calimac

busy day

2026-06-09T11:25:18Z

Wow, did I have a busy day on Monday. First I had a doctor's appointment at noon to discuss the results of my test from last week. I had to take a roundabout route to get there, because there was some event going on at the Apple spaceship, which is along the regular route.

That gave me half an hour to get home before the regular starting time of my Zoom play-reading session. I made it, ten minutes to spare. This week we were finishing up Dion Boucicault's London Assurance, our latest successful venture into obscure 19th century comedy. This one features a man who convinces his father that he is not himself but a random lookalike. Then he keeps forgetting that there are things he therefore shouldn't know.

When we finished that, I had enough time to grab a hasty lunch before heading over to the other side of the urban area for another visit to the specialized dentist who is taking care of the hole where my extracted tooth used to be. Done there - uncomfortable but not painful, as my previous visits have been - I stopped by the nearby excellent tamale makers for dinner makings before heading home.

After dinner, another Zoom session. The Lamplighters, the local Gilbert & Sullivan society, were presenting an hour's introduction to Iolanthe, their next production, focused on Sullivan's music. I know Iolanthe pretty well, but I thought I might learn something, and I did pick up a little. (The oboe solo at Iolanthe's introduction is the only extended instrumental solo in the entire G&S canon.)

After that I fell asleep early, and no wonder.

comments

venue review

2026-06-08T08:34:08Z

Review of a new pop-music concert venue in my area, the Siesta Valley Bowl. Only it's not new, it's the amphitheater that used to host the now-defunct California Shakespeare Festival.

You know, I stopped going there long before Cal Shakes died, and the reason was the acoustics. The bowl was not focused, and the unamplified actors had to shout to be heard. That's assuming that a plane landing at or taking off from the nearby Oakland Airport wasn't passing overhead, which they did frequently, because that would rip a few pages out of the script entirely, making the actors inaudible no matter what they did.

So, all in all, this is a better venue for amplified pop music than it was for unamplified theater, assuming it doesn't bother the neighbors. Though I will say that I was curious enough to go and listen to what the review said was probably "the finest song in [the performer's] entire catalog," and all I can say is that if that is his finest song, I'm really glad I don't have to hear any of the others.

comments

driving

2026-06-07T09:15:10Z

B. and I had received an invitation for Saturday. Our great-niece, T., has graduated from high school - and beyond that, owing to an arrangement between her high school and a local junior college, a lot of extra classes, and four years of summer school, she also completed an A.S. degree, normally two years full-time of junior college, at the same time. So she goes off to university this fall a couple of legs ahead.

So T.'s parents, A. and C., decided to host a big late-afternoon party to celebrate. We've been invited to some earlier birthday and other celebrations but were not able to attend. So since we did have this day free, we decided to go.

The thing is, T. and her family live three hours' drive and a mountain range away from here, in a large and comfortable home out in the boondocks far from anything, so it's a major investment in time to go there. I drove us, we spent an hour and a half there, and then B. wanted to get back, partly to perform evening ablutions before it was too late. It took even longer to get home, thanks to a brush fire in the freeway median, but we did that too. Amazingly I got us home without feeling too tired out on the way.

Not a trip we may ever take again, at least not together, but we did get a chance to congratulate (congraduate) the honoree, and chat with parents and grandparents. It was a good outing, despite the trouble it took to get there.

comments

automation

2026-06-06T06:09:24Z

This is very 1963, but it's also disturbingly relevant today:

comments

one thing about doctors

2026-06-05T02:29:48Z

and dentists is that - I suppose depending on their specialty - is that they love looking around the inside of your body, where all the blood and guts are. (In the case of dentists, close-up views of the gums and around the tongue.) If they have cameras floating around in there, they want to show off the view to the patient, and are rather hurt if you decline on grounds of ickk.

comments

voting for the least annoying candidate

2026-06-03T19:26:41Z

Here's a clue, politicians. If you're running for a relatively low-profile down-ballot office, like state legislature or a county office, don't deluge the voters with endless flyers or giant ads on tv or in newspapers. Because all you'll do is make me wonder, "Who's funding this person?" and make me reluctant to vote for you.

Indeed, for one local office there were two candidates, of which I was very skeptical of the incumbent. But the challenger's ads were so glaring that I got even more uncomfortable with him. I voted for the incumbent, who won.

comments

ok, here's the story ...

2026-06-02T08:07:45Z

I was asked to tell about Shostakovich and the San Jose Symphony, so here it is.

