tour and concert

Yesterday I picked up my friend Dr. Academic at the airport and delivered her to a conference she's attending at the Graduate Theological Union. In between we wandered about Berkeley a little. This is the first time I've given my tour of historic 60s Berkeley to someone without a particular historical interest, let us say, in those events. Required a little rejigging of my patter. ("Now this park has a rather unusual history. It's called People's Park, and ...") Shopped a little on Telegraph, where she bought a tie-dyed t-shirt for her little one, who will know that Mom was in Berkeley.

Also gave her a sample portion of the index I'm compiling for her book (this will be a highly analytical index; I hate the kind which simply consists of the page number of every proper noun in the book) and turned her slightly green with my copy of the still-unreleased-in-US LOTR Reader's Companion.

Afterwards, again left my car at a convenient BART station (Rockridge) and mass-transited myself over to the City for another SFS concert. Vladimir Ashkenazy, the Great Humming Conductor, led the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto (soloist Janine Jansen, appropriately chipper in the finale) and Shostakovich's Fourth, the Shostakovich symphony for Mahler fans. Requires an orchestra the size of a small planet. First movement is so long that when it ended, some of the audience thought it was the whole symphony. Maestro and musicians delivered an incredibly taut, tight performance until the strangely gentle blazing climax, followed by a pillowy coda.

Now B. and I are both home with colds or something like it. Blch.