calimac

"FEMA told not to use the word 'ice' in storm mesaging to avoid confusion and online mockery" - CNN.

Yeah, because then this will happen:

San Francisco Symphony, Thursday
What do you do if you're conducting Beethoven's Fifth, the best-known symphony ever written? John Storgårds' answer is, lead it as if it's never been played before. The crispness, the intensity, and the variations in tempo and flow made this an exciting, even riveting, performance of the old masterworks. It helps to remember that, familiar as it now is, it's the most startling and revolutionary symphony ever written, which is what made it so iconic in the first place.
Seong-Jin Cho was probably badly cast as soloist in Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 1. He's good with lyrical music, but this is a clangy and rigid concerto. Cho vamped ineffectively all over the keyboard while the string orchestra got to do the lyrical part. In the back, standing up whenever he was playing, was SFS principal trumpet Mark Inouye in the second soloist part. He was billed as a soloist and got to share an encore with Cho, but he came out with the orchestra as well as was seated with them.
And the US premiere of The Rapids of Life by 40-year-old Finnish composer Outi Tarkiainen. This is perhaps the first piece of music ever written depicting the experience of giving birth: cascading down rapids is what the composer describes her rather quick labor as resembling. The comparison was not obvious from the music, which was ten minutes of fast-moving soundscape.

Sarah Cahill, Friday
Brief (one set, 70 minutes) piano recital featuring elegies and homages. Designed by the performer to bring us together in a time of loss and oppression. (The news out of the occupied territory that was formerly the state of Minnesota keeps getting worse.) I didn't attend this concert up in the City in person, but bought a livestream ticket; Old First's technicians have improved greatly since I last tried this during the pandemic. Cahill specializes in newer music, and there were pieces by the likes of Maggi Payne (written mostly for the foot pedals) and Sam Adams; also a Fugue to David Tudor by Lou Harrison that was twelve-tone (why, Lou, why?). But the bulk of the program, with each movement outweighing any other piece on the program, was Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin, which besides evoking Couperin's baroque elegance is in memory of a series of Ravel's friends who were killed in WW1.

California Symphony, Saturday
This concert was about the winds. Began with excerpts from Mozart's Don Giovanni arranged for the standard wind ensemble of the time (2 each of oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn), which is what they did in those days instead of playing it on the radio. Concluded with Schubert's Great C Major Symphony. Conductor Donato Cabrera pointed out that, unusually for the time, nearly all the themes are introduced by the winds, so he had the woodwind section seated in front around him (though the horns, which are just as important, stayed in back with the brass). This both magnified the sound of the winds and emphasized the parts where only the strings were playing. Pretty lively but not revelatory performance.
And the Cello Concerto by Friedrich Gulda, best-known as a pianist (he was Martha Argerich's teacher), with Nathan Chan as soloist, written in 1980 and one of the strangest and goofiest pieces of music I've ever heard. The orchestra was winds and a few brass, plus a drum kit, a bass player, and a guitarist who was mostly on acoustic but switched to an electric guitar for one section where those three played jazz/rock to alternate with the more sedate winds while the solo cello tried to keep up. Other sections included a stately minuet where the drummer switched to tambourine, and a raucous marching-band finale. Amused the audience no end.

1. Our tv set has been misbehaving. It was refusing to connect to the wifi on which we get streaming channels like Netflix, although our wifi is otherwise working fine. B., who has 95% of the tv set usage in the household, thinks it may be a lemon. Nevertheless I contacted AT&T, our ISP and cable provider (some people will say AT&T doesn't provide tv service, but it does) to fix it. And eventually a technician came by who fixed the problem. (Mostly: another streaming channel we just subscribed to isn't working right.) "What did you do?" I asked. He didn't really know. "Magic hands," he suggested, holding them up, and indeed he even looked rather like Ben Carson.
An earlier interaction on the phone had produced a suggestion that our router (modem) and receiver (the box that attaches to the tv) needed to be replaced. I doubted this would fix the problem, but I said OK and they shipped the boxes. I was immediately stuck when the instructions for the router showed you where to plug in the coaxial cable, but the actual router contained no such plug. So forget that. I asked Mr Magic Hands what to do with them, since we'd received conflicting instructions on whether to return or discard the old ones. He said return them, which meant take them in to a UPS store, which would ship them without charge to me.
So I took them in. They took one of the two boxes but refused to accept the other one, for reasons unclear. I refused to take it back. I said my job was to take them in to a UPS store; shipping was their responsibility. So I just left it there and walked out.
Then I called AT&T and reported this, and they promised not to charge me for failure to return equipment.