This happened in 1992, after long-time music director George Cleve was persuaded to retire. Those who heard Cleve in later years may think of him as a mellow Brahmsian figure, but that's not what he was like when he was younger. Everyone agreed his music-making was inspired, but in rehearsal he could be tempestuous, even tyrannical - B. sang with the symphony in those years, and can testify to the long rehearsals and the tantrums - and eventually it was just too much.

To hunt for Cleve's replacement, the symphony held one of those "seasons of discovery" that orchestras in search of a new music director are sometimes fond of. A set of prospective conductors were invited to lead one concert each which served as an audition. One of the finalists, who didn't get the job, was Marin Alsop, now probably the most renowned female conductor around. But remember this was 1992, she was young and still little-known - it was the first I'd heard of her - and it may be a good thing she didn't get the job, because it meant she didn't go down with the ship. But I get ahead of myself.

The successful candidate was a Ukrainian named Leonid Grin (pronounced Green). His audition concert featured a dark, somber and compelling rendition of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, preceded by Grin's own brief talk about what this music meant to him. It was a stunner of a performance, and it was probably responsible for him getting the job.

Unfortunately, it turned out that dark, depressing Russian music was the only thing that Grin could really do well. His attempts at being light-hearted were particularly cringe-worthy; I remember a rendition of Ravel's Bolero that was especially pathetic. He put the snare-drummer (regular percussionist Galen Lemmon) in front of the orchestra on the grounds that this was a snare-drum concerto, and it just didn't work.

I don't say that ten years of this ham-handedness was solely responsible for the symphony's decline and eventual bankruptcy - an incompetent management was the primary cause - but it didn't help. After the orchestra's demise, an entirely new management hired most of the same musicians - nothing wrong with them - and founded a new and more successfully-run orchestra initially named Symphony Silicon Valley, now Symphony San Jose. Grin has never been seen here since, though SSV did eventually bring back the older and mellower George Cleve as a guest conductor.

comments

two outings

2026-06-01T12:44:56Z

On Friday, the Redwood Symphony put on another of its occasional spectacular Sondheim semi-staged productions, this one of A Little Night Music. B. came with me to this one. I was unfamiliar with the show and hadn't heard much of it, and what most struck me on this encounter was how little it sounds like standard-issue Sondheim. His usual ticks are completely absent. I enjoyed most of the music; the closest thing to a catchy song in it is "The Glamorous Life" and the most tiresome and irritating is "A Weekend in the Country," which I had heard before somewhere.

The orchestra - this was Tunick's rarely-heard full symphony orchestration - did very well, but the singers were mixed. Fredrik had a weak voice, and Anne was whiny and annoying, which undercut both the character and the plot. But Desiree (Annmarie Macry) did a good job with "Send in the Clowns," and William Giammona as Carl-Magnus had complete command of his character's infinite self-regard; he was even better than the guy on the original cast recording.

Sunday I headed out to the local area's most popular ethnic event, the Greek festival put on annually by a local Greek Orthodox church in the forlorn hope that attendees might be distracted from the food and the dancing long enough to pay regard to the religion. Instead, I spent two hours eating the like of lamb chops, dolmas, and a new offering of fried cheese (saganaki) that was quite delicious. Having arrived at opening, I was able to get in some of this before the lines became insanely long, and at that point I just left.

However, I did unusually run into someone I knew, and thus spent a considerable part of my eating time in the company of the marketing director from Music@Menlo, whom I've had a lot of professional contact with, plus her husband and two small children, whom I hadn't met before because she doesn't bring them to work. We chatted on a lot of music gossip, such as the appointments of new music directors in both San Francisco and L.A., hopeful signs both of them, and I told stories like how Shostakovich led to the fall of the old San Jose Symphony.

comments

Bay Area Book Festival

2026-05-31T10:50:12Z

I spent much of Saturday attending four politically-oriented panels at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley, all of them in the rented facility of the Freight and Salvage stage.

I was unfamiliar with the names of any of the participants, but they turned out mostly to be authors of books, usually non-fiction, on the topics of their panels. But the subjects interested me.

The first panel was something of a damp squib. Titled "Mindful Democracy," it was full of activists who said that democracy wasn't, or shouldn't be, a war between two hostile tribes, but a communitarian act of compassion and connection. But they offered no way to get there from here, or to solve the mutual suspicions that characterize our political world.

