Dry Ice Factory

I started to watch Netflix's Death by Lightning, its dramatization of the events of US politics of 1880-81. It's framed by interleaving the stories of James A. Garfield, who was elected and then served as President, and of Charles Guiteau, the weirdly upbeat loser who broke a mental gear and assassinated him.

I got about one and a half episodes in before coming to a screeching halt, which is about one episode further than I usually get in tv series.

Visually it's very impressive, filmed in Hungary no doubt not just for the cost (and a complete lack of concern about supporting an autocracy) but because you couldn't possibly find cityscapes that look like that in the US any more. The beards do not look as if they were casually slapped on the actors' faces with a dab of glue, a common failing in film set in this period (the movie Gettysburg was particularly bad in that respect).

The most distinctive characteristic of the acting is the extremely flat midwestern accents in some of the voices.

The script felt mannered and off in various ways, but differently from the usual. Except in the Republican convention scenes in episode 1, there was very little over-explanation for the audience's sake that I hate so much. For instance there are several references to Hancock without anybody saying, "He's the Democratic nominee, you know." You have to either already know that or pick it up. That's good. But the very 21st century use of powerful swear words in public grates, and much of the character depiction lacks subtlety. Garfield was reluctant to be nominee, yes, but did he express it that crassly? I don't think so. And the relationship between Arthur and Conkling, though based on reality, treats it ham-handedly.

What brought me to a screeching halt, though, was a scene in episode two featuring the thing I hate most in historical drama. And that is when a character shows up to preach 21st century morality at historical characters. Moral debates in historical drama should be conducted in the terms and contexts used at the time; it's not impossible to depict - the musical 1776 did it magnificently for the slavery question - and if it shows the characters as imperfect by our standards, they're less imperfect than they look when confronted by what are effectively time travelers from the present.

If I can get the viewer app to tiptoe past the rest of that scene, I might continue, because I am curious as to how the script will handle the titanic conflict between Garfield and Conkling which was the main feature of the administration. But not right now.

The Poiesis Quartet are the young ensemble who won first prize at this year's Banff International String Quartet Competition. I watched the whole competition on video broadcast and was deeply impressed by this ensemble. So I couldn't miss the opportunity to hear them in person, in the Noe Music series in a small but acoustically and aesthetically impressive neighborhood church in San Francisco. And one reason this small local series was able to nab the Banff winner, a hot ticket as classical ensembles go, is that they'd booked them before Banff. So, great perspicacity on the part of the Noe director-programmers.

Poiesis will occasionally play a "classic," but they're dedicated to more modern music, especially recent work. Their program included four contemporary works, all completed within the last 12 years, and the two most recent of which they commissioned themselves. They'd played all four* at Banff, but the experience of hearing them over an electronic connection on that occasion paled against the vivid, arresting quality of hearing them live now. This was the kind of playing where it was easy to tell how great the players are even without knowing the music well enough to evaluate it.

The four pieces had distinct individual styles, but there was a general family resemblance between them: excursions into lyrical tonality were separated by complex querulous sections without the grinding dissonance that once would have been obligatory in such works; plenty of exclamations of the kind of startling metallic effects (ponticello was a favorite) typical in the quartets of Bartók or Janáček, whom I think must be the patron saints of the composers represented here - that is to say, the composers seemed to be thinking, "Those are the kind of quartets I want to write."

To finish up, a modern quartet that's on the verge of hoary classic status, Prokofiev's Second. This was played with a firm, compelling hand that got across this rather difficult piece - I've rarely heard a satisfactory performance - more coherently and winningly than other renditions. Another big winner.

At Banff, it's not done for performers to speak to the audience during concerts. Here, all four players took turns introducing the various works. That too is unusual; if there's introductions to be made, usually one player does all the talking.

I'm so pleased that I was able to haul myself up to the City for this one.


*Pisachi by Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate; String Quartet by Brian Raphael Nabors; String Quartet No. 7 by Kevin Lau; and Many, Many Cadences by Sky Macklay.

I was uncertain whether I'd recovered enough to invest in a trip up to the City for a concert, but I thought of it as a test run for Sunday when I really want to go. Also, it was a tempting 'comfort' program for me. And it worked out fine.

