Kalimac's Journal (original) (raw)
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded inKalimac's LiveJournal:
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| Wednesday, November 13th, 2024 | |
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| 10:18 pm | Fantasy: Realms of Imagination And the other artistic expedition that I made on my trip to LA was to venture down to the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, because it was hosting the touring version of the British Library exhibit by the above title.A couple hundred items in four or five rooms, mostly books and manuscripts (usually from the BL collection) but a fair number of media items, less illustrations (though there were some of those) than screens showing videos. Some of these were talks of the interview sort with authors, of whom the only one I knew was Terri Windling. But there were also some clips from movies and tv shows, ranging from the 1910 Wizard of Oz film to a clip from Buffy (Tara running away from the Gentlemen).At one end of one room was a 14th-century manuscript of the Iliad, at the other a 1983 kit for Dungeons & Dragons. That'll give you an idea of the scope and range. No single author got more than minimal attention. CSL had an early US edition of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and a copy of the poster of Pauline Baynes's Narnia map. Tolkien had a first edition of The Hobbit, open to Thror's Map, and a Swedish translation open to an illustration by Tove Jansson depicting Gollum as a giant troll-like blob. The caption astutely noted that Tolkien subsequently added the adjective "small" to Gollum's description, but it leaves the impression that Jansson was the only artist who made this strange interpretation: no, she wasn't.Manuscripts included the faint pencil of a page from The Wind in the Willows, a typescript page with extensive pen changes from Macdonald's Lilith, and the notebook in which Le Guin wrote the first draft of A Wizard of Earthsea, placed so far back in the case it was not possible to read any of it.Such a circumstance was the locale of the one factual error I found in the caption. It said we were looking at the "original manuscript" of Terry Pratchett's The Colour of Magic, but it wasn't. It was the galley proofs. I mentioned this to the clerk in the exhibit gift shop, figuring to get a shrug, but no, she was a former part-time English lit grad student who was very interested and promised to pass this on, though I had to explain both what galley proofs were and why they're called that.I wasn't in a position to say what really bothered me about the way the exhibit was presented, which was its depiction of all these assorted authors as if they were engaged in a conscious group project, each contributing a stone or two to a vast edifice. But at least until the advent of a publishing genre of original fantasy in the 1970s (or earlier if limited to sword and sorcery), the characteristic of literary fantasy was that, though authors were intermittently aware of and admiring of one another, each plowed their own furrow; they were distinctive for their individuality. There was no "group project" about it and it belittles them and the field to suggest there was.That there was something naive and belittling about the entire thing was communicated by the animated illustration at the entrance. It was of a unicorn, depicted as a horse with a horn in its forehead. There's more to a unicorn than that, but I'm not going to bother saying so. (Comment on this) |
| Tuesday, November 12th, 2024 | |
| 10:45 pm | mini-Mythcon In a living room east of LA on Monday afternoon, five locals who are Mythopoeic Society regulars but were not able to attend this year's Mythcon gathered to hear me, come down from NorCal for the occasion, give my paper from this year's Mythcon on one of the most elusive and atypical Inklings, CSL's pupil John Wain.I described how he didn't fit in with the Inklings, how he didn't fit in with the younger writers of his own generation with whom he's most associated, and then described some of his novels (modern realist, decidedly not fantasy, except insofar as he's deluding himself about human behavior), all of which I've read. Some I thought casually worthwhile, others are ... not.After the paper, and some supplementary prepared contributions to panels at Mythcon, and much discussion among the Mini-atures, we adjourned for dinner at a local roastery. And a Good Time was had by all. (Comment on this) |
| Sunday, November 10th, 2024 | |
