concerts review

Sep. 28th, 2025 07:56 am
calimac: (Haydn)
[personal profile] calimac
Many years ago, San Francisco Performances put on a series of morning concerts which I attended. The Alexander String Quartet would play one or two of Shostakovich's string quartets (or sometimes, with guests, another of his chamber works), preceded by a lecture on (theoretically) that part of Shostakovich's career and those particular works, by music historian Robert Greenberg. It took three years to go through the entirety of the subject, but I went to them all and increased my familiarity with the repertoire.

But though this successful series was followed by many more with the same personnel on other composers, I didn't go to any more. After three years, I'd had enough of Greenberg's mannered, detail-clogged, and over-interpretive lecturing style, and I wasn't fond enough of the Alexander Quartet to overcome this.

But now things have changed. The Alexanders have hung up their bows, and the Esmé Quartet, of which I'm very fond indeed, is replacing them. This year's series is four concerts - that's not too many - on the major quartets (and quintet) of Schubert's, and yesterday was the first. They're not going in chronological order: this week's piece was the "Death and the Maiden" Quartet. Greenberg's lecture was as mannered and detail-clogged as ever, but at least the interpretation made sense. This work, he said, is haunted by death, which is why Schubert quoted from his song on the subject - not to recycle material (Schubert hardly needed to do that) but to convey meaning. But, Greenberg said, the finale is not a dance of death as many claim, but offers consolation and acceptance, as does Death in the last verse of the song.

The Esmé sat on stage during all of this, playing excerpts of the quartet for illustrative points. Then, after intermission, they played the whole work. It was not as violently intense as some do it, but this meant the lighter third and fourth movements were as satisfactory as the larger, darker first two. The sound was crisp and slightly metallic. The players added expression with pauses and dips in intensity. It was gratifying to hear.

I occupied mid-day with a quest I may tell you about later, and then landed in Walnut Creek for the evening with the season's first concert by the California Symphony. This was a program of pops classics, a framing confirmed by conductor Donato Cabrera's increasing tendency to yammer from the podium. Gershwin's An American in Paris had colorful enough tone color, but the tenor of the piece was dull after SFS's magnificent show last week. To be fair, this is how the work usually sounds to me. Ravel's Boléro worked better, and his orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition was marred only by the tendency of some of the wind soloists to swallow their phrases.

From Scott Fogelsong's pre-concert lecture I learned something about the Ravel Pictures I hadn't known. The orchestration was commissioned by Boston Symphony music director Serge Koussevitsky, who kept exclusive performing rights for his lifetime, despite clamors by others to play it. Which explains something I'd wondered: why there are so many other orchestrations of Pictures, and why most of them sound just like Ravel's.

(no subject)

Sep. 28th, 2025 08:25 am
skygiants: janeway in a white tuxedo (white tux)
[personal profile] skygiants
VOYAGER CATCH UP. I said I wanted to post about the first half of S6 before we were actually done with s6 and have not .... quite achieved that, technically, but TODAY we start the seventh and final season so I feel like if I post today it more or less counts, spiritually, emotionally, etc.

Voyager Season 6, episodes 1-13 )

Overall early S6 not a high point in our Voyager experience, with some exceptions; it feels like we're on a little bit of a downward arc after the highs of S4/S5, but we will see what the future holds!
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Posted by David Edwards

CNN host Jake Tapper pressed House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) after he suggested that Jan. 6 rioters did not deserve to be indicted like former FBI Director James Comey.

"We have to ensure that the rule of law applies to everyone, and that's exactly what's happening here," Johnson told Tapper during a Sunday morning interview regarding the Comey indictment.

"Does the rule of law have to apply to people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th?" Tapper asked.

"Well, I'm glad you brought that up," Johnson replied. "There's new information over the last couple of days about that as well. Apparently, there were 274 FBI agents in the crowd on January 6th."

"No, no, no," Tapper interrupted. "[FBI Director] Kash Patel just brought enhanced understanding to that. They were sent there to do crowd control because of everything that was going on. It wasn't a false flag operation, as President Trump suggested."

"Well, Jake, wait a minute," Johnson remarked. "Hold on, Jake. How do you know that? Right? There's a lot of questions."

"Kash Patel said that," Tapper noted.

"I'm telling you that there's videos and it's always been disputed," Johnson deflected. "What involvement some of those persons engaged in? What involvement they had? Did they spur on the crowd? Did they open the gates to allow them in? I don't know. These are questions."

"The American people deserve full transparency," he added.

"I'm always in favor of full transparency, including for the Epstein files," Tapper responded.

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Posted by Ed Scarce

It's unclear what made the officer chase the Canadian tourist down "at a high rate of speed," as they were several miles from a border crossing when the incident occurred. What is clear, though, is that it's yet another black eye for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, where such incidents of harassment have become common in recent months.

