Dry Ice Factory

107 Days, Kamala Harris (Simon & Schuster, 2025)
You'd think a book like this would be a chance to wax reflective on what it's like to run for president, particularly under such unusual circumstances. But it turns out that running for president allows no time to be reflective, so this is mostly an account of Things Happening.
What mostly surprised me is how unlike this book is to many descriptions of it. No, Kamala doesn't blame everybody but herself. She castigates herself, not for major decisions, but for opening her mouth and saying the wrong thing. She doesn't blame Biden for it all either, though she offers a few real criticisms. Mostly she blames his staff. (They'd say she was a lousy veep. She'd reply, nobody could be a good veep with so little institutional support.) One thing is sure, this is not a 2028 campaign tract. Too many bridges being burned behind her.

Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, Robert B. Reich (Knopf, 2025)
Reich says that when trying to persuade politicians, he's often lost his audience by going on too long about rising inequality and the fall of the working and middle classes, and he proves that in this book. If he said it once, it would be punchy. After seven or eight times of Reich making the same points, even the sympathetic reader wearies.
It's roughly framed around an account of his life, but that's just the frame and the anecdotes; the bulk is endless repetitions of the same lecture on economics. The parts about his service in the Clinton administration are just copied from his earlier and more readable book, Locked in the Cabinet.

Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan, Michael Barone (Free Press, 1990)
Political history of the US, heavily emphasizing federal electoral politics, from 1930 to the day of the 1988 election. Divided into two parts. Before 1968, it's a sparkling and intelligent history, focused on the electoral details that I want to read about, just what you'd expect from the founding editor of The Almanac of American Politics.
But starting in 1968, two bad things happen to this book. First, that was about the time that polls became ubiquitous, so the prose is deluged with polling result numbers, instead of stepping back and explaining what the numbers tell us. Second, this appears to be the time that Barone's personal memories begin, so after previously dealing out praise and criticism impartially, he begins to be partisan, and his partisanship is conservative. He keeps slamming the left in ways showing he doesn't understand their points, and he keeps telling us that Nixon ended the Vietnam War, which he did not.

Small Fry, Lisa Brennan-Jobs (Grove Press, 2018)
Memoir of her childhood by Steve Jobs' out-of-wedlock daughter, the one he either did or didn't name the Lisa computer for, depending on when you asked him. He also both did and didn't acknowledge her existence as his daughter, so Lisa spends most of the book yearning for an attachment that she's never quite sure she can get, and dealing with his odd habits, and the weird phenomenon of his having an effectively unlimited fortune. Meanwhile she also has to deal with her equally peculiar mother and a parade of miscellaneous stepfather figures.
This book is so long and detailed it's hard to get a sense that it's going anywhere, except that Lisa gradually gets a bit older. I also have to wonder: does she really remember all this stuff? In this much detail? How much non-fiction is this book, really?

Many years ago, San Francisco Performances put on a series of morning concerts which I attended. The Alexander String Quartet would play one or two of Shostakovich's string quartets (or sometimes, with guests, another of his chamber works), preceded by a lecture on (theoretically) that part of Shostakovich's career and those particular works, by music historian Robert Greenberg. It took three years to go through the entirety of the subject, but I went to them all and increased my familiarity with the repertoire.

But though this successful series was followed by many more with the same personnel on other composers, I didn't go to any more. After three years, I'd had enough of Greenberg's mannered, detail-clogged, and over-interpretive lecturing style, and I wasn't fond enough of the Alexander Quartet to overcome this.

But now things have changed. The Alexanders have hung up their bows, and the Esmé Quartet, of which I'm very fond indeed, is replacing them. This year's series is four concerts - that's not too many - on the major quartets (and quintet) of Schubert's, and yesterday was the first. They're not going in chronological order: this week's piece was the "Death and the Maiden" Quartet. Greenberg's lecture was as mannered and detail-clogged as ever, but at least the interpretation made sense. This work, he said, is haunted by death, which is why Schubert quoted from his song on the subject - not to recycle material (Schubert hardly needed to do that) but to convey meaning. But, Greenberg said, the finale is not a dance of death as many claim, but offers consolation and acceptance, as does Death in the last verse of the song.

The Esmé sat on stage during all of this, playing excerpts of the quartet for illustrative points. Then, after intermission, they played the whole work. It was not as violently intense as some do it, but this meant the lighter third and fourth movements were as satisfactory as the larger, darker first two. The sound was crisp and slightly metallic. The players added expression with pauses and dips in intensity. It was gratifying to hear.

I occupied mid-day with a quest I may tell you about later, and then landed in Walnut Creek for the evening with the season's first concert by the California Symphony. This was a program of pops classics, a framing confirmed by conductor Donato Cabrera's increasing tendency to yammer from the podium. Gershwin's An American in Paris had colorful enough tone color, but the tenor of the piece was dull after SFS's magnificent show last week. To be fair, this is how the work usually sounds to me. Ravel's Boléro worked better, and his orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition was marred only by the tendency of some of the wind soloists to swallow their phrases.

From Scott Fogelsong's pre-concert lecture I learned something about the Ravel Pictures I hadn't known. The orchestration was commissioned by Boston Symphony music director Serge Koussevitsky, who kept exclusive performing rights for his lifetime, despite clamors by others to play it. Which explains something I'd wondered: why there are so many other orchestrations of Pictures, and why most of them sound just like Ravel's.

It's Erev Rosh Hashanah (for the year 5786 A.M.), the equinox and thus the beginning of autumn in the northern hemisphere, and Bilbo's and Frodo's birthdays, all on the same day. What bliss!

I wanted to review something for the Daily Journal for September, especially because I skipped out on August. Not that there's much going on classically in either month, and the one thing going on in the DJ's coverage area that I could get to was the Palo Alto Philharmonic's Baroque concert, so that's what I wrote about.

I don't often cover early music (defined as pre-1750), because there's not a lot of interpretive "give" in it and there may be difficulty finding anything much to say. This concert left me with two positive impressions, one performer-oriented and the other in repertoire. First, that the bassoonist (Gail Selburn) playing Vivaldi's RV 497 bassoon concerto (I have to specify the catalog number because there are 39 Vivaldi bassoon concertos) was spectacularly good - I wish I could say the same for the violinist who played most of the concert's other solos; second, I enjoyed the almost Nymanesque slow march in a quartet by Johann Friedrich Fasch. I located a YouTube performance of this piece out of the thicket of crabbed catalog numbers for minor composers, and here it is cued up to that movement. Continuo here is on bassoon and harpsichord. These guys are nowhere near as good as the performers I heard, but this may give an idea.

I understand that the dentist needs to drill around in my tooth for two hours, but why do I have to be there when it happens? If there were such a thing as an out-of-body experience, now would be the time for it.