. The difference is, 1) this wasn't pushing the envelope of human achievement, this was sight-seeing jaunts; 2) when you're taking those risks, you minimize them by being as vigilant as possible, not by cutting corners; 3) when the risk is high, you don't take tourists along.

Sondheim Festival VI: Sunday in the Park with George

I'd thought my spate of attending Sondheim productions was over, but last week I saw a poster in downtown Mtn View: a local theater group I'd never heard of, Los Altos Stage Company, was currently running a production of Sunday in the Park with George, which I'd never seen, in a theater I'd never heard of despite it being right behind the Los Altos library, which I go to all the time. It's called the Bus Barn Theater, and it lives down to what you'd expect of that name, except for two things: the acoustics are good and the sight lines not bad.

B. wanted to go too, so we bought tickets.

The performers were all excellent. They didn't have the not quite ready for prime time quality of some local theater groups, but were fully on top of their parts like some others I've seen. The problem was with the show itself. It's not very good.

The music is all characteristically Sondheim, but there's nothing in it particularly memorable, though some of the lyrics were amusing. But the plot, which is by James Lapine, suffers from an inherent flaw which didn't afflict the next Sondheim show, Into the Woods, which Lapine also concocted. Act 1 - which is tediously overlong - is all about Georges Seurat painting his famous work A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. And the problem with that is what I found in the movie about J.M.W. Turner, which is that watching a painter paint is just desperately dull and boring to see, that's all there is to it.

In Act 2, Seurat's (imaginary) American great-grandson, also an artist and played by the same actor, endures vapid cocktail party chatter after his latest installation, and then he visits the river island in Paris where his ancestor's famous painting is set. Here the figures in that painting - which as people had floated boringly around Act 1 - come alive and talk to him. Mercifully quick ending.

Amy Wisniewski

I ought to report on this, because Amy was a well-known and loved figure in Mythopoeic Society circles and I knew her for, oh, let's see, 48 years. She died last Tuesday at the age of 76.

Amy was already in the Society when I arrived. The first meeting I attended was at the small house that she and her partner (and later wife) Edith Crowe were living at in the flatlands of Redwood City. 48 years later, in a larger house further up in the hills, they were still hosting meetings. Almost every year, except during pandemics, they hosted the annual Reading and Eating Meeting. We would gather for a potluck meal and then take turns reading short selections around the (once real, later theoretical) fire.

For a few years, Amy was our discussion group's moderator, and she actually directed meetings with a skill and knowledge surpassing that of anyone else who had that title. Amy wasn't a Tolkien scholar; she didn't give papers at Mythcon; but she had read and absorbed his books and did the same for the books we were discussing, and consequently always had intelligent things to say.

What Amy was a scholar at was neuropsychology. She had a Ph.D. in the field and until her retirement taught at Palo Alto University, the same small specialized institution that Christine Blasey Ford taught at. They must have known each other, though she never brought it up and I wasn't crass enough to ask.

Once at a discussion group meeting at Mary Kay Kare's, we played with her kitties extensively, and they got so excited one of them had an epileptic fit. Fortunately there was a neuropsychologist in the house. Amy told us what to do to calm and treat the cat.

As a book review editor, I was long on the lookout for a book uniting Amy's interests that she could review. I finally found it recently in John Rosegrant's Tolkien, Enchantment, and Loss. But unfortunately by that time Amy, who had been ailing badly for some years, and was having eye trouble that made it difficult for her to read, was no longer in a position to take it on.

Like many Americans of Polish ancestry, Amy was originally from the Buffalo area, and she and Edith were preparing to move back at the time she died. Both long retired, they had little to keep them here aside from the discussion group, and lots of family to return to. One year not long ago I was just back from England with some Polish casserole seasonings I'd picked up at Tesco, and made a Polish chicken dish for the reading potluck, in Amy's honor.

We will all of us miss Amy very much.

concert review: Garden of Memory

It was the summer solstice yesterday, so it was time for the Garden of Memory walk-through concert at the Chapel of the Chimes mausoleum in Oakland. I used to attend these annually, but I hadn't been in six years, counting pandemic years when they didn't have them, conflicting engagements and a reluctance to risk the virus accounting for the rest. But this year I decided to take it, especially when I learned they were limiting attendance (no at-the-door tickets, for instance), and it was indeed rather less perishingly crowded than before. But despite an official request for masks, only about 10% of the attendees were wearing them.

Many of my favorite performers weren't there this year, which meant I couldn't settle down and spend the whole four-hour event listening to Amy X Neuburg or Laura Inserra. Instead, I wandered around. I came in through the upper back entrance (the building is on a hill) and found one group I did know, the Orchestra Nostalgico, in their usual position on the porch, playing Nino Rota in their drier-than-a-big-band way. Wandering inside, I was distracted from a guy playing a lonely saxophone by the sound drifting up from the floor below through the big aperture. It was the slow wordless keening of a female voice accompanied by electronics: haunting and arresting. When I went down and found her, according to the performance map she was Majel Connery, but the music was quite unlike anything you'll find on YouTube with that name, so I dunno.