| 4:37 am | concert review: blech Having another free evening in LA, searching the events listings beforehand I found what I thought would be a Rodgers and Hammerstein revue.It wasn’t. When I arrived, at the PAC at a community college in the Pomona Valley near where I am staying, it was billed as a tribute to the Great American Songbook, but what it actually was, was jazz vocals. You know the kind, where the singers unpleasantly distort the melody, then hand it over to the instrumentalists, who distort it further to the point of unrecognizability. This is why I hate jazz. I stuck out the 90 minutes, more because I was curious as to what songs they’d maul than eagerness to hear them maul them. (There was no set list in the program booklet, which was only available by QR code anyway, and from the age of the audience I doubt I was the only person there who couldn’t access it, though I was apparently the only one who raised enough of a fuss about it that the assistant manager let me look at her phone.)Anyway, the singers, Benny Benack III and Stella Cole, semi-performed three R&H songs, Some Enchanted Evening, The Sound of Music, and Getting to Know You; a bunch of other Broadway musical theatre songs of that era (I Could Have Danced All Night, Till There Was You, Almost Like Being in Love, Hello Dolly and Food Glorious Food - a bit later date, those two - and a few others, almost all of which I knew), and a few songs from movies (including Moon River and Over the Rainbow, both of which Stella liked so much she sang them almost straight) and a few other miscellanea.Not a great use of my time. (Comment on this) |
| Saturday, November 9th, 2024 | |
| 4:34 am | Sondheim Festival VII: Pacific Overtures I attended a whole sheaf of productions of Sondheim shows in the first half of last year; here's a supplement. It was Pacific Overtures, a show rarely done, perhaps because it requires a cast of Asian ethnicities, and all-Asian theater companies are not thick on the ground, perhaps? I don't know. But the East West Players in Los Angeles is such a troupe, and I caught the first preview performance of their new production - it runs through December 1 - on my current trip to LA. I'd encourage anyone in LA who's interested in this kind of theater to go; it's one of the best Sondheim productions I've seen.So Pacific Overtures - with "Pacific" meaning peaceful, not the ocean, and "Overtures" meaning introductory offers, not what comes before an opera, phrase taken from a letter by Commodore Perry, tells the story of the 1850s opening of Japan to Western contact, almost entirely from the Japanese point of view, with the rest being what the Japanese might imagine the Americans and other Westerners are like. Despite some tragic events, it's mostly comic, even silly, almost slapstick, and I'm almost surprised that the Japanese don't object to this Western portrait of their ancestors.For most of the plot, the Japanese are just trying to make the Westerners go away, Perry and his ships in the first act and various others following in his wake in the second act. Things get hairy - there's a nasty scene, reminiscent of something from Sweeney Todd, where three British sailors - played, like all the Westerners, by regular cast members in masks - menace a high-ranking Japanese woman pursuant to her rape, but at the end the Emperor takes charge, officially bans rejection of the visitors and the scene segues into a quick closing account of all that Japan and Japanese people have accomplished since adopting Western ways, though the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere doesn't get a reference.The music is perhaps vaguely Japanese in style without being pentatonic, with interjections of what I guess was authentic Japanese folk music, but what struck me was the lyrics with echoes of the Sondheim writing style from shows like Into the Woods (especially the ensemble opening number) and Sunday in the Park with George.But oh, the production! Brilliantly colorful costumes, ingenious staging of characters sometimes speaking for each other, and the most fervent and dedicated acting and singing. The song that struck me as the best in the show depicted the shogun's advisors considering how to react to Perry's arrival. I thought about posting a link to a recording, but none of the performers of the principal part I found online were even close to a match for the delight of hearing and seeing Gedde Watanabe (who was actually in a small part in the show's original production in 1976) perform it onstage last night. And they were all like that, with special marks to Jon Jon Briones as the Reciter, the principal character.This was a winner. Go see it if you're anywhere in the area. Through December 1. Ticket info at the company web site. (1 Comment |Comment on this) |
| Friday, November 8th, 2024 | |
