randy_byers | Reading

I went to a concert last night. I'll tell about the music when my review is published in the Daily Journal, but the venue turned out to be problematic. It was in a small hall perched on the balcony of a winery at the top of the mountains that overlook our urban area. The view out over the valleys and the bay was spectacular, at least before the sun went down. But getting up there in the first place, and even more getting back afterwards, was another story.

To get up to the top of the mountains anywhere in the middle of their run, you have a choice of three or four extremely twisty and winding roads climbing up the slopes. I chose Page Mill Road, which is the closest to the winery. I got off the freeway at Moody Road, which for much of its length goes winding but not twistily up a creek canyon and then attaches to Page Mill, which powers its way straight up the slope. I've known this area since I used to bicycle around in it at the age of 8, but I don't go up there often, and the sudden and extreme hairpin turns on Page Mill still have the power to surprise; only afterwards do I say, "Oh yeah, I remember that one."

Coming back at night was even hairier. The road running along the summit of the mountains, Skyline Boulevard, is winding but not twisty, and can be dangerous because cars tend to speed along it faster than it can handle. And in the dark and the fog I missed the crossing of Page Mill, where there is apparently no sign other than the tiny street signs. After a while I realized this, and figured I might as well continue another winding ten miles or so to the next access, Congress Springs Road, which is a state highway, so there ought to be a visible sign at the crossing.

There was a sign, but to my surprise nothing designating it as a highway. Just a directional sign pointing off to Big Basin. If Big Basin is to the right, then this is where I want to go left. This road has fewer surprise hairpins than Page Mill, but it's every bit as twisty, and it goes on just as long. In the dark and the fog I often couldn't tell which way the road was going to turn next, and I missed noting any of the landmarks I know along that road which would tell me how far I'd gotten. Eventually, after much exhaustion, I knew I'd reached the end when suddenly dumped out onto the main street of the quaint downtown of Saratoga. Turn left at the other end of town and it's literally a straight shot home. So I got here, but I will certainly pause before considering doing this at night again.

kate_schaefer

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

calimac

Yeah, I've seen the videos in which young people are presented with a dial telephone and try to figure out how it works. I haven't forgotten the time I saw a phone book from the 1910s with detailed instructions on how to dial a phone, that being quite a new technology then.

But I've just had a personal encounter with unfamiliarity with other aspects of old-fashioned phone behavior.

It was a call to establish a medical appointment. The young-sounding woman on the line said she'd tried to call before, but had gotten a beeping sound. That's called a busy signal. I don't have voice mail on this phone.

Then she said, if you need to call back to change the appointment, use the number displaying on your phone. My phone does not display numbers. She had to read it to me.

Of course, none of this would be true if the call had been on my cell phone, but I don't like using the cell phone when I'm at home. (Partly because reception is bad here. We're one mile from Apple world headquarters, but that doesn't mean we have a good cell signal.) I use the good old-fashioned landline.

calimac

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?

calimac

Four years ago, I attended the last performance of San Francisco Opera's production of Cosi fan tutte, having been persuaded by a review by Lisa of the Iron Tongue. Yesterday, I attended the last performance of Opera San José's production of Cosi fan tutte, having been persuaded by a review by Lisa of the Iron Tongue.

I found it a less ideally superb performance than San Francisco's, though all the ingredients were good. Certainly there was some excellent singing on display. Soprano Emily Michiko Jensen as Fiordiligi (she's going on to play the title role in Madame Butterfly in their next production) shone the brightest with some powerhouse arias. But I like duets and ensemble numbers best in opera, and for me the highlight of the entire piece was the duet in which Guglielmo (baritone Ricardo José Rivera) wooed Dorabella (mezzo Joanne Evans) in Act 2. Their low voices blended perfectly together. Rivera has an impressively powerful voice, stronger and deeper even than that of Dale Travis as Don Alfonso. Were it not for Travis's age, I'd have suggested they exchange roles.

Nicole Koh as Despina was not only a good physical comedian, she was able to express comedy in her singing voice as well. That leaves Jonghyun Park, a good clear tenor, as Ferrando. Sets and costumes were basic 18C; the men's disguises were more than a little thin. Assistant conductor Noah Lindquist led this performance.