Karina Canellakis, whom I've heard before here leading some powerhouse Shostakovich, is a lean and intense conductor, and she leads lean and intense performances. The evening started with Dvořák's Scherzo Capricioso, a lively little piece with undercurrents of melancholy. Then Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto went by in a flash. It was so brisk and succinct that it was over almost before I knew it had started. Alexandre Kantorow as soloist whizzed through his part with the speed of a flashier player but a more subdued approach. For an encore he took a slower way through a florid and player-piano-like arrangement of Wagner's "Liebestod."

After intermission, the main event, Sibelius's vast tone poem cycle, Four Legends from the Kalevala. This is where the Canellakis who had Shostakovich in her heart came out. The sound quality was golden. This was an hour of pure, distilled, 200-proof Sibelius, every note exuding his distinctive sound world. It was fabulous all the way through and gripping despite the fact that not much happens. This is still a great orchestra.

I've seen lately various comments suggesting that the Four Legends really form a symphony. Nonsense. Having four movements does not a symphony make. It doesn't have the structure, the sound, the approach, or above all the complex developmental concepts, of a symphony, and most certainly not a Sibelian symphony. It's a series of shifting static sound pictures. In short, it's what Sibelius said it was, a set of tone poems. The first item, "Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island," is the most interesting and most varied. "The Swan of Tuonela," which would be the Adagio if this were a symphony, is the most lush and melodic, though there was a terseness to the approach here. "Lemminkäinen in Tuonela" is the most difficult to absorb, extended and more disconnected than "Maidens." It's the farthest thing from a scherzo, which a four-movement symphony would need. The finale, "Lemminkäinen's Return," is a bit disappointing. It still sounds great, but it's a hasty and bombastic wrapped-up conclusion, a problem that early Sibeius is prone to elsewhere as well.

The people sitting up behind me had, as they often do, brought a large dog. It might be a service animal though it had only a harness, not a vest. It was as always entirely well-behaved. At intermission and afterwards, passersby were asking if the dog liked the music. And the handlers would say, apparently so. As I went by to leave, one handler was cooing to the dog, "You like this better than the ballet, huh?" And I muttered, "Better music." At a look of inquiry I explained: the ballet orchestra here is OK. But the Symphony is something outstanding.

There have been other articles published, analyzing Elon Musk's peculiar misreading of The Lord of the Rings, but I'd like to unpack it a little further.

Musk wrote, "When Tolkien wrote about the hobbits, he was referring to the gentlefolk of the English shires, who don’t realize the horrors that take place far away. They were able to live their lives in peace and tranquility, but only because they were protected by the hard men of Gondor. ... It is time for the English to ally with the hard men, like Tommy Robinson, and fight for their survival or they shall surely all perish." And, in the part I omitted, he referred to a post by Robinson describing "the Afghan attacking the public" in an incident in England, with an anti-immigrant conclusion.

Andrew O'Hehir, in an article I linked to above, describes this as "an especially idiotic misreading of Lord of the Rings as a right-wing warmonger fable," and it is, but it's actually a distorted mirror-reflection of the situation Tolkien describes.

First off, one must clarify that Tolkien intended absolutely no contemporary geopolitical reading whatever, particularly one only occurring after he wrote the book (he finished a draft in 1948, soon after World War II), and that looking for one is extremely perilous. Some early readers assumed a parallel to the war, and Tolkien was at pains to point out, in the foreword to the second edition, that the stories were entirely different. "If [the real war] had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron" and Saruman would, like the USSR getting the Bomb, would have made his own Ring and challenged the West. "In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves."

Those inclined towards Muskery should look hard at that last sentence. His claim to save hobbits looks more like it will trample them.

As part of the same point, the hobbits aren't "the gentlefolk of the English shires." True enough that Tolkien modeled hobbit society on the English countryfolk of his pre-WW1 youth, but that's just a model, not a parallel, and even if you can force through a parallel to the WW2 situation, that has absolutely no applicability to the period that inspired Tolkien's creation. The bucolic countryside, as he saw it, was long gone by the 1930s and 1940s when he wrote the book. (I can further quibble by pointing out that, while Tolkien as a youth lived in "the shires" - Worcestershire, Warwickshire - Robinson's incident took place in Uxbridge, which historically was in Middlesex, a county but not a shire.)