| 5:37 am | concert review: Jerusalem Quartet Joshua Kosman, retired newspaper reviewer who's now blogging, is "at the moment struggling to imagine what purpose is served by going to concerts, listening to music, and thinking and writing about it" in our new authoritarian reality.I look at it differently. I see music as a refuge, a - not a "comfort," that's too facile - but a means for healing and enriching the soul. Even music that's dissonant can do that. That's why I posted a link to A Child of Our Time on Wednesday, and that I think is the point of having any form of art at all.Which is why I went with cheerful anticipation to this concert by a string quartet group I knew nothing about. They're four men from Israel, a country whose exports some would prefer to boycott, though how avoiding its cultural features would help the people in Gaza is not clear to me. Perhaps it's just to chide the entire country for having an obnoxious government, though if that's the motive then come January I'd have to start boycotting myself, and I'm not sure how I would do that.So I just ignored that point. This concert ought to have been in Herbst, but there was a scheduling conflict after the performers had to change their date, so it was moved to the large(r of the) halls at the San Francisco Conservatory down the street, a much better venue than it looks. They played Haydn's Op 50/1, a lively piece, Dvorak's Op 106, an expansive one, and Shostakovich's Twelfth. Shostakovich's Twelfth is in D-flat major, an insane key to write for strings in, but I think Shostakovich had a plan, if he lived long enough (which he didn't), to write a string quartet in each key, like The Well-Tempered Clavier. As for why this one, apparently the Jerusalem Quartet is working its way through a Shostakovich cycle, and this was just the Twelfth's turn to come up.This is the work which begins with an attempt to write twelve-tone music, but soon enough the composer gives it up and goes back to writing like Shostakovich. It was at this point that it became crystal clear what the Jerusalem Quartet is good for, and that's for playing fast loud passages in unison. They simply burn the carpet. Something similar had been revealed in the Haydn, not in unison but in a quick forte exchange, where despite the quartet's serious mien they passed the phrases around with the vim and vigor of children playing with a ball.And so it was a pretty good concert, and I preceded it with trying out for dinner a nearby Burmese restaurant (hey, this is San Francisco - we have every national culture in the world) of some reputation, where I had Strange Catfish (not its name, but should have been). (Comment on this) |
| Wednesday, November 6th, 2024 | |
| 7:37 pm | responsive music for a troubled time Michael Tippett, A Child of Our Time (Comment on this) |
| 6:07 am |  L: Donald Trump. R: America. ("It's not a perfect metaphor ...") (Comment on this) |
| Tuesday, November 5th, 2024 | |
| 2:25 pm | concert review: California Symphony I think that Mason Bates's update to the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra was supposed to be the highlight of this concert, but the Brahms Fourth Symphony took that prize instead, in my ears, so that became the focus of my review. (Comment on this) |
| Saturday, November 2nd, 2024 | |
| 5:12 am | concert review: Redwood Symphony  What is this? It's the entire bassoon section of the Redwood Symphony dressed as gnomes for the orchestra's Halloween concert. Everybody was dressed up: they were conducted by a pirate, and Batman played the timpani.And I reviewed it.Watching ten small children, each bearing a souvenir baton, escorted in turn up to the podium for 30-second stints "conducting" a Sousa march - it reminded me of the old joke of a conductor with a small piece of paper on the music stand in front of him which proved to read "Wave hands around until music stops." The main point of the exercise, of course, was for their parents to take photos. (Comment on this) |
| Friday, November 1st, 2024 | |
| 3:25 pm | return to history Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens, by David Mitchell (Crown, 2023)David Mitchell is a British comedian, tv panelist, and writer whom I think is not well-known in the US. I know his screen work exclusively from clips on YouTube. But I'm aware that he's both very funny in a ruthlessly logical way and extremely intelligent, so I picked up this book which is a history of English monarchs from post-Roman times up through Elizabeth I, which is when, Michell says, royal history became too much of a subset of general history to be worth pursuing.Reviews describe this as a humorous book, but while it does have some comic digressions in the manner of John Oliver, it's mostly an entirely serious historical account; it's the way that it's told that's funny; and this appeals to me, for though my style is different and I'm nowhere near as good as Mitchell, that's similar to the effect I aim at when writing informally about history myself.Mitchell has a main theme which becomes more explicit as the book goes along, which is an analysis of the whole point of having a king, what good does it do to have one in a medieval society. And he measures the kings he discusses in terms of how well they succeed at those aims.I'll leave that analysis to him, but I would like to quote extracts from his extraordinarily level-headed (i.e. he agrees with me) evaluations of some of the more challenging historical problems of the period.On whether King Arthur actually existed:Some people will still say he might have existed, but the sort of person they say he might have been is so far removed from King Arthur in any of the forms we understand him that it feels like they're just saying he didn't exist in a different way. Perhaps a