The second, though, was a dazzler. The topic was detention of immigrants, and the highlight speaker, buttressed by the others, was a historian from Stanford named Ana Raquel Minian, who argued that detention of immigrants is a long-standing US practice and who summarized her book tracing that history back to 1900. I was impressed enough with Minian's speaking that I went to the sales table afterwards and bought that book, titled In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention.

Moderator for this panel was a local named Piper Kerman, whom I didn't know by name but who turned out to be the author of the original book of Orange is the New Black.

The other panels, all like the second full of hard advice on what to do about it, featured the topics of press freedom (support independent journalism) and academic freedom. Particularly excoriating speakers in the latter, notably UCB professor Hatem Bazian, who ran off the rails a few times but who was most impressive saying that public education is a public good that should not leave students shivering in debt and consequently fearing to speak out because of potential damage to their careers.

comments

on my way home

2026-05-29T12:18:57Z

Having spent Wednesday morning of my LA trip doing library research at UCLA, I was able to get as far on my drive home as Pismo Beach to stay overnight. ("What's in Pismo Beach?" asked my LA hosts, wondering why I was going there. "Hotels," I replied.)

That gave me enough time on Thursday to do something I'd only done once before: drive along the narrow and twisty coast road, the Big Sur highway. This is often closed for extended periods because of landslides or storm damage, but it's open now. Lots of lovely scenery, visible through the intermittently intense rain that fell that day, and the number of stretches of road covered in loose rocks that had fallen from the cliffs above were notable. I stopped at Willow Creek, where you can drive down below the bridge to the tiny stone beach where the creek hits the water. Despite the dicey weather, lots of surfers plying their trade out on the waves. Also, much further north in Big Sur, the Henry Miller Memorial Library, which is not a library but a bookstore specializing in literature with moral content. Both Tolkien (The Two Towers and The Return of the King) and Lewis (The Screwtape Letters and A Grief Observed) made appearances, as did Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick.

And one more stop. I'd made a reservation to tour Hearst Castle, which I'd also been to only once before, many years ago. Checking their menu of tours, I'd found one designed for the walking-disabled, with no stairs. I am able but very slow on stairs, so that was the one for me. There were only three of us on this tour, guided by a Bryan Cranston type named Phil, who talked very fast and rather quietly. He kept leading us into rooms occupied by a much larger regular tour group (the same one each time), so he'd huddle us into a far corner and talk even faster and more quietly, so I didn't absorb much of what he was saying. I did gather two things: first, that the not particularly devout Hearst was fascinated by collecting medieval Christian iconography; second, that his expectations of what visitors should do and how behave meant I would not have enjoyed a visit here in his time.

B. would find the decorations fascinating, but I'm not taking her here. Opportunities to sit during the tour were few, and the shuttle bus going up to the castle from the visitor center took the winding and twisty road at breakneck speed. Even I was a little nauseous.

comments

concert review: Los Angeles Philharmonic

2026-05-25T07:57:53Z

I had wanted to hear Gustavo Dudamel conduct one more time in LA before he left its music directorship for that of New York at the end of this season. But I was in no position to visit LA this season until April, and then Dudamel was gone until late May. Of his last programs after his return, the most likely was his semi-staged production of Wagner’s opera Die Walkure. It’s a very long opera, so they divided the three acts into separate days. I picked Act 3, because that’s the part with both the Ride of the Valkyries and the Magic Fire Music. I bought my ticket for a pretty penny and Sunday I went to Disney Hall and heard it.

The orchestra was displayed on the stage, with the singers mostly up on a balcony behind them, though for part of the conclusion Wotan and Brunnhilde moved to a catwalk in front of the orchestra, very close to my seat at the front of the side terrace.

The music making was pretty good, though the Ride of the Valkyries was too fast and lightweight. The Magic Fire Music, though, was slow and powerful, making a grand conclusion. As for the long part between, purely a dialogue between Wotan and Brunnhilde, that wasn’t too boring, mostly because I didn’t have to sit through Acts 1 and 2. I spent more of it watching Dudamel than paying attention to the singers, Ryan Speedo Green and Christine Goerke, though they had strong voices and had no trouble being heard above the mostly not very loud music. Back during the much noisier Ride, though, the Valkyries could often not be heard over the orchestra except when all eight of them were singing together, which was pretty thrilling.

Staging was minimal. The Valkyries stood in front of papier mache statues of horses, one of which appeared to be a unicorn. Costumes were fairly traditional. Wotan kept adjusting his eyepatch.