Now: "protected by the hard men of Gondor." This is a grotesque distortion of Tolkien's story. The Shire and its hobbits were not directly protected by Gondor, certainly not in any sense in which a Tommy Robinson parallel would be at all apt. Gondor was very far away. (In what sense Gondor did protect the Shire, I'll get to.) The nugget of accuracy here is that the Shire was protected, but by the Dúnedain, Aragorn's people. In a rather condescending speech at the Council of Elrond, Aragorn says, "The North would have known [peace and freedom] little but for us. Fear would have destroyed them. But when dark things come from the houseless hills, or creep from sunless woods, they fly from us. What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave? ... Travellers scowl at us, and countrymen give us scornful names. 'Strider' I am to one fat man who lives within a day's march of foes that would freeze his heart or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly. Yet we would not have it otherwise. If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so. That has been the task of my kindred, while the years have lengthened and the grass has grown."

And I suppose if you're sufficiently evil-minded, simple-minded, and starkly prejudiced, you could draw a parallel between those "foes" and the immigrants denounced by the likes of Tommy Robinson. But it does violence to Tolkien's story to do so.

But in what sense are the Dúnedain "hard men"? They're tough fighters when necessary, to be sure, but Aragorn says they keep secret. The Dúnedain are known in Bree only as the Rangers, mysterious "wandering folk" who pop in from time to time. They're not known in the Shire at all. Aragorn is very gentle with Frodo, because he needs to win his trust. I will leave any suggestion that this is even remotely like the posturing of Tommy Robinson with the silence it deserves.

Now, back to Gondor. In Tolkien's story, Gondor played another part. Its role was to defend the bulkwarks of the West against the onslaught of Mordor. From a distance, yes, this is in the defense of everything behind them, including the Shire. But its equivalent in a blinkered simplistic post-WW2 distorted-Tolkien fable is not indigenous rabble-rousers like Tommy Robinson, but NATO, protecting the West against the armies of the USSR and then Putin. Completely irrelevant to Musk's and Robinson's warnings against immigrants.

But if we do apply Gondor to this scenario, Musk's entire intended moral point falls apart.

Most importantly, Gondor's defense is insufficient. Even with allies, it cannot hold off Mordor entirely. Mightily though Gondor struggles, relying on it as your protection will fail. As Gandalf tells Frodo, there is but one thing that prevents Sauron from gaining the "strength and knowledge to beat down all resistance, break the last defences, and cover all the lands in a second darkness." And that is that "he lacks the One Ring." Which cannot be used by the West either, or only a second Sauron would emerge. It is the two tiny figures of Frodo and Sam, crawling through the dust of Mordor on a quest to destroy the Ring entirely, who are the key to the achievement of the story. It is (spoiler alert) the destruction of the Ring which saves the Host of the West from final annihilation by the forces of Mordor at the last minute.

Where is the equivalent of this in Musk's metaphor? There is none.

Then we're back to the "hard men" again. Like the Dúnedain of the North, Gondor's men are doughty warriors. But the unfortunate fates of Boromir and Denethor are there to show us the perils of relying on your status as "hard men." It is easily possible to be too hard, too rigid, and to fool yourself about the nature and extent of the dangers you face. Panic - from what Denethor sees, or thinks he sees, in the palantír, and what Boromir fears in the refusal to employ the Ring - is the cause of their error and the source of their downfall, and that Musk and Robinson are similarly panicked over immigrants seems depressingly obvious.

Better far than being "hard men" is the role and position taken by the noblest of all Gondor's warriors, Faramir - whom I begin to think is the most misunderstood character in The Lord of the Rings; certainly he was profoundly misunderstood by Peter Jackson. In his profoundly wise statement, Faramir says, "War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom."

I think a little more love of what we defend, and less lusting for the sword and the arrow and the "hard men" who wield them, would do us good. That is one thing Tolkien is trying to tell us.

A British paper like the Independent ought to know its own history better than this. An article on Labour MPs losing faith in the leadership of Prime Minister Starmer includes this:

One senior Labour MP said: “No 10 think he [Starmer] is Blair, but the PLP think he’s Ramsay MacDonald with nicer hair.” MacDonald, Labour’s first PM, eventually took the party to its worst ever election defeat, and was later expelled from the party for forming a government with the Tories.

No, first he formed a government with the Tories that almost all the Labourites refused to go along with, then they suffered their worst ever election defeat without him. I think his formal expulsion may not have occurred until afterwards, but he was definitely on the other side in that election. This was 1931; you could look it up. I told the whole story here. My conclusion: though they lost, the rest of the Labour Party had the right of the matter. MacDonald was well-meaning but sadly mistaken.