2. For a long time, one of my regular lunches has been a can of menudo soup supplemented with albóndigas, Mexican meatballs, which are lighter and tastier than Anglo meatballs. (They contain rice as binder.) I would defrost a handful from a bag of frozen albóndigas that I'd buy at Smart & Final.
But alas, it seems that Smart & Final no longer carries these. I've checked quite a few large Mexican groceries - a species quite common in this area - and none of them carry albóndigas in any form other than canned albóndiga soup, which is not what I want.
So I found a recipe online and made my own. They're not a match for the ones I used to buy, but good enough.

1. Some gadfly is objecting to a congressman running for governor on the grounds that he isn't a California resident. That strikes me as unfair. A member of Congress is functionally the local area's ambassador to the federal government. That person has to have their usual residence near the federal government, since that's where their job is. On the other hand, the whole point of their being there is that they're a citizen of their district. The congressman maintains a California address and uses it as his voting address. He's legitimate, and so are many other members of Congress who've run for governor of various states before now (e.g. our Pete Wilson was a senator when he was elected governor in 1990).

2. An apartment building a few blocks away from us - about 1/4 mile - had a major fire yesterday. News report: "A two-alarm fire ripped through a Sunnyvale apartment complex Tuesday morning, displacing two-dozen residents, authorities said. ... “Preliminary information indicates that three of the eight units sustained significant fire and smoke damage,” authorities said, “and the building as a whole was damaged.” No injuries were reported. The American Red Cross is providing assistance to the displaced residents." And it's not the only recent local one.
And I wonder if the displaced residents will be allowed access to their belongings, or if the building will be torn down and hauled away along with everything in it. I'm not impressed with the 'be grateful you're alive' argument. That has nothing to do with it. If your belongings were burned in the fire, that's fate. But if the authorities can't find a way for you to retrieve your belongings, the authorities are to blame.

3. So let's say the US does something that causes NATO to "collapse." What's left? Well, the EU plus the UK and Norway are already acting together for defense of NATO territory, so that's basically the European side of NATO. If Canada joins in, that means NATO hasn't collapsed, just that the US has flounced out of it.

Once the bargain basement of local community orchestras, the Saratoga Symphony has improved tremendously in recent years. They did a pretty good job with the obscure but enormous Busoni Piano Concerto a couple years ago, and brought back the same pianist, local star Tamami Honma, in the very famous and also very large Rachmaninoff Second Concerto for a concert in a nearby church which, contrary to Saratoga's tradition of wreathing their programs in complete obscurity, they advertised heavily.

Honma played in a clotted but compelling manner, and the orchestra surged effectively. Music director Jason Klein craftily put the concerto after intermission, so as to force the audience that had come for it to also hear the other major piece, Sibelius's Fourth Symphony. This is by all odds the most inscrutable of all Sibelius symphonies, and a real challenge for the orchestra: not that it's particularly hard to play, but that it's very hard to interpret coherently. But this worked pretty well, especially keeping the drive up in the finale, and technically it did quite well for the community orchestra level.

A discussion elsewhere of the death of Scott Adams led to a consideration of how culturally ubiquitous Dilbert was in its heyday, however astonishing that may seem to those who only know it in its sad decline.

It's one of a series of strips that have held that status, with a new one close to waiting in the wings when the previous honoree begins to fade away.

I'm not sure how culturally ubiquitous early strips now honored as pioneers were - like The Yellow Kid (1895-98) and Krazy Kat (1913-44). The earliest one that I expect hit that status was Little Orphan Annie, which premiered in 1924, followed by Popeye the Sailor Man (first appeared in Thimble Theatre 1929). Those two are still cultural touchstones today, and I suspect they were heavily popular at the time; certainly Popeye soon made the jump to animated cartoons.

The next one I know about was Barnaby by Crockett Johnson (later of Harold and the Purple Crayon fame). This strip about a little boy and his louche fairy godfather Mr. O'Malley had a short run (1942-52) and is now pretty much forgotten except among those who've collected reprint volumes of it. But it was a big hit among commentators and SF fans, at least: the Berkeley SF club, founded in 1949 and still around when I joined in the late '70s, adapted its name - the Elves', Gnomes', and Little Men's Science Fiction, Chowder and Marching Society ("Little Men" for short) - from the name of Mr. O'Malley's social club in the strip.

Barnaby kind of puttered off in its later years, and allegiance switched to Pogo by Walt Kelly, which started in 1948 and quickly became very popular, not least for its wicked political commentary, with characters like Simple J. Malarkey, a parody of Joe McCarthy. Kelly wrote songs for the strip which were published and recorded, both originals and his still-famous fractured Christmas carol lyrics, "Deck Us All With Boston Charlie."

