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Donald's Blog
June 24, 2015 In the snooze nooze
The New York Times today says: "With a poll showing nonwhite voters strongly favoring Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bernie Sanders’s capacity to win support among blacks represents a test of his campaign’s relevance." It does no such thing. Sanders would like to reform the nation's economy so that poorer people might have a better chance to get a bite of the cherry; lots of poorer people will not understand this and will vote against their own best interests, and not just minority voters. Even more will not vote at all. On the obit page, the inventor of the pink plastic flamingo has died. I could not possibly comment. June 23, 2015 Public Muttering
Edward P. Lazear, in today's Wall Street Journal, trots out the mantra that the reason the recovery since 2008 has been so slow is that there are not enough right-to-work states, taxes are too high and so on. Well, he is a professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and a Hoover Institution fellow, so there you are. He quotes other experts as saying that "the deeper the recession the steeper the recovery". They are all talking about the recessions we have had every decade throughout our history, capitalism being very good at digging traps for itself, but the worst recession we ever had was the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it took a dozen years and a world war to get us out of that. So the right-wing economists cling to the word "recession", like the one in about 1959, when little American Motors was said to have sold more cars than Chrysler, but there were no banks collapsing. On the other hand, I learn from the Internet, Edward P. Lazear is more precisely a professor of HR management, of which I have seen precious little. A corporate Home Resources department is usually managed like a bed of marshmallows in an oven having the heat turned up slowly so they don't notice; or when something comes up, like an avalanche of insensate mineral material plunging down a steep mountainside. But as my old friend Roars Hamnix used to say about the university: "A sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection after they have been hunted out of every other corner of the world." Better still, old Roars was quoting Adam Smith, he of the "Invisible Hand", beloved of über-capitalists everywhere. (I do love to roll their own petard under them.) Yet I have recently learned that Brian Ferneyhough, one of the spikiest and most interesting of contemporary composers, is now at Stanford. Aghast, I told my informant, who was whispering to me in a dark alley, that I would have thought the music professors at Stanford were all Lawrence Welk clones, but he said no, stifling a guffaw, Stanford's music department is cutting edge. Wait till Stanford's economists discover that. They will no doubt start a movement to close the music department, on the grounds that music like Ferneyhough's will never pay for itself. June 16, 2015 Life in cyber alley
One of my music list colleagues has sent me to Shellackophile, which looks like a fun site, a collection of transfers of old classical 78rpm sets. When I try downloading I arrive at FileFactory, instantly get a funny-looking .dmg file which I could not open and warnings about a “Macfest” (?) that might be infected with a virus and which could be blocked but not deleted. Not too worried because I hadn't installed anything. Then we tried Sendspace, which might be something like Dropbox, except that Dropbox works, easily and quickly and without any rigmarole. At Sendspace if I click where it says “click here to start download”, I get “503 service temporarily unavailable”. When I click on any of the other several download buttons (why are there several??) I have to register, which I ain’t gonna do. As I said yesterday, I'm through clicking on stuff and registering, logging in, joining and signing up. Don't need it. The ignoramuses who design all this crap ought to be arrested for being in constraint of trade; they will choke the Internet to death before the FCC gets a chance to murder it. I want to buy some music by Russian pianist Alexandre Pirojenko, but distribution of physical objects is collapsing, I’m not sending a credit card number to a Russian site, and my bank wants $55 for a wire transfer to Swedbank. Too bad! Curmudgeons unite! June 16, 2015 Free trade again. In today's Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens in his Global View column ("The New Liberal Know Nothings") and William McGurn in Main Street ("Nancy Pelosi's Democratic Double-Cross") both chide the Democrats in Congress who have stymied the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Stephens:
Er, no, Stephens, I am not beholden to organized labor (though I am a union member and proud of it), nor am I opposed to free trade, which has given me a standard of living that could not have been imagined by my grandfather. I am however opposed to a profoundly important piece of legislation being concocted behind closed doors, and its concoctors demanding an up-and-down vote without debate on something that no one has seen. To begin with, there is every reason to suspect that TPP would give far too much power to multinational corporations, who would then be able to jerk us all around even more than they do now. Secondly, there are those old bugbears, the rule of law and the sanctity of contract. I assume that a "Trans-Pacific" partnership will include China, a backward nation (like Russia, Iran, Saudi and others) which will sign an agreement and then find a way do as they damn please, the opposite of the attitude that has made Western civilization the most (materially) successful in the history of the world. Why can't we see the bill? The likes of Stephens and McGurn disapprove of everything Obama does, but they want TPP handed to him on plate? Are they taking baksheesh? I think we should be told. June 15, 2015 Notes from the Springs
