undebated

The vice-presidential debate was less chaotic than the presidential one, but I still could only stand to watch about half an hour of it. I think what bothers me most is the irksome, though necessary under the conditions, practice of candidates responding to questions by reaching into their shelf of prerecorded answers, picking one that's at least tangentially related to the question, or sometimes not even that, plugging it in to their speech circuit, and rattling it off. There was no communication or response going on here, just robotic speechifying. The last candidate to actually respond to what another was saying at a debate was Chris Christie taking on the robot Marco Rubio, and that was a while ago.

So I left the tv set, went upstairs to my computer, and joined a live online event I'd actually bought a ticket for, a club concert in NYC by Suzanne Vega and her band. Then I rewound and watched the part that I'd missed, which included Vega thanking her unseen audience for watching this live and not something else. Oh well. As with other pop music artists I enjoy, I haven't been following Vega's new work for some years - it's not them, it's me - but even though I knew less than half the songs she played, I enjoyed listening to all of them. It felt more alive, as if the audience were actually there, than the Richard Thompson solo concert I heard online last week. Possibly the venue helped. Vega has changed in appearance a lot since I last saw her, but she still sounds the same, and the band (electric guitar, bass, keyboards) was restrained and good. I imagined myself being at the concert, and thinking of my last actual visit to NYC, and that helped too.

Also on my online calendar for Wednesday, a two-scholar lecture for alumni of what used to be my library school, on issues of misinformation, social media, and the US presidential election. One of the presenters said that, though she'd been studying misinformation for many years, she only recently learned the difference between misinformation and disinformation. I found that a little hard to credit, but it may be true, because her examples of disinformation were really more misinformation, so she may still not be entirely clear on it. The other scholar was studying ads on social media, and how users may click on them without entirely realizing they're ads, and whether they contain mis- or disinformation (it turns out not to matter the nature of the site on which you see them). She added that if you use an ad blocker you may not see this stuff anyway. I always do, unless the site won't let me in with one.

Other news of the day includes an announcement that yet another scientist from my undergraduate alma mater, UC Berkeley, has won a Nobel Prize. I think we have some kind of a record. The real kicker came at the end of the article, where it noted that the university has awarded her a free parking space on campus. Now that's worth striving for a Nobel Prize for.

online concert review: Tetzlaff Quartet

This one was sponsored by Cal Performances, with the Tetzlaff Quartet from Germany, in Germany because of the virus, and not live but recorded last week, but they pretended as if it were live. The intermission video was a time-lapse of the upper Zellerbach lobby, but I hope they hadn't planned on holding the actual concert there if it were real. Chamber music goes in Hertz, please.

What attracted me to this concert was the awesome program: Opp. 130/133 and 132, the two most monumental and difficult of Beethoven's quartets. I'd never heard them put together like this before. I had some problems with the sound quality - more on that below - but the performances had me riveted throughout.

They were actually rather different. The Tetzlaffs approached Op. 130 with gravity. Even the lighter inner movements were given the same weight and seriousness as the first movement and the Grosse Fuge, as a result of which the piece expanded and felt even vaster and more all-encompassing than it otherwise would.

Op. 132 was more textured and varied. The Andante interludes in the Heilige Dankgesang were so warm and tender, and the final appearance of the Adagio so emotionally fulfilled, as to make an ideal rendition of the movement. There were other bright spots, particularly the march which was almost as off-kilter as Op. 130's danza tedesca, which is supposed to be that way. Growls from the inner instruments in the finale likewise stood out. It made a great conclusion.

I put my good headphones on to listen to this, but the sound nevertheless seemed a little hollow and stale. It definitely wasn't the performers, nor could it have been the venue, which was wood-lined, so it must have been in the recording or transmission. That, and a few pops in the playback, aside, it was a good recording. A separate microphone for each instrument assured that each could be heard individually. All around it was pretty satisfying.