Pogo had its several-year run as the cultural ubiquity and then faded a bit into the background, to be replaced by the biggest cultural powerhouse of them all, Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz, which started in 1950 but took a few years to hit its stride. But during the 1960s, at least, it pervaded American culture to an extent hard to believe if you didn't experience it. And its pervasiveness popped up spontaneously from outside sources. There were books about it (this one, from 1965, was a collection of Christian sermons using the strip as textual illustrations, and this unlikely thing became a bestseller); there were songs (I first heard this one sung by the kids on the bus to camp in 1966 and I still know all the lyrics); NASA even named manned spacecraft after Peanuts characters.

But the strip faded from cultural intensity quickly after 1970, despite having another 30 years to run during which it maintained its prominence on the comics page. The cultural hit of the 1970s was undoubtedly Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau, which began in 1970. Plotted more like a soap opera than any of its predecessors, Doonesbury was even more explicit politically than Pogo. (This one, among others, won Trudeau the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.)

Doonesbury took a hiatus in 1983-4 and then rebooted itself; it was still popular, but the torch of cultural ubiquity quickly passed to Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, which ran 1985-95; uniquely among these creators, Watterson stopped the strip before he could run out of steam. And then Dilbert, which began in 1989 and had built up its renown by the time Calvin and Hobbes signed off.

Dilbert started to fade by the mid-2000s. Since then, I dunno - newspaper strips as a cultural icon have faded with the fall of print. In my circles, maybe xkcd by Randall Munroe, which came along in a very timely fashion in 2005, but I'm not sure how commonly-known it is generally, and it's not even a strip in the traditional fashion. But that's where I think we are now.

So I attended the one-day Clark Ashton Smith conference yesterday, held in the old Carnegie Library - now just a historical site, devoid of books or historical displays - in Smith's hometown of Auburn, California, in the foothills of the Sierras. In Smith's day this was still the city library, and the self-educated author probably got most of his education from books here.

But despite the local boosterism, accentuated by a panel discussing Smith's life here, neither Smith nor any of the panelists hailing from Auburn liked the place much. They thought it a tiresome backwater of a town. I found it charming as a one-day visitor. And my sandwich from a local deli (the con offered to fetch lunch for us if we'd order and pay in advance) was delicious.

The programming was held in the library's one large room. The organizers said the attendance was 80-90; I counted closer to 50. The attendance was largely but not entirely male. And almost all white. And largely but not overwhelmingly old.

Besides writing ornate fantasy stories, Smith also wrote SF, and he began as a once-promising poet, and he also was an artist (drawing and sculpture). The day was occupied with panels discussing all these things, and full of enlightenment on Smith's style, artistic goals, and ethos. Despite his obscurity, a case was made that he was a substantial artist worth studying.

Two panelists were particularly interesting to hear. S.T. Joshi, the well-known weird fiction scholar, is - as you'd guess from his writing - lucidly voluble and erudite. He regaled us with tales of Smith's amorous adventures, and challenged the otherwise universally-held belief that the reason Smith stopped writing weird fiction in the late 1930s was as a reaction to the deaths in short order of both his parents and his colleague/friends H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. I guess we'll find out when Joshi's biography of Smith is published later this year. I got a glimpse at a proof copy; it is not as overwhelmingly large as Joshi's Lovecraft biography.

The other liveliest panelist was the fiction author Cody Goodfellow, who read aloud the opening paragraph of Smith's "The Abominations of Yondo" in a voice so sepulchral that I'd buy a full-length recording of him reading Smith stories.

Downstairs in the basement were book dealers, but the two books I wanted to buy were only in one copy and sold to someone else before I could get them.

There wasn't a single person there I already knew, but the attendees were friendly, and I didn't feel downgraded for not being a real connoisseur or expert; there were others there who clearly had only just begun reading Smith. This was fun, the panels were all interesting throughout (including the other participants) and since this was not a far drive from home, I'm glad I took the trouble to come.

Ron Chernow, Grant (Penguin, 2017)

Chernow is the author whose biography of Alexander Hamilton inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda. I decided to see what he could do with a thousand pages on U.S. Grant, most of my reading on whom had been quite succinct.

What interests me about Grant is this: after brave and intrepid service as a junior officer in the Mexican War, he was a complete failure in the peacetime army and then in civilian occupations after he resigned his commission. But when the Civil War broke out, and men with military experience were at a premium, no matter how shoddy they might seem, as soon as he reached command level Grant showed instant assuredness and promptly became the most successful general on the Union side, a status he kept to the end despite various setbacks. How did he do this?