This was only the second time I’ve seen Wagner staged, the first being a college production of a semi-staged Rheingold many years ago. I could do without any more, though I don’t consider my time wasted. I enjoyed this.

comments

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

2026-05-24T15:00:21Z

The outstanding feature of guest conductor Cristian Macelaru’s rendition of Dvorak’s New World Symphony was its clarity of form. Every section of every movement stood out as its own entity, and the whole passed on in crystalline goodness. And the solo passages from the individual musicians! Just marvelous.

And we also had Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto. According to the program notes, the original version of this concerto sounded like any other late 19C piano concerto, but the revised version, which we heard, sounds like Rachmaninoff. Well, a bit, but not as epically as the Second or Third, problematic as they in their turns are. Soloist Simon Trpceski thundered away dramatically, but to what end?

Lastly but first on the program,the premiere of a tone poem, Embers, by Tyler Taylor. How about that, another composer with the names of two US Presidents. Taylor is a horn player, so he knows the orchestra from the inside. His music featured a well-blended mixture of grinding strings (secret: they left the practice mutes on but played loudly), ghostly winds, and clonking percussion. It was a hefty chunk of chaotic tonal noise.

comments

music director reds

2026-05-22T08:19:41Z

Huzzah, entering its second year without one, the San Francisco Symphony has finally named a new music director, who takes over not next season, which is already announced, but the season after that.

And they've done exactly what I hoped they'd do, which is to name a fairly young conductor who's already made her mark as a guest with the orchestra. And I say "her" because yes, it's a woman, the first one SFS has ever had in this post, and one of the few in a major position anywhere in the country.

She's Elim Chan, who'll be 40 by the time she takes over. She's originally from Hong Kong, but received her higher education in the U.S. She's conducted here several times, and I've heard her once, leading Holst's The Planets, which I described as played "with the ideal dynamism and sweep, and with every exotic instrumental color exactly where it should be."

She'll be conducting next week, which I won't be attending, but I do have a ticket for the program in October that she's already scheduled for, with John Adams's Doctor Atomic Symphony. I'm looking forward to it, and to a new era of exciting music-making in SF.

comments

interview

2026-05-21T15:31:19Z

A fellow named G. Connor Salter has been interviewing various authors including Inklings scholars. He's gotten around to me. Here's the result.

comments

Lewis and Clark book review

2026-05-20T14:42:37Z

Craig Fehrman, This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis and Clark (Avid Reader Press [Simon & Schuster], 2026)

A new history of Lewis and Clark? As a long-time interested one in that expedition. I had to check this out, and it turned out to be well worth the trouble. Recent writers like Stephen Ambrose and Clay Jenkinson have painted Lewis as a psychological basket case, rendering it ludicrous that he was appointed to command the great western expedition. Fehrman finds a balance between this and the traditional view of Lewis as a great explorer, specifying his weaknesses but also emphasizing his strengths. Some of the other white men staying with the Mandans and Hidatsas over the winter of 1804-5 thought Lewis and Clark completely incompetent at dealing with the Indians; but you don't find that view here, though mistakes are acknowledged. Fehrman accepts without comment that Lewis was a suicide; this is possible but not historically established as certain, though most writers now treat it as if it were.

What makes this history "new" is the viewpoint. Chapters on various chunks of the expedition are told largely from the viewpoint of specified persons; sometimes Lewis or Clark (very different men), but just as often York, Clark's slave - so there's a lot of background information on the practice of slavery in this period - or Sacajawea, the Shoshone woman brought along as a translator. It's no longer necessary to rebut that she "guided Lewis and Clark across the continent," so Fehrman wastes no space on that, while emphasizing how resourceful and useful to the expedition she was. Strangely, though many of the men kept journals, the only subordinate who gets chapters is the lead sergeant, John Ordway.

But there are also chapters from the point of view of Indians, mostly chiefs, whom the explorers met, and this gives of course an entirely different view of the story. Most interesting is one from the view of Wolf Calf, one of the Blackfoot warriors with whom Lewis and a few hunters had an at first wary, then violent, encounter on the Marias River in July 1806. In later years, Wolf Calf left a brief description of the event, which Fehrman has uncovered (and prints in full in an appendix) though most previous scholars were unaware of it, though it had been published. It quite contradicts parts of Lewis's account, but Fehrman has noticed that Lewis was still asleep for much of the early-morning violence and is relying on the testimony of his hunters, who had probably fallen asleep on watch and had good reason to prevaricate.