Roman officer who served in Britain, or a Romano-British chieftain, or a Welsh king. Someone like that, the idea goes, might have been the bit of real grit in the imagination oyster that turned into the Arthurian pearl. Personally, I don't think imagination oysters need real grit any more than metaphorical bonnets need real bees.On whether Richard III was really a bad guy:It's well established, then, that the Tudors worked hard to make Richard III look bad. Too well established. People in modern times got a bit overexcited about it and started to jump to the contrary conclusion that Richard was, in fact, lovely. This is a bit of a leap. The lamentable problem that you can't believe everything you're told is not solved by merely believing the polar opposite. I find all this a bit daft. It's nice to take an active interest in history. But we don't and can't really know these people. The truth is lost under centuries of propaganda and then centuries of contrarian rejection of it. This is an amazing, entertaining, and useful history book. (3 Comments |Comment on this) |
| Thursday, October 31st, 2024 | |
| 8:37 pm | soup for dinner When B. and I were up in Ashland, Oregon, last June, I stopped in a grocers that carried interesting stuff that I didn't see at home. I bought several packets of a northwest brand of soup fixings - one envelope of pasta or beans, another one of seasonings, a recipe card inside.It was hard to believe, in June, that it would ever again be cold enough for soup for dinner to be desirable, but at last it's come. I got down the bag from the back of the pantry where the packets had been sitting all these months, pulled out the basic chicken noodle soup mix, and made it. Of course it expected you to add chicken, but on the back of the card there were some additional suggestions, one of which was a cup of fresh vegetables: "We like summer squash & broccoli." Substitute zucchini for the summer squash and it not only sounds good to me, I was already planning to put those in before I saw the back of the card.So that was our nice small dinner, and I'll make the others soon.And that was our Halloween. No trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood in recent years, so no costumes, no decorations, no candy, no lights on, just a normal evening at home. (Comment on this) |
| Wednesday, October 30th, 2024 | |
| 3:27 pm | no, el coward Our play-reading group just finished our second play by Noël Coward. We've all agreed that it will be our last.Some time ago we read Blithe Spirit, and despite the degree that it's about the staging rather than the dialogue, we enjoyed it and decided to pick another one some time. I argued against Present Laughter, because I'd watched a tv presentation of that and found it boring and tedious, despite the fact that it starred Kevin Kline. The amount of bad writing required to make Kevin Kline boring and tedious is unimaginable.Instead, we picked Private Lives, which as a play with only four characters (essentially: there's a maid with a brief walkon) was ideal for a four-reader group. It's the one about a divorced couple who run into each other while each on their honeymoon with a new partner, who rediscover first why they got married in the first place and then why they got divorced.But no, it's more than that. They actually reunite, then split up again, then reunite again, meanwhile revealing themselves as both truly unpleasant people whom we felt bespoiled by trying to impersonate by reading their lines. This is the play with the infamous line so beloved by Brett Kavanaugh's frat brothers, "Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs."It should be noted that the woman addressed replies to the man saying it, "You're an unmitigated cad, and a bully." But he returns, "And you're an ill-mannered, bad-tempered slattern." We couldn't say that either of them were wrong.As the play went on it turned out that the discarded partners, instead of sympathetic innocents, are just as bad as the other two. And we noticed retrospectively how the general air of nastiness and inhumanity infects Blithe Spirit as well: it was just disguised by the comic situation. This one is not so well-disguised. Coward's world turns out to be an unpleasant one we just don't want to spend any more time in, and so, no more.And so, having done all of Shakespeare's history plays, we're turning to Marlowe's Edward II. Those people are also nasty and brutish, but they're not pretending to be oh-so-cleverly witty about it, and that makes all the difference. (Comment on this) |
| Tuesday, October 29th, 2024 | |