What a week! On Thursday to Packard Hall during the Colorado College Summer Music Festival to hear a wind quintet by d'Indy, then a sonata for trumpet, horn and trombone by Poulenc, followed by Music for a Farce, a set of eight short jolly pieces by Paul Bowles, intended to accompany film clips by Orson Welles in a theatrical production that never happened: the quartet included the beautiful Susan Grace, music director of the Festival. This was the first Bowles I ever heard, light and amusing. After the interval came a thrilling rendition of Franck's piano quintet in F minor, with Orion Weiss, piano; Stephen Rose and Stefan Hersh, violins; Philip Ying, viola; David Ying, cello. And yesterday! Ethne has a job in a nursery selling plants, so we both worked in retail yesterday morning. Then another concert in the afternoon: a jolly Serenata in vano by Nielsen, for three winds and two strings; two short pieces for piano and bass trombone by Duard Lassen, who I had never heard of, and two more by Schumann for piano and oboe, all curious divertessments; the oboist was Elizabeth Koch Tiscione, a former Colorado College student who is now first oboe in the Atlanta Symphony. And then another thrilling exercise for strings, the octet in B-flat Major by Max Bruch. After the interval a Mozart piano quartet, which believe it or not was a let-down after the Bruch. And after all that, in the evening a house party with eight people including our David, enjoying the garden in twilight followed by smoked salmon and other goodies... A Concert at Midday today which I am missing because Ethne has the car. Invited to dinner tonight by some new friends. An orchestral concert tomorrow evening will include a Serenade by Strauss, Bartok's Music for strings, percussion and celeste, and Brahms' first symphony (my second live Brahms' first this year will probably be more fun than the first one). No wonder I don't have any time to blog. ========================= My email spam is creeping up, junk somehow getting past the highest bar Earthlink provides. (This morning it was "Compare hotel prices on 208 booking sites at once!") I conclude this is the result of looking at too many cute videos on Facebook, so I'm taking the pledge. I enjoy Facebook, but there are safer ways to waste time. ========================= From today's Facebook I gather there is an article in the current Atlantic (or on its website) about political comedy, asking why we don't have any "conservative" comedians. The reason we enjoy "liberal" comedians and have no "conservative" ones at all is that our heroes are sending up the world we all live in, while so-called "conservatives" are pissing and moaning about a world in which no one ever lived, nor ever shall. June 5, 2015 This does not compute. A letter writer in the Wall Street Journal today says that "Human life has just been cheapened in Nebraska." Because Nebraska has decided it's not going to execute people any more. May 27, 2015 So it goes. Unlike in the anodyne letters pages of other newspapers, the readers of the Wall Street Journal argue with each other and with the paper. I thought this exchange about the plight of African-American families was rather sad: first a woman writing about the past from Minnesota, then a man writing about today from New Jersey:
Pity we Americans. We can't win for losing. May 26, 2015 Russia today A Russian immigrant in New York once described his home country as "Nigeria with snow." I've just finished reading Peter Pomerantsev's book Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible. Russia today is a zoo; maybe it always was. The fantasy-land of violence and corruption is scary and hard to believe...and maybe the West is coming to resemble it. I'm tempted to quote a long paragraph about the unbelievable corruption at the top of the greasy pole in Russia, but there are too many such paragraphs and it's too depressing. Russia has not yet recovered from the long Communist period, when it was necessary to believe ten impossible and contradictory things before breakfast. Take the book out of the library. May 22, 2015 MahlerFest XXVIII
Still coming down from last weekend's MahlerFest in Boulder. It was conductor Robert Olson's last, after 28 years; there were two performances of Mahler's 9th: Claudio Abbado said that the ending is supposed to sound like snow falling on snow, and Sunday afternoon I could not keep back my tears. Plus we got to hobnob with friends David and Mary Lamb, Mitch and Sue Friedfeld, Eric Sussman, Aaron Z. Snyder and others, all old chums from Jason Greshes's Mahler-list for lo these 20 years. Having just moved to Colorado we had thought "Hot dog! Now we can go to the MahlerFest every year!" Then we were afraid that there wouldn't be any more Fests because founder Bob was retiring, but the search committee found the estimable Kenneth Woods. Maestro Woods is an American who lives in Wales, the conductor of a BBC orchestra there; he also leads the Orchestra of the Swan, which I guess he founded; and he plays chamber music (he's a cellist). He has conducted almost all the Mahler symphonies, and has recorded all the symphonies of Hans Gal and Robert Schumann, and much else. Furthermore, he is a thoughtful musician. Joel Lazar told me a few years ago about a fairly famous conductor of the last generation, who he described as the most "incurious" conductor: having conducted a piece once, he never looks at the score again, until conducting it again. This is worse than a lack of curiosity. I have