This careful reading of the journals to observe things that had passed previous writers by is Fehrman's principal value. For instance, it's long been claimed that Sacajawea was close only to Clark among the explorers, but Fehrman finds plenty of evidence that she had friendly and mutually rewarding relations with Lewis and Ordway as well. He also digs up other evidence, not just Wolf Calf's memoir. Clark nicknamed Sacajawea's infant son "Pomp" or "Pompey," and so he is usually called. But Fehrman has interviewed Shoshone women, and declares that "according to Shoshone tradition" his mother had nicknamed him a Shoshone word, Pahmpi, which Clark had adapted into a condescending classical reference. Fehrman gives no further source for this, though his source notes are extensive, so I can't tell if this is an actual tradition, passed down through the generations, or if somebody had just noticed that there was a Shoshone word that sounded like "Pompey" and assumed that was the baby's real nickname.

This book can be rewardingly read by people previously knowing little about the expedition, though they may find the beginning a bit of a slog, as there's four chapters on preparations before they ever set off up the river, and another four before they get to territory unknown to whites. The emphasis is on relations with the Indians, which is the interesting aspect of the early part of the journey, though geographic discoveries later on, which are what most interests me, are not neglected. Overall, an intelligent and rewarding book, and the best account of the expedition alone, as opposed to as part of a biography of Lewis or Clark, since an intelligent abridgment of the journals like Bernard DeVoto's.

comments

tv review

2026-05-19T17:59:38Z

I saw a favorable review for Legends, and it was on Netflix, so I could get it. If you like British cop shows, and I know a lot of people do, this is a good one. It's a 6-episode mini-series, so it functions as a really long movie. The heroes of this one are Customs agents, not previously trained at undercover investigations, so they are perhaps a little easier to identify with than the typical pro hacks.

The story is that it's 1990, and Margaret Thatcher has decided to crack down on heroin importations. That's Customs' department, so they set up a training and filtering program to test and train volunteer agents who want something a little more exciting than riffling through suitcases. After a three-week program, they're down to four agents who look qualified to do the work.

"Legends" is Customs' term for cover identities, but only one of the four is destined to go deep undercover. He's maneuvering himself into the position of being the drug dealers' transport guy, who moves the heroin from Pakistan to the UK. Of the other three, one becomes the computer whiz backroom girl, and the remaining two spend most of their time watching over the other batch of drug dealers than the ones the transport guy is working on.

Most of the show jumps back and forth among the agents and their handler, who is played by Steve Coogan in a serious role, though there are flashes of humor in the show here and there. The undercover guy is married with a small daughter - unusual for undercover agents, who are usually unattached - so he has to balance work and family, and being two different guys at once, in an odd and stressful way.

It's a highly dramatic show, and well directed and acted, and I recommend it for those inclined to such drama.

comments

two concerts

2026-05-18T15:23:23Z

Because I was going up for the evening anyway, I added to my schedule the afternoon Peninsula Symphony concert in San Mateo. I learned that long-term (40+ years!) m.d. Mitchell Sardou Klein is retiring at the end of next season. Perhaps it's time, because it seemed to me the orchestra has deteriorated since I last heard them two years ago.

The concert opened with Wagner's Flying Dutchman Overture. This was energetic and perky enough, but the Wagnerism of it was in full cry and it was consequently very tedious. Then, the Viola Concerto of the early-20C modernist Rebecca Clarke. Clarke didn't actually write a viola concerto; in 1919 she wrote a sonata for viola and piano, and this was orchestrated about 20 years ago to be used as a concerto for an instrument in desperate need of more repertoire. Soloist was Pearl de la Motte, a Juilliard student who won the string player competition here two years ago, prize of which is customarily playing a concerto with the Pen Sym. Her tone was a rich viola tone, distinct from both violin and cello, satisfying to hear despite the fact that the music itself seemed to wander meaninglessly, rather in the mode of one of the concertos that Elgar was writing at the same time.

Lastly, Brahms's Second Symphony, played in a blatty style reminiscent of the SFS in the bad old days of the 1970s. The horns were particularly coarse, the colors from other instruments blared out in an un-Brahmsian fashion, and interpretive oddities of strange emphases and pauses, especially in the first movement, didn't help. Well, I'll be hearing the BA Rainbow Symphony in the Third next month, and maybe that'll wipe out the memory of this one.