My conclusion is that Grant had what might be called moral courage. This is, as Grant discovered the first time he led troops into action, a different thing from personal bravery under fire. It's the courage to lead and order other men into battle, knowing that many will be wounded or killed, and then to do it again the next day. Many of the generals either shied at the idea of exposing their troops to injury or death, or were so appalled at the results when they did that they withdrew and did not press the attack - which only, Grant felt, made the war last longer and become even bloodier.

The problem with this book is that Chernow never discusses where Grant's moral courage came from or how he developed it. The very first time Grant led troops into combat was early on in the Civil War. He was a colonel looking for the camp of some Confederate raiders led by one Col. Harris, and he was extremely nervous about commanding an attack on the enemy, but when he got to the camp he found that the rebels had learned he was coming and vamoosed.

In his memoirs, Grant writes two key sentences: "It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards." Chernow quotes the first of these but not the second. He doesn't address the question of Grant's moral courage at all until he gets to the Overland Campaign of 1864, when Grant for the first time faced an opposing general with as much moral courage and tactical skill as his own, and the results were an impasse leading to grisly slaughter. But Grant carried on, despite the toll, knowing that, if he was to prevail, to withdraw and lick his wounds would be worse. Here Chernow quotes from Grant defining this courage in the way I did above, but he doesn't analyze or discuss it.

The questions that interest Chernow are very different. He is absolutely absorbed by the rumors of Grant's alcoholism. This is probably the book's major theme. Repeatedly Chernow quotes testimony swearing that Grant had been seen falling-down drunk, and repeatedly he insists that other evidence renders these stories extremely doubtful. So were these malicious lies, or what? We never learn.

In the postwar part of the book, a recurrent theme is Grant trying to make up to the Jews for an injudicious order he'd issued early in the war, expelling all Jews from the territory he controlled on the grounds of the actions of some rapacious Jewish merchants. His subsequent regret for this becomes a major theme.

Of course by the end of the war, Grant's sad earlier life had vanished from his personality. Now he was the Army's chief general, then President of the U.S., and he was used to being in command. Chernow depicts Grant as chief peacetime general in the Johnson administration as developing a degree of political savvy he'd never previously had to show, but then he depicts Grant as president and afterwards as politically naive and the constant victim of scoundrels and shysters - something that had happened during the war too, but only as a minor feature. Chernow does not attempt to reconcile the savvy and the naive Grant.

I was also puzzled by some fragmentary material testifying to hints in Grant's earlier life of the greatness he would only display later. There's a story of Gen. Taylor, the army commander in the Mexican War, coming across Lt. Grant taking charge of his men in clearing a waterway, and saying "I wish I had more officers like Grant." Wow, what a testimony. But what is the source? Endnotes reveal it's from a newspaper article published on the occasion of Grant's death 40 years later. Somehow I doubt its veracity. Elsewhere Chernow is sometimes cautious about accepting unverified stories, but not here.

There's a lot of useful and well-researched material in this book, but for all its extent I do not find that this book captures the man.

Fr John R Blaker posted on FB that his close friend, and sometime my friend also, Eric Larson, "has taken his own life. His wife Pat Larson had cardiac arrest on December 23 and was 20 minutes without pulse. She was on life support with no brain function until a few days ago."

I'm so very sorry about all of this. I hadn't seen Eric in many years - probably since before he was married; I knew he had been but I don't recall ever having met Pat - but he and John and I were part of a circle of undergraduate science-fiction fans at UC Berkeley in the late 1970s. That's where I knew Eric best from.

We had two Erics in the group. The other was called Eric the Red for his hair color. Eric Larson was Eric the Large. He was very tall, and broadly built, and he had an immeasurably deep voice, which he later parlayed into a role as the PA Voice of God at various sf convention costume presentations.

Eric was a friendly guy, pleasant to be around, a valued member of our little community. Bless his memory.

This is the way I wish more commentators would write about sports (from a roundup of the new year's highlights by Dieter Kurtenbach in the Mercury News yesterday, and thanks to B. for spotting it):

Super Bowl LX - Billionaires' BBQ (Feb. 8): The Super Bowl returns to Levi's Stadium. Get ready for two weeks of national media complaining about the lack of shade in a game played at night, and the fact that San Francisco is actually a 45-minute drive from the stadium (on a good day, which this won't be). It's the biggest party in the world for a bunch of people you'd never invite to a party, hosted in a corporate office park. Fitting.
But, hey, maybe the 49ers will be in it.