The gimmick of this production was having the audience vote, online during intermission, on how the characters would pair off at the end. In this performance they went with their original partners, which is what the text says; but I wonder how it would have been handled had they all split up or the men had gone off together, which were two of the other options. Maybe it would have looked like the end of a performance of Measure for Measure I once saw, in which Isabella spurns the Duke's hand and walks offstage. But that would have been a pretty sour ending for this production of Cosi, whose director said he was seeking a return to the comedy at the end.

calimac

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.

calimac

I'm trying to catch up with light bulbs. Once there were incandescent bulbs, which looked like this:

Then we were all encouraged to abandon them and take up LED bulbs, which initially looked sort of like this:

This took some getting used to, but I did.
But then I was just in the hardware store looking, for the first time in a while, for new bulbs, and found that now the LED bulbs are the same shape as the old incandescent bulbs, just with different insides. They look rather like this:

These are the right ones, right? I'm just trying to catch up here.

history_monk

"Brit card" will likely cost you your seat

Dear Mr Zeichner,

A compulsory ID card, digital or otherwise, is a catastrophically bad idea for Labour. The British public have accepted such ID systems in time of war, but the illegal immigration and working problems are not a crisis on that scale, no matter how much the right-wing press tries to make it seem so.

By over-reacting in this way, Labour are handing the entire civil liberties agenda to the Tories and Reform (Reform? Civil liberties? What have we come to?). They are not really in favour of civil liberties, but they have a better idea of what the public will put up with than Labour is displaying.

In Cambridge, the Tories and Reform have no real hope of unseating you, but the Liberal Democrats and the Greens do, especially if they were to form an electoral pact against you. As a strongly Remain former Labour MP, finding another seat would be challenging, at best.

I urge you to oppose any form of compulsory ID in all ways possible. It makes Labour look even more authoritarian than the Tories and Reform.

I would also suggest that Labour needs to be far more sceptical about policy suggestions from the Tony Blair Institute. It isn't 1997 any more. but the TBI doesn't seem to have noticed and carries on campaigning for things Blair was unable to push through, because they were bad ideas for both New Labour and the United Kingdom.

Yours, sincerely,

John Dallman

Current Mood: angry
Current Location: Mum's flat
Current Music: Radio 3

calimac

1) placing this week's pickup grocery order on the store's website

and

2) listening to a lecture on Zoom sponsored by the local public library.

The lecture is by a comp sci prof named Dr. Shaolei Ren, and is on the environmental impacts of AI servers. Which appear to be gargantuan. So much so that Dr. Ren had to keep saying he's not anti-AI, he just thinks we should have a clear-eyed view of their impact. So: gobbling up more water than the rest of the county combined, and spewing carcinogenic air pollutants across borders. Be particularly careful if you're downwind of Loudoun County, Virginia, which seems to be the AI server capital of the country. Downwind of it is Montgomery County, Maryland.

history_monk

Tomorrow, the UK government will announce plants for mandatory digital ID. This is an act of the most profound stupidity on their part, making it trivial for the Conservatives and Reform (Even Reform!) to outflank Labour on civil liberties. It won't work, it will be hacked and abused, and people without a smartphone will be even more marginalised.

Please sign this petition against it, contact your MP, and resist in all practical ways.

Parliamentary petition here has over a million signatures, Let's try for ten million.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Location: Mum's flat
Current Music: Radio 3

calimac

Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares, Berkeley Rep

Hour-long one-woman show, sort of, by the musical theater star and Melania Trump impersonator. Mostly spoken, but with songs inserted: not greatest hits, but purpose-written songs expanding on what she's been talking about, co-written with her musical director and pianist Todd Almond, accompanied also by bass and drum kit.

It's one of those wryly amusing sample of life things. Her theme is that she's overly anxious to please people (including us, the audience), going back to her earliest days in the theater, where she specialized in being an ingenue. (Definition by examples: "Disney princesses, Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde, Timothée Chalamet.") Also why, since premiering at 18, she's never been for any length of time without a boyfriend or husband, some of whom sound pretty awful in her telling. (Song about, Are there any good men out there?) She's been married three times, which she seems to consider a blot on her escutcheon. So did the clerk at the marriage license bureau, who - in an amusing story Benanti tells - wasn't sure whether the fiancé at her third marriage knew that she'd been married twice before.

Anyway, her third husband, whom she's been married to for ten years now (she's 45), seems to be the satisfactory one, and they have two little girls, so she segues into talking about motherhood, covering everything from overcoming your taught aversion to bottle-feeding when it turns out you can't breastfeed (the baby thought the bottle was great, but not the strangers who would see it and come up and say, "You should try breastfeeding") to answering smart-alec remarks from precocious kindergarteners. (Song on the theme "Mama's a liar" - she's trying to reassure her children and hide how broken the world is.)

Last topic, perimenopause. Oh boy. After which, she says, you become a crone and turn invisible. (As in, people don't notice that you're there.) "Well," she says, "I refuse to be invisible."