Then, off to the Freight in Berkeley for another Terry Riley 90th birthday celebration. The Bang on a Can All-Stars, a 6-member touring ensemble, have been going around playing a Riley celebration, and this was their Berkeley stop. They played two long pieces by him. First was A Rainbow in Curved Air, but it didn't sound much like the version on overdubbed electric organs that Riley improvised for a record in 1969. For one thing only one of the performers was on electric organ (also covering as an electric piano), the others being clarinet/sax, electric guitar, cello, string bass, and drums/percussion. That turned the minimalist noodling background into more of a muddle. The tunes coating this on the other instruments seemed original and not copies of Riley's, and at times, especially in the long string bass pizzicato solo, the rest of the ensemble pretty much dropped out to enable it to be heard.

After that, the performers were joined by 4 or 5 (hard to see how many were onstage) local musicians, one of them a vocalist, for a full performance of Riley's minimalist classic, In C. This was enchanting as every live performance I've heard of it has been. The pulse rhythm was played on xylophone. The other players took full advantage of Riley's permission to drop out occasionally, and hushes to only one or two players besides the pulse were frequent. But also they'd build up to tremendous climaxes at other times. This sounded coordinated, but I didn't see any signals as a leader gave for switches during Rainbow. The whole lasted 47 minutes, a typical length for this work. We were out at 9:30, early for a Freight concert, but I was thoroughly satisfied with my evening.

comments

concert review: South Bay Philharmonic

2026-05-16T11:53:30Z

A typical symphony concert has three works, two of them fairly long. This potpourri of a concert had eight works, all of them pretty short. The unifying gimmick was that they were all in some way referents to time. The keynote work of the program, probably the longest selection, and definitely the best-played, was Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours." I also enjoyed a piece by frequent South Bay contributor Ron Miller, "Overture to a Summer Afternoon," a rondo featuring a bustling American modernist recurring theme. Miller is not usually this good. Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain" was played OK, but somewhat clunkier, and "Sunrise" from Grofé's "Grand Canyon Suite" was squeaky. The grinding conclusion to the program was a suite from the music to the Back to the Future films, which meant nothing to me as I've completely forgotten the first one and never saw any of the others. Less imitation John Williams than imitation Elmer Bernstein, it was loud, crass, and extremely repetitious. B. who plays viola in this orchestra was not happy with this mixed bag program and especially not with this piece.

comments

news of the day

2026-05-15T16:26:37Z

1. Author gets in trouble for quoting Sturgeon's Law.

2. California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer is paying online "influencers" to boost his campaign. They're writing posts praising him without revealing they've been paid to do so.
I'm not much of an influencer, but that only means I get less crud e-mail than they do. I wonder how Steyer's campaign contacted these people. If I'd gotten an e-mail from someone claiming to represent him and offer me money to boost his campaign, I'd probably have thrown it out with the spam. If I'd recognized it as real, I'd probably have posted "Can you believe it? Some nut wants to pay me to praise Steyer."
I'm leaning towards supporting Becerra. He may be incompetent, but he's less corrupt.

comments

Tiptree on Tolkien

2026-05-15T08:41:18Z

From a 1974 essay, "Harvesting the Sea," by James Tiptree Jr. (only later revealed as Alice B. Sheldon), reprinted in the collection Meet Me at Infinity (Tor, 2000), p. 265:

The main thing I've been into is a serious study of Tolkien's Ring and reading H.G. Wells for the first time. I will spare you my conclusions beyond saying I take both very seriously indeed. One of the aspects which they share is that they are both strategies for handling almost unbearable grief. In Wells's Days of the Comet, the fantastic, gut-tearing paean of hope reveals the wound beneath; it is the blinded crying for light. In Tolkien the held-back cry of bitter loss becomes lacerating; it is interesting to read that his first memories were of the ravaging of his childhood lands by the devastations of the railroad, and that in his youth, by 1918, all but one of his close friends had been killed in the war. His prescription is go on, go on; it stinks, it hurts, but go on. Somehow go on. Wells goes on, too; both men are, well, sturdy. Brave, one might have said in a simpler age. Both tremble toward sentimentality, are saved at each last moment by their brilliantly observing eyes, their regard for what is, no matter how dismaying. And of course with Tolkien, the rich airy landscape of words, his almost magical grasp.

I don't recall this unusual, interesting, and observant comment being quoted in the Tolkien literature before; so here it is.

comments

more dentistry

2026-05-13T22:41:56Z

Monday's the day I finally saw the periodontist about my fractured tooth. He said it needed to come out, soon, but he wanted an endodontist to have a look first, especially to confirm the neighboring teeth were secure. Fortunately I was able to get to the endodontist (I had to look up all these dental specialties) on Tuesday. He said the neighboring teeth were fine, but the fractured tooth needed to come out right away. He'd do it, right then, and I wouldn't have to wait for the periodontist to schedule an appointment.