| 5:34 pm | concert review: Other Minds The Complete Piano Sonatas of Galina UstvolskayaConor Hanick, pianoThis was a concert so profoundly unusual and interesting that I felt compelled to go to it. Other Minds is a sponsor that does offbeat modern music events; I've been to them occasionally before. For this one, they rented the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley.Ustvolskaya was a Soviet-era composer who was a pupil of Shostakovich (he had a crush on her, as he did on most of his female pupils, but nothing came of it). But her music is not like his; in truth it's not like much of anything else, and she was even more insistent on her own uniqueness than is justified by the music.Her output is small. She wrote six piano sonatas over the course of her career, four in 1947-57 and the other two in 1986-88. What I learned from this concert was how different the two subsets are: I'll explain that. There are recordings of these pieces, but the impact of hearing them live is incomparable.After a half-hour talk on Ustvolskaya by musicologist Simon Morrison and a brief break, Hanick sat down and played all six sonatas without a break, only stopping long enough to take his hands briefly from the keyboard between works: one solid 70-minute wad of music.It takes something really good to keep from being wearying over that time. Not only was Hanick a solid and vivid pianist (and the Freight's acoustics are wonderfully clear for piano music), but it was constantly evident throughout that this was music of great substance and thought, no matter how uningratiating it was - and it was, very. The contrast could not have been greater with certain renowned modern composers whose difficult music is empty and void of anything except challenges to the performers.From the beginning, Ustvolskaya's music was tough and brutal. Someone dubbed her "the lady with the hammer." Yet throughout the early sonatas, there were quiet and tender passages as well. The variety was part of what kept the flow working. Though the music held interest and was obviously of intellectual substance, I was not sure if I was really connecting with it on a visceral level.This changed when we got to the last two sonatas. If the earlier music was tough and harsh, this was tougher and harsher. Hanick slammed the keys down, and even employed his forearm to play tone clusters - not for the gentle washes of sound that Henry Cowell, their inventor, had done, but for the ferocious clang that people think they're for.It was at this point in her career that Ustvolskaya started employing insistent repetitions of notes and phrases, always at top volume, that put tremendous tension and drive into the music. This is what caused one critic to dub her an exponent of "sado-minimalism," a term whose cleverness can't disguise that it's inapt for both of its components. Though severe, it isn't painful, and there's nothing of the absorbent trance of canonical minimalism.Though you'd think I'd be beginning to be tired out from all this, instead I found my interest renewed and refreshed, absorbed and captivated by this hard but very human stuff. It spoke a strange and hard language, but it spoke clearly and compellingly. I'm not sure I'd want to listen to it again soon, but I'm oh so glad I did, and was I ever artistically satisfied by the evening. (1 Comment |Comment on this) |
| Monday, October 28th, 2024 | |
| 9:28 am | concert review: Voices of Silicon Valley This was the 10th anniversary celebration of a little (17-voice) local acappella choir that I hadn't heard of before. SFCV actually promoted this concert, though they haven't reviewed it, at least the first performance (I went to the second, yesterday). But what inspired me to go was that my old friend K., who's belonged to other local choirs, has joined this one. I think she felt it was more her style.Its style is an offbeat combination of avant-garde experimental pieces and epically tuneful musical excerpts from video games.* The main work on the program was Bits torn from words by Peter S. Shin, which has lyrics but mostly consists of oohs and ahhs overlaid on each other in complicated ways. It sounds great in the recording by the famed avant-garde choir Roomful of Teeth. But though VoSV sang this challenging piece with fair competence, they lacked the artistic flair needed to put it across effectively. Nice try, though.I was much more impressed with the premiere of a commission from one of their own tenors, Alexander Frank. Describing the work beforehand in a talk that deserved the title Chatter as much as the composition did, Frank said that, because the work consists entirely of spoken words, he does not classify it as music, but as 'voice.'Oh, I thought, I wish my old buddy V. were alive to hear that. She and I used to have intense arguments about this. I said that certain types of aural compositions were not music, not to denigrate them but to classify them properly, because they needed to be listened to differently in order to be appreciated. (Imagine listening to the 'music' in, say, a Shakespeare soliloquy as if it actually were a musical composition. It would just be wayward and irritating.) V. insisted it was all music; music is the whole sphere, it's not differentiated. I would say fine, in that case we need another word to describe what the term 'music' used to mean. I suggest 'music,' and for the larger category of organized sound, something like 'organized sound.'Anyway, it sounds like Frank agrees with me. His composition was a