Elsewhere I heard a very quiet quartet of two violins, electric guitar, and steel drum; two women playing hushed Irish folk tunes on harp and dulcimer; a woman playing wandering modernism on a set of clarinets and saxophones, including a contrabass: I didn't know you could play pizzicato on a saxophone, but apparently you can; a number of performers of the "play a note, take a long pause, play another note" school; and a recital of new music for harpsichord. All these, you'll note, were quiet, though I did find one guy who loaded up his new-age electronics to heavy-metal volume level; fortunately he was in the closed-off Middle Chapel.

They didn't give out performance maps on site this year, though there were some posted on walls here and there; the only way to get one to carry around was by having printed it out from the website in advance, which I did because I'd read the e-mail to ticket-holders saying so. But a lot of attendees didn't have one, though that did not fully explain the number of attendees wandering around lost. Twice when I got in the elevator, I was joined by somebody who was trying to get to the very floor that they were already on.

Though I drove up at 2 PM, the Nimitz freeway was stop-and-go traffic all the way: I fear it's become like the 405 in LA. So I got off it as soon as possible and came in by 580. There's only street parking in the vicinity, but I found the last available space on the street by the back entrance an hour before starting time, and sat in the car eating my late lunch or early dinner. When I got down to the main entrance later on, I found three food trucks - none to my taste - and a bunch of plastic picnic tables outside, an advance on amenities of past years.

Hoping there was no covid, I had a good time.

books

Edward Dusinberre, Beethoven for a Later Age: Living with the String Quartets (2016)
First violinist of the Takács Quartet describes the nitty-gritty of rehearsing and playing Beethoven's quartets, in the context of his history with the group: young Englishman joining three grizzled Hungarians and playing with them for 20 years, through two subsequent personnel changes. It really helps in reading this book to be familiar with the works and thus know the import of particular movements and passages, and even more to have heard the Takács play and know their amazing ability to listen to each other and unify their sound, and in particular Dusinberre's brilliance at melting lyricism. Because he never feels he's done learning how to play better, so this is a very self-critical book that can make its subjects look like incompetent duffers if you don't know at what a high level their self-criticism is pitched.

Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos (2005)
Social history of the Manhattan Project, focusing both on mundane issues like domestic power outages and useless cooking stoves, and on wild parties and security issues and the baby boom and personnel issues at the lab. Los Alamos was designed as a military camp but it was inhabited by civilians, and there's the main clash right there. Concludes with the long postwar story of Oppenheimer's loss of security clearances. Very little about technical issues; that's covered in other books. The title is the address of the project's office in Santa Fe, where new arrivals had to check in, often not knowing where they were going or what they would find when they got there. The principal character is less Oppenheimer than Dorothy McKibbin, the Santa Fe office manager, who was only occasionally on site in Los Alamos but got to see everybody. Some amusing anecdotes: for security reasons, use of titles like Prof. or Dr. was prohibited, so when a couple scientists sight-seeing in Santa Fe saw a statue and one said, "That's Archbishop Lamy" the other replied, "Shouldn't we say Mr. Lamy?"

J. Anthony Lukas, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (1976)
One of the first attempts to tell the full "White House horrors" story, based on a pair of huge New York Times Magazine articles. Excellent, clear, and monumentally detailed - it's a very long book - on the early stuff, but once the Watergate burglars are caught it needs to tell two stories at once - the cover-up and the public unraveling - and it gets clotted. I dug this one up because it was reported as one of the few early sources to finger Mark Felt as Deep Throat, but it only sort of does so. It mentions Deep Throat in passing only once - this is not a history of the journalism - and just says that many people think he was Felt. I don't know who these people were, because although his name did come up, most detailed investigators dismissed him as a possibility until much later on.

David Kaczynski, Every Last Tie: The Story of the Unabomber and His Family (2016)
Brief, painful. Discusses the discovery that his brother was the Unabomber more from an emotional perspective than an event-recounting one. Though it does say that David's wife suspected it before the manifesto was published. Also a lot on his parents, particularly their deaths. David's father committed suicide in the face of incurable cancer. This book was published long before Ted reportedly did the same thing.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Back up to the City for the most basic red-meat program possible, the two largest-scale concert works of Beethoven's "heroic" period: the "Emperor" Concerto and the "Eroica" Symphony. Still, these works are some of the greatest music ever written and they deserve to be played, just not perhaps too often. It'd been a while since I'd heard either.

EPS conducted and Igor Levit was the pianist. I liked the crisp clarity of Levit's playing, and especially the quiet subterranean way he navigated the concerto's transition from the Adagio to the finale. For an encore, he played a little Shostakovich waltz.

The "Eroica" was a dramatic, energetic performance that kept the music continually exciting.

Again, not an earth-shattering performance but a good one, and much more in keeping with SFS's traditional strengths than the last such concert.