So I said OK, and he did. It was uncomfortable but not painful; it's the aftermath which is more difficult, involving some pain, a lot of gauze to staunch the bleeding, and severe restrictions on eating. There's also the cost, since apparently my insurance covered none of this, but I have the money. What I don't have so much of is agreeableness over the physical effects.

The other exciting part is that both appointments required consultation with my physicians over whether there'd be any medical complications to this. Reaching them is challenging, especially as there's three of them, only two have direct office phone numbers, and one is away right now though someone is covering. That required an hour's wait on both days, and a quick visit by me to one of the offices when phone contact proved insufficient.

comments

I hate the Los Angeles Philharmonic customer service department

2026-05-13T04:43:04Z

I went to the LA Phil website to print out my ticket for the concert I'm attending later this month. When I got to the "show barcode" command, I clicked on it, and it said "Please wait" and continued to say that for the next five hours. I tried a different browser; same result.

Eventually the customer service number woke up for the day and I called them. The agent responded to my attempt to print the ticket by saying we don't advise printing tickets; the barcodes might not be legible to the scanners. I said, "In that case, why do you enforce this by making the website hang up on 'Please wait' for five hours?" And instead of responding, "We don't; I don't know why you're having trouble with this, but it's not our intention and I'm sorry it's happening," which would have been both true and kindly, she said, "I'm not responsible for any problems." I said yes you are; you are a person designated by the LA Phil to answer the phone with customer problems, so therefore you are responsible for dealing with them. That forthright answer may have been the reason why she shortly hung up on me.

Bad move. That only makes me call back in towering anger and demand to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor promised to listen to the tape of the previous call and have a talk with the responsible agent; but he also said that the LA Phil feels no obligation to facilitate printing of bar codes because these days most people have smartphones. I said "most people" leaves out the large number who don't, and is a studied insult to their existence. He said he didn't mean to insult anybody - if true, that's a greater condemnation than if he did intend to insult them - but he's had lots of experience and not allowing printing is not a problem. I said I've had plenty of experience with other venues, and they all offer printing out tickets as an option. I said that maybe we're not as technologically advanced in the Bay Area as you are in L.A. (a truly sarcastic remark, coming from the heart of Silicon Valley where I live), but we manage to allow printing of tickets and have no problem scanning them on the day. Maybe he should see about fixing the website so that it offers a printable ticket. Perhaps not very many people will need that option, but they do exist and will be grateful. I doubt I got my point across.

He did come up with a technical reason for probably why I'd had trouble accessing the bar code, and then offered to switch my ticket to will call, waiving the added fee usually associated with this. He said that option should have been available when I bought the ticket, but it was not. A list of possible ways to get your ticket was one of the steps, but that list had only one option: online download. So I was stuck.

comments

a day out in the East Bay

2026-05-11T15:24:42Z

Since I was attending a concert in Oakland Saturday evening and another in nearby Walnut Creek on Sunday afternoon, I decided to stay over in the neighborhood overnight, finding a hotel room which didn't have a "hot" setting for the shower, ugh, and whose "breakfast bar" was both useless and overpriced.

That did mean I'd have time Sunday morning to visit the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site in Danville. This takes planning to get to. The site, O'Neill's retreat home at the top of the mountains, is now accessible by road only through a gated private community, which means you have to make a reservation for the NPS van to take you up there by car. (It's also possible to hike in from the regional parks which abut the other side of the property, and a large party did that on our tour, but you have to reserve for the tour to do that also.)

I'd been to this home once before, but it was years ago. O'Neill and his wife had wanted to get as far away as they could from Broadway, where he could just write in peace and privacy, so they built this home in an isolated spot and deprecated visitors. They designed it according to their amateur understanding of Chinese philosophy and aesthetics, and named it Tao House. The plan worked for a few years, and O'Neill wrote some of his most renowned plays, including A Long Day's Journey Into Night, here. But then his increasing hand tremor made it impossible for him to write (with pencil, the only way he could get his ideas down), and the coming of WW2 made their servants go off and get war jobs - neither O'Neill drove, or cooked or cleaned for that matter. So they sold the house and left. So it was interesting to see the house's design and the earth-sky color scheme, and the private study where Eugene did his writing, made up into a simulacrum of a merchant marine captain's quarters (he had once been in the merchant marine, and now he was the captain of his soul).

