The Usual Suspects

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 of them 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 O'Neill 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'm 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.

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.

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.

David Cameron, For the Record (Harper, 2019)

The question posed by this enormous book (703 pages of text) is, does David Cameron really get how much of a disaster he inflicted on the UK by holding the Brexit referendum and then losing it?

And the answer is, sort of. This book is full of regrets at things not done or done not well enough, but mostly they take the form of regrets at not expressing himself clearly enough, with the implication that he must have failed because, if he'd succeeded, his perfectly formed views would have commanded universal assent. Uh-huh. I do wonder how much of the book's lengthy exposition of issues came from speeches that Cameron gave at the time, and if not, if he should have given them as speeches.

As for Brexit, Cameron defends holding the referendum on the grounds that the pressure to do so was so great that, had he resisted it, it would have broken out even more virulently later, and would be even more likely to have gone Leave than were the chances with the actual referendum. As for why it was lost, Cameron blames increased immigration, and for that he blames the UK having the best economy in Europe at the time, making everyone want to come there. So for losing the referendum he blames his own brilliant economic policies. What a guy.

For me, the most surprising and dismaying aspect of the book was the enormous amount of time Cameron had to spend arguing with other national leaders at EU summits. Usual scenario: the UK wants one policy, all the other countries want something else.* Requirements for universal assent ought to prevent the UK from getting run over, but the EU staff usually find a way around that. This happens over and over again, leaving me a lot less puzzled than I had been as to why Leave won the referendum, but despite everything Cameron wants to Remain, on the grounds that it's better to have a seat at the table than not, regardless of how badly you're losing. But then at the end he undercuts this by looking on the bright side of Brexit by seeing it as an opportunity to forge a new relationship with Europe.

But the book is more than detailed accounts of issues and negotiations, wearisome though they are. Cameron puts in a fair amount about his personal life, notable especially for the illness and death of his small son, and how he felt about things, beginning with a description of his becoming PM (he then flashes back to his earlier life) focused on how he reacted and thought about what was happening. There's only so far he can go in that direction, but it's an attempt. Generally, Cameron thinks he was a pretty good PM who got a lot done, and I guess he was broadly competent in a way denied to all his successors to date: five of them in a mere ten years, an unending succession of clown cars, though May and Truss he considers to have been competent subordinates of his own, and perhaps they were. He is critical of a few subordinates, notably IDS whom he keeps not firing from Work and Pensions because he's afraid of the right-wing backlash if he does, and Steve Hilton whose description as "one part brilliant to several parts bonkers" I've already quoted. At one point, and one only, I cheered, and that's when Cameron quotes himself defending same-sex marriage as a conservative policy if properly viewed, a perspective I share.

However, the main lessons of this book seem to be 1) Cameron's hopeless optimism about Europe; 2) his terror at offending the right-wing rebels, so extreme that he'll do anything they want to keep them quiet. Neither of these policies actually work very well, so perhaps a different approach might have been superior.

*At one point Cameron has one ally, but as it's Viktor Orbán it doesn't do him any good. The question, "Uh-oh, am I on the wrong side?" doesn't occur to him.

Saratoga Symphony, Sunday: This community orchestra gave a fairly rarified program under Jason Klein, the best-known piece being the Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 by George Enescu, played with sufficient liveliness and drive. Plus A Fugal Overture by Gustav Holst, which wasn't very fugal, and two unusual turn-of-the-20C tone poems, neither apparently ever played in the U.S. before: The Witch of Atlas by Granville Bantock, a character which in the Shelley poem it's based on is more of a benevolent angel than a witch, and which was accordingly represented in peaceful music with a lot of solos for violin and English horn; and The Isle of the Dead by the Swedish composer Andreas Hallén, one of numerous tone poems based on the Arnold Böcklin painting, but unlike any of the other composers, who treated it as dark and ominous, Hallén preferred to depict the consolatory aspect of death, and after a mournful beginning his composition turns gentle and even incongruously lush in a slightly Wagnerian manner.

San Francisco Conservatory Orchestra, Saturday: I attended this, or rather part of it, by livestream. Student conductors led Beethoven's goofy King Stephen Overture and Revueltas's Sensemayá, the latter with firm enough rhythm but nevertheless sludgy. Music director Edwin Outwater, a former assistant to MTT, dedicated the concert to MTT's memory, pointing out that all the pieces were ones he'd play, and led the orchestra in John Adams's Absolute Jest, his concerto for string quartet and orchestra, much better-balanced than the last time I'd heard it, but at which the Esmé Quartet were wasted as soloists, their exquisite approach to Romantic music having no role in Adams's jerky and rigid postmodernism. But I was too tired to sit in my work chair and listen to the concluding piece, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, so I skipped it.