fascinating collage of mostly unintelligible chatter. It began with everybody talking at once, like the sound of a restaurant full of diners, and then reduced to a few voices, then increased again. Sometimes a couple voices would talk in unison. It was not music because there was no melody, no harmony; but there was rhythm and timbre and there was certainly multiplicity of line if not exactly counterpoint, and as with other such works I've heard (Varese's Ionisation for percussion ensemble) I found myself absorbed by those elements, though I would not wish the piece to go on any longer than it did.More conventionally, VoSV sang a piece called The House of Belonging by Jeffrey Derus, one of those efforts in which the words are stuffed awkwardly into music which they don't quite fit; and Friede auf Erden by Arnold Schoenberg, in German.Their pianist, whose role was mostly to serve as a pitch pipe, though she did accompany a couple of pieces, also played a solo piano work, one of the most totally useless pieces of music I have ever heard. Its sole point seemed to be to proceed slowly down the entire keyboard from the top note to the bottom.After intermission there was a brief interjected set by a local high school choir, who did pretty well for themselves. Their set included a motet by Josef Rheinberger, a 19C figure who's the most renowned composer from Liechtenstein, but their most challenging and effective piece was a setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah by the noted living American choral composer Z. Randall Stroope. Then they joined VoSV at the end for the grand finale, a nice arrangement of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."The first performance had been at the Hammer Theatre in San Jose, but I skipped that both for scheduling reasons and to avoid Hammer's dodgy acoustics, preferring the venue of the small and friendly, if perishingly cold, Tateuchi Hall in Mountain View. I might have been better off at Hammer. The chorus was miked, which in a hall as small as Tateuchi led to an overload of sound, with a couple of the sopranos (not K.) shrieking unpleasantly.I think the choir strove for more than they could do here, but some of it came off well, and it's the striving that's important, right?Credits: VoSV artistic director and conductor, Cyril Deaconoff. Pianist, Ting Chang. High school choir, Saratoga. Its director, Beth Nitzan.*They sang themes from Genshin Impact and Portal 2, not that either of those names means anything to me, but I know that if I don't mention it, someone will ask. They also sang, with boom box-style accompaniment, music from Gladiator, which if it's not a video game, ought to be. (Comment on this) |
| Sunday, October 27th, 2024 | |
| 7:39 am | concert review: Esmé Quartet I heard this group two-and-a-half years ago, in their North American debut, at which time they consisted of four young women from Korea who had been studying in Germany. Now they consist of three of those women plus a man from Belgium, and they're not in Germany any more, they're right here in San Francisco, having all four been hired to teach at the San Francisco Conservatory, which is some six blocks down the street from the Herbst Theatre where both of these concerts were held.At the previous concert they gave a stunningly effective performance of Dvořák's Op 106, a work which doesn't always come off that well. So how would they do this time with Schubert's G Major, which is one of the most lyrical quartets in the repertoire? Oh, one felt floating along in a timeless state of bliss listening to this lengthy work: the combination of lyricism and drive was superb. Here: this is a very fine video of the previous Esmé lineup playing this work, and it will give you something of an idea.I was particularly pleased with the forte outbursts in the first movement, which had the bite and drama one associates with Schubert's previous quartet, "Death and the Maiden," and by the fast rondo of the finale, which had the momentum of a waterwheel or of a snowball rolling unobstructed downhill: it was as if it was being driven by the force of gravity.Yet even more remarkable, by the same standards, was the rest of the program. Mozart's D Major Quartet, K. 575, one of his late "Prussian" Quartets, rose above any routine Mozart scribbling with an elegant sense of gracefulness and an unending emphasis on the lyric flow. Astonishingly, the same thing was true of Ligeti's First, a tiresome collection of random 1950s avant-garde tricks strung together. No matter how gritty, fragmented, dissonant, or harsh the music, the Esmé players found that lyrical flow of a melodic line. It was an astonishingly graceful performance, unlike anything I've heard in this work before. It didn't make me like Ligeti any better, but it further cemented my admiration for Esmé.For an encore, despite now being only 3/4 Korean, they played a piece of Korean folk music, which in its ceaseless presentation of bent note slides outdid even Ligeti in weird modernism. (1 Comment |Comment on this) |