I saw Benanti play Liza in My Fair Lady at Lincoln Center in NYC six years ago, and I've seen her talk about some of these things in online concerts. So I was a good candidate for this and enjoyed it.

calimac

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!

calimac

Do Admit! The Mitford Sisters and Me by Mimi Pond (Drawn & Quarterly, 2025)

I've been curious about the Mitfords since my eye was caught by a title on a bookstore display table one day nearly 50 years ago: Poison Penmanship. It was a collection of Jessica's muckraking magazine articles. I bought it. She became a favorite author of mine, and it was from reading her memoirs that I learned that she was called Decca and had five equally colorful but sometimes more alarming sisters.

There have been a number of biographies, individual and joint, but I haven't found the ones I've read particularly compelling. This one, though, was fascinating as well as zippy. I'm not sure what to call the kind of book this is. It looks like a graphic novel, except it's non-fiction. The art is sometimes a little sketchy - I'm not sure I recognize the sisters, much of the time - and it can get very confusing what order to read a page's various captions in.

But it's very well told, going through the entire lives, jumping from one sister to another and concentrating on what they did together, with digressions in the form of visits to the author's own bleak suburban childhood for contrast or comparison, and sidebar-like introduction to other characters or events (treating their only brother that way). It tends to skip over Pam, the least colorful sister, in her earlier years, and it gets overall sketchy near the end, telling what happened without the rich array of anecdotes that enliven the earlier years.

But it tells lots of good stories, only some of which (mostly those involving Decca) I already knew, and brings them to added life with the illustrations. And the jumping-around storytelling style is impressively coherent.

There aren't many factual errors; I only counted a couple. The only one of any significance was the statement that Decca and her husband Esmond met Washington Post publisher Eugene Meyer through one of the letters of introduction they carried when they came to the US. They did carry a batch of such letters, but they got to know Meyer through his daughter Kay, whom they'd met at a party and hit it off with immediately. She is mentioned later, where it's noted that she's Katharine Graham, later the famous publisher of the Post herself, but not that she and Decca remained lifelong friends.

Pond is emphatically sympathetic to Decca's time in the Communist Party - they were giving a hoot about social justice when hardly anyone else was - and she tries to be understanding about the eccentricities of the Mitford parents, but her treatment of sisters Diana who became a fascist and Unity who became an outright Nazi and a Hitler groupie is pretty deadpan. This is what they did; comment would be superfluous. And I learned a lot I hadn't known about the personal lives of the remaining sisters, Nancy and Debo.

Very informative, very entertaining, and despite its length a very fast read. Probably the best book-length introduction to the batch of them.

calimac

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.

calimac

I did it. Rising from my bed of recuperation, I ventured up to the City for my first SFS concert of The Season Without A Music Director. This required two forms of public transit as well as a lot of driving, and my first eating out since early August. The meal was a little iffy - even ordering a smaller than previously customary dinner, I still overestimated how much I'd be able to eat - but everything else went OK.

And I got to hear a stunningly effective concert under guest conductor James Gaffigan. At least so far in its travails, SFS hasn't lost any of its MTT-given snazz. That was on vivid display in this program, four pieces of sophisticated 20C urban Americana.

The excitement kicked off with a gratifyingly tight and exciting performance of Gershwin's Concerto in F. Soloist Hélène Grimaud, dressed in sparkles, dazzled visually as well as audibly. I've called her the Argerich of her generation, and she demonstrated that pizazz. The outer movements were big and brash, which is surely how the composer wanted it. Gaffigan was clearly fully into it on the podium. But even more pleasing was the Adagio, which simply burst with sardonic New York color. The players knew just how jazzy they needed to be. At the end of the work, Gaffigan's first acknowledgment was to rush to the back of the stage to shake hands with the principal trumpet.

Gershwin's An American in Paris, which I've never much liked, was almost as satisfying, shining equally brightly with the same colorful sass, and again Gaffigan shook hands with the trumpeter. Duke Ellington's Harlem has a different style but worked to the same effect with even more jazz stylings, as much as was called for.

I only wish these had preceded instead of followed the one new and unfamiliar (to me) piece on the program, Carlos Simon's The Block, so I could have triangulated and better appreciated the style. As it was, the piece sounded like the answer to the question, What if the composer John Adams had been an urban ethnic?

The one odd clang to the concert came on noting from the program book previous-performances listing that SFS has already played each of these works within the last four years. Considering that, as others have noted, each of the works on the opening showcase concert last week had been played within the previous one year, the programming of last night's concert looks less bold and thematic and more timid and conservative. I think we're in for a lot of that this year.

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September 2017

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Dry Ice Factory

Good place to get some thinking done

Reading

in the hills

Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution

phone behavior

books, some political

so do all opera reviews

concerts review

light bulbs

E-mail to my MP

multitasking

Mandatory Digital ID

show review

all the first days at once

Mitfords in line

concert review: Palo Alto Philharmonic

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

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September 2017

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