written here about the Pacifica Quartet's rendition of Beethoven's 11th string quartet, which I heard in a church on the south side of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a few years ago: in the last movement they did something so ethereal, so unexpectedly beautiful, that it lifted the whole thing onto another plane, without being unfaithful in the least to the score: they had clearly studied it and thought about it and found something special of their own in it. To judge from his very popular music blog, "View from the Podium", Woods is that kind of conductor. There is a controversy over the order of the inner movements of Mahler's 6th symphony: it was published as scherzo-adagio, but then Mahler changed his mind, and apparently always played it adagio-scherzo. (Alma had stuck her oar in after Mahler's death, confusing things with a letter to the conductor Mengelberg.) Woods has decided on strictly musical grounds that it needs to be scherzo-adagio, that it makes more sense that way. He also thinks that the famous "train wreck" at the beginning of the 4th symphony should be played just as Mahler left it: that far from forgetting to put a ritard on the flutes and sleigh bells, he meant them to fade away into the forest like spooks (as it were), ignoring the strings as they enter. We Mahlerites are in for some endless discussion, which is what we like! Long live the MahlerFest! May 16, 2015 Off to Boulder We're off to the MahlerFest in Boulder to hear two performances of M9 and to see old friends. It might be the last MahlerFest, because the marvelous conductor, Robert Olson, is retiring after more than 20 years. This will be a sad and a happy weekend all at once! May 16, 2015 Well, what do you know. In the Times Literary Supplement (April 3), Peter Marshall is reviewing Austen Ivereigh's book The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope:
Aha! We know that corporations are people, because the U.S. Supreme Court says so, and therefore they must be capable of sin! What's Marxist about that? May 15, 2015 Goodbye and Thanks, Blues Boy In October of 1978 we were living in England, and Ethne had booked herself a vacation trip to the USA, so she gave me her tickets to a B.B. King concert at the Hammersmith Odeon. I've never stopped teasing her about it because it was absolute magic, one of the best gigs I ever saw in my life. And he could do that for 200 nights a year. There will never be another. "Nobody loves me but my mother/ And she could be jivin' too." May 15, 2015 A musical joke (or two)
"How do you get two oboists to play in tune?" "What is a burning oboe good for?" "How many oboe players does it take to change a light bulb?" May 15, 2015 Schubert's 'heavenly' length I'm listening to one of dozens of recordings I have of Schubert's "Great" C major symphony, by Franz Konwitschny and the Czech Philharmonic. It's one of the best ones, and I don't know anything about Konwitschny, except that the orchestra apparently called him "OneWhiskey". Glorious music-making, on the somewhat obscure old Urania label. May 14, 2015 In the furtherance of getting my eyes examined We looked up Kaiser Permanente's website to find out if any eye doctors in Colorado Springs accept their insurance. The only thing I could find was a Dr. Shreck at a Kaiser Permanente building, so I called an 800 number and talked to a computer for a few minutes. When the computer wanted me to go find my wallet and get out my Kaiser Permanente card, I laughed and hung up. I found what appeared to be a local number for appointments, but a recorded voice wanted me to leave a message, which I did; nobody ever called back, but we had some errands to run anyway, so meanwhile we drove to the building, at the other end of town, 15 or 20 miles away. There is a great long list of doctors' names on display in the lobby, but none of those doctors are theirs; although Kaiser Permanente's name is on the building, they only lease part of it. When we found Kaiser, they was nobody there. We wandered through the empty offices until we found Administration, where a very nice woman was having lunch at her desk, and asked if she could help us. Sure enough, everybody was out to lunch; she told us that she was sure we would like Dr Shreck, and that he and his assistant would be back soon. I asked her if she got paid extra for taking care of business while everybody else was at lunch; she laughed and said no, and in fact she was responsible for two other locations as well, including Pueblo, which is 40 or 50 miles away. We went away and had a sandwich, and came back to make appointments. Ethne needs to have a checkup too because she had cataract surgery a year ago, and Dr Shreck can do that. Everyone we eventually met was very nice. Everything is different in the West, and everything is different when you get old, but I suspect everything will be just fine when we learn to jump through all the hoops. There was a final surreal touch. The next day I got a telephone call from a computer wanting me to take a survey about my customer satisfaction. The first question was, did I remember talking to a Kaiser Permanente representative on the phone? I said no. The next question was, did I want to call back when I remembered...? I laughed and hung up before the machine could say "Your call is important to us..." UPDATE: it is now June 15th, and it has been at least eight months since I started trying to get new glasses in Colorado Springs. Kaiser Permanente's lab broke my favorite frames, which I cannot replace because they've been discontinued. The glasses I am wearing now are the prescription before last, about ten years old. I'm discovering I that can drive without any glasses at all.
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