And the concerts? Saturday was pianist Sarah Cahill playing works of Terry Riley, a celebration of his 90th birthday last year (he wasn't there; he's living in Japan). It was a very tiny concert in an industrial warehouse in West Oakland, in a room rented by a new-music proprietor as rehearsal space. Four rows of chairs on risers on the side of a big room otherwise empty except for a piano in the middle. Only one piece, from 1964, was minimalism as we'd know it. Since then Riley has been exploring jazz, ragtime (one piece was a ragtime reinvention of "I Am the Walrus," recognizable only in the rhythm), improvisation, and various other techniques. Pieces that Cahill has commissioned in honor of Riley by Samuel Adams (very quiet) and Danny Clay (very hypnotizing) were also included.

As for Sunday's concert, it was the California Symphony at Lesher. I drove in about 90 minutes before concert-time (pre-concert lecture is at 60) only to find the next-door parking garage was, unusually, full. Oh yeah, it was Mother's Day and everyone was in downtown Walnut Creek eating brunch. I wound up parking on the street 1/4 mile away up at the top of a hill.

The concert featured a new piece by resident composer Saad Haddad, five minutes of Arab-inspired dissonance. Then the Rach Three. Pianist Sofya Gulyak was highly popular with the audience, but all I could think of was how the piece kept going on and on long after it had run out of anything to say, and it was so tedious. After that, Borodin's Second Symphony, which doesn't get played much. I've heard this piece come out sludgy and dull, but not this time: crisp and dramatic under m.d. Donato Cabrera's direction, a delight to hear.

comments

the ecstasy and the agony

2026-05-09T05:15:48Z

B. wanted to hear the Winchester Orchestra in Vaughan Williams's cantata Dona nobis pacem, but only if I could drive her. I judged this more appealing than the SF Symphony, so we went. "We are a nation at war," wrote conductor James Beauton in the program notes, "which is why this evening's performance feels especially relevant." It was a fine performance, solid orchestra, strong and well-directed chorus, and soprano Amy Spencer's calls of the fading "Dona nobis pacem" were under tight control and exquisitely done.

But we should have left at intermission, because the second half was a "symphonic suite" (actually full of the chorus going "ahhh") of music from the series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which I've never seen nor heard of. Composer Sunna Wehrmeijer created the music digitally, so it had to be painstakingly scored so that an orchestra could play it. Was it worth the trouble? No! A lot of overloud off-the-shelf movie music, full of whooshing sounds and clanking effects. B. put in her earplugs and read from her tablet to pass the time. As for me, my watch said the piece was 40 minutes long, but it didn't seem so long, so I suspect that B. was right in saying that I did nod off for parts. Which she found amazing due to the Awful Dynne.

comments

home electrician

2026-05-08T04:02:34Z

Last night while stumbling to the bathroom I knocked down a framed drawing from the wall while fumbling for the bathroom door. In the morning, B. discovered that the falling frame had knocked the toggle off the ancient light switch. This was the switch that controlled the overhead lights for the bedroom as well as the outlets where we plug in the fans that keep the room cool in hot summer nights, nights which are expected to resume this week. So we needed the toggle fixed, and fast.

I could have called in an electrician for much money, but there was nothing else for him to do right now in terms of home repairs. I decided to see if I could do it myself. I bought a new light switch from the local hardware store and gathered the tools. Not knowing which breaker controlled the room, I turned off the master breaker for the house.

Detaching the old switch from the wall and unconnecting the wires was one job; stripping the wire that needed it, connecting them to the new switch, and installing it in the wall was quite another. B. had found a useful illustrated article (not a video, blessed be) on how to replace a light switch. I found I already knew most of it, which was encouraging regarding my competence to do the job, but it had some useful information, such as that it doesn't matter which connection you attach each of the two hot wires to, which was relieving because the layout of the old switch and the new switch was different, so if it had mattered I wouldn't have known how to map the old one on to the new one. Unless the article had explained it, which it probably would have.

The big problem, not addressed by the article, was attaching the plate to the wall. The long screws could go through holes in the switch but couldn't fit into anything in the wall, so how was the whole (plate + switch) going to attach to the wall? I suspect that the old plate was original to the house and wasn't screwed in to the wall at all, but had been stuck on the wall paint when it was still wet; some prying had been necessary for detaching it. So I fixed the plate to the wall with a couple of pieces of transparent duct tape. One more thing to alert the landlord to whenever we do move out of here.

comments