| Saturday, October 26th, 2024 | |
| 2:02 pm | smashing pumpkins Article (paywalled) about what to do with your jack-o-lantern after Halloween.Don't put it in the garbage; it will just release methane from the landfill. Compost it, or donate it to be fed to pigs or other omnivores, or take it to a pumpkin-smashing event, after which they'll compost it.I thought with sorrow of all the ex-jack-o-lanterns I dumped in the garbage after past Halloweens, because I didn't know any better and knew of nothing else I could do. We did keep a compost heap for a short period, but I quit because it was not something I could manage, and it wasn't large enough to have taken a whole pumpkin in a short period anyway.But a few years ago, our garbage can was replaced with one with a separate compartment for food scraps, which I think go to the omnivores. And I would be happy to put the pumpkin in that, if we still kept a jack-o-lantern. But the number of trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood, once hefty, trickled to a near-stop years ago, so now we just turn the lights off and go to bed early on Halloween. No candy that we'd only have to eat ourselves, and no decorations and no jack-o-lanterns.But it's nice to know what we should do if we did it. (Comment on this) |
| Friday, October 25th, 2024 | |
| 10:53 am | and the trivia goes on So Anna Kendrick was on Stephen Colbert's show a day or two ago, to promote her new movie Woman of the Hour (which I've actually seen: it's on Netflix), the true story of a woman who goes as a contestant on The Dating Game not knowing that one of the three eligible bachelors is a serial killer. (And what happens then? Stephen: "The person you play, was that a real person?" Anna: "Yes." Stephen: "And was she OK?" Anna: "Stephen! Premise of the film!")She's talking about, having already been cast in the lead role, she applied for and won the vacant position of director, though she'd never directed a film before. She was having an internal debate on whether to apply or not, and described it (4:08-4:22) as "a Gollum/Smeagol battle of who's going to win out here."Now that was interesting, because not only did she make the comparison, but she did so aptly: Gollum v. Smeagol is an internal debate within one person, not (as some viewers of the movie might presume) between two different personas in a multiple-personality case. Good for her.And also, she pronounced "Gollum" correctly, whereas Colbert in response (4:35) is still saying "Golem." I wish someone would correct him on air about that. Isaac Asimov was once on The Tonight Show, and was irritated by Carson pronouncing his name "EYE-ZAK", so he fantasized about calling his host "JOE-NEE" but didn't have the nerve.Colbert didn't know he was engaged in a Lord of the Rings trivia contest last night, but he lost it to Anna Kendrick. (Comment on this) |
| Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024 | |
| 8:40 pm | more corrections A few years ago, I cobbled together a series of corrections and additions I'd accumulated over the years for a major article I'd published about 30 years ago. I sent those updates to the original journal, two editors later, and they published it.I've just learned of another correction that I would have included had I known about it. Another researcher, plunging into related topics, tried to order by ILL a copy of a rare article I had cited and was told that no article of that kind existed in the named issue or anywhere near it. She wrote to me and asked for help finding it.I had received this article by photocopy from - someone else, I don't remember whom. It had no publication information on it. Where I got the citation from, I don't know either: probably the person who supplied it. But this was evidently wrong. I applied a little clever research skill and was able to determine that the article was actually five years older than I'd been told, 1976 instead of 1981.I sent this information to the enquirer, along with a PDF of the photocopy, which came from some material I've kept in my handy file drawers all these years. She was greatly appreciative.For a further trick, I went to a local university library which is one of the few holders of a book that one of my "Year's Work in Tolkien Studies" writers needs but which she can't get from her college's ILL, which evidently charges by the search, like the old Dialog service did. Fortunately the local university library has a usable scanner, and fortunate also that I needed only two chapters from the book. One more PDF. (Comment on this) |
| Tuesday, October 22nd, 2024 | |
| 7:49 pm | those ruddy bastards I'm really annoyed.I was in LA in mid-August, and on Sunday morning (this was the 18th) decided to drive over to a favorite used book store in east Hollywood, because I'd been there the previous day and noticed signs saying they were having a big all-hands sale the following day.This is what transpired, taken from my blog report of the trip. "Traffic was fine until I got to Hollywood, where something was going on. Streets were closed and the traffic was packed. It took me 15 minutes to travel five blocks." I was eventually able to turn off on to a side street a few blocks from the bookstore where, to my surprise, I found available parking. The bookstore itself was not over-crowded, and I took twisty and mystifying back streets through the Hollywood hills to get out of there. But the experience was so shattering that, once I got back to my hotel, I spent the rest of the day recuperating, and got out of LA first thing the next morning instead of in the afternoon as I'd intended.I've just now found out what caused the congestion. I was reading an article on Slate about the future of LA traffic, and found a reference to "CicLAvia, an enormous, movable parade that runs through different parts of Los Angeles some eight times a year and draws about 50,000 participants. Six miles of streets open up to pedestrians, cyclists, joggers, roller bladers, and wheelchair users, with traffic barred at some intersections and directed by police at others."I'd never heard of this before, but I thought, "eight times a year ... could it ...?" so I looked it up and yep, it did. Sunday, August 18, it was going right through Hollywood, just one long block away from the street my bookstore was on.And I repeat: I'd never heard of this, either the specific event or the program in general. Nobody had told me.My absolute opposition to protesters blocking streets to force the public to suffer for some cause does allow for an acceptance of pre-planned parades. You know they're coming, where they're going, when they will stop, and that police will monitor them; travelers can plan around them. But not if they haven't heard about them. I visit LA fairly often, but I'm only a visitor. This project has apparently been going on for some time, but I'd never heard about it. There were no temporary street signs up a block away, even on Saturday, saying "warning: the streets will be congested and Hollywood Boulevard will be entirely closed on Sunday the 18th." There was nothing on the signs in the bookstore announcing the sale adding, "You might want to think twice about trying to get here that day, though."Now I know. Whenever I go to LA in the future, I'll have to check ahead and see if there's one of those closures going on, the same way I check to see if there are any wildfires going on in the hills near where I'll be. But when it actually hit me, I didn't know. Those ruddy, ruddy bastards. (Comment on this) |
| Monday, October 21st, 2024 | |
| 8:27 pm | concert review: Borromeo Quartet  Borromeo Qt. L to R: Yeesun Kim, vc; Kristopher Tong, 2v; Melissa Reardon, va; Nicholas Kitchen, 1vSunday evening I went up to Kohl Mansion to hear the Borromeo Quartet in the first concert of the chamber music season in their magnificent Great Hall, a sort of drawing room on which a platform has been placed on the mid side, so that people in all the chairs surrounding it can see; there's no trouble with hearing. In fact, the acoustics are stunning, which brought particular vividness to this particular performance.This was an exceedingly serious string quartet concert. The repertoire had its lighter moments - Beethoven's Op. 135 is often seen as a reversion to his clever Haydnesque youth with the greater perspective of maturity; and Sibelius's Voces Intimae Quartet has a couple of lighter and bouncier movements. But they didn't come out that way this time. Nor did the darker portions - the slow movements of both works are potentially emotionally intense, but they had a much drier interpretation here.The Borromeo Quartet play with a hard crispness that's really best suited for the high modernist 20th century repertoire. They're known for their penetrating Bartok, and I'd be fascinated by what they could make out of Shostakovich. But when they play Romantic or Classical works with that style, it makes the music feel high modernist even if it doesn't actually sound anything like it. They have sprightliness and clarity, but only at a couple small moments - notably the pizzicato moment that almost concludes the Beethoven - was there even a trace of the lightness or wit inherent in the music. They have awesome drive and exactness of control, which expressed itself most clearly in the finales. Beethoven's had some agonizing drama until it faded away; and instead of being a frantic dance, the finale of the Sibelius was a machine of vehement power bearing down on us and nearly crushing the life out of its hearers.I have to count this a great performance within a certain very limited perspective of interpretation. It was certainly an impressive thing to listen to.There was a little more to the concert than that. One of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier prelude and fugue sets, arranged for quartet. Evidently the fugue has only three lines, because that's the number of performers playing at once throughout it. And Remember by Eleanor Alberga, three minutes of wistful chordal lament. A fairly succinct program. (Comment on this) |
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