Source: Toronto Star

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency says it is conducting a “managerial review” after a video posted on Reddit Thursday shows what appears to be a CBP agent in a pickup truck speeding toward and yelling at an Ontario driver in New York state, about three kilometres from the Canadian border.

The video showed a man wearing a CBP Field Operations patch drive close behind the filming driver, before pulling up alongside them: “Never come to the U.S. again,” they could be heard saying.

After noticing the driver was filming, the supposed CBP officer slowed down, before speeding up and overtaking the driver without using a turn signal.

The incident happened just before 8 a.m. Monday on exit 24 of Interstate 190, near Niagara, N.Y., according to the video. The poster said the purported CBP officer honked after noticing their Ontario plate.

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Posted by NewsHound Ellen

NOTUS did a deep dive into the Trump administration’s likely illegal grab of funds allocated by Congress.

Across federal agencies, the Trump administration’s aggressive slash-and-burn approach to federal programs, grants and contracts has repeatedly challenged Congress’ power of the purse. The administration has claimed it has the discretion to redirect funds to programs aligned with Trump’s agenda — and Republican congressional leaders have largely let them do it.

The outcome: Billions in taxpayer dollars have become virtually untraceable — a level of opaqueness in government funds that’s raising questions around the legality of the administration’s actions. Some of these taxpayer funds expire on Sept. 30. If they’re not spent by then, like all funds Congress appropriated specifically for 2025, they disappear.

NOTUS attempted to trace the money appropriated for more than 100 government programs to understand where taxpayer dollars are going, only to hit dead ends repeatedly. Data is outdated or conflicting, agencies have been vague in their explanations, and in many cases, there’s no publicly available evidence that appropriated money is being spent at all.

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Done Since 2025-09-21

Sep. 28th, 2025 04:35 pm
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
[personal profile] mdlbear

Welcome to (Northern Hemisphere) Autumn. This last week appears to have gone quickly and left very little in the way of a lasting impression. Perhaps that's for the best. (Hopefully guitar practice, at least, will stick around, and the bits of paperwork will have wound up where they're supposed to go.)

N and I have now been beshotted. Pfizer. Flu and pneumonia are week after next. Hopefully the effects of those will stick around as well. We've also scheduled studio time over the next couple of weeks. (He says after suddenly remembering to make sure we didn't get double-booked. Apparently not. Whew!)

I have not been logging my thrice-daily servings of what Colleen used to call "pill salad" as carefully as I ought to. But there's nothing still in my pill sorters today, so apparently I've been taking them. This week, anyway -- I remember there have been a couple of weeks when I missed one. I also haven't been very careful with logging my sleep. Not really all that surprising; I tend to walk over to my computer and promptly fall down a rabbit hole rather than making whatever log entry I intended to make.

Hopefully you won't need to know How to Set Up and Use a Burner Phone, but these are perilous times.

Notes & links, as usual )

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I was never a full Qanonologist and I never heard about medbeds before, but apparently they're the secret technology that is going to be installed in hospitals everywhere and we will all be cured of everything for free.  Good news for my plantar fasciitis!

Anyhoo...

A fun challenge for reporters, at least! "Some experts say medbed technology is unlikely to be ready any time soon" might be a line in a Peter Baker article soon.

I am very glad that My President will soon have his very visible and likely fatal medical conditions cured!

I like that the company in the first link is called "Tesla BioHealing." Piggybacking on Elon!

...adding, the video is all AI, that Trump posted is real.


sovay: (Mr Palfrey: a prissy bastard)
[personal profile] sovay
Every time I watch Heat and Dust (1983), I want to write about its beautifully patterned expectations and ironies, its women who confront or evade them, its last extraordinary melding of time done with nothing more than a window that contains one decade and reflects another while the snow-flanked mountains stand behind them both, and it seems that I am writing about Harry Hamilton-Paul.

I shouldn't be surprised. In a film much concerned with cultural codes and transgressions, he's the most liminal character, the oddest man out, the last living memory of the scandal that rocked the Civil Lines at Satipur in 1923 when British India was the jewel of the never-set Empire of which he was most definitely not a builder. He's the storyteller, partly narrating the past thread of the film from his future as a tobacco-tanned old India hand who can't resist giving the same colonial advice about water and fruit and salads that he never heeded in his youthful days as—a meaningful, veiled word—the guest of the Nawab of Khatm. His presence at diplomatic functions is ambidextrous, dinner-jacketed at a state banquet, turbaned at a palace durbar, as likely to be found on his own time in an angarkha as a tennis shirt, belting out enthusiastically amateur selections from Pagliacci and acidly losing at cards to the ladies of the zenana. His role in them is blatantly unexplained. Nickolas Grace gives him such an arch, pointed face, his eyes ironically lidded even when flat on his back in a fever of homesickness and his serious statements edged like light comedy, he's impossible to imagine as even a one-time appendage of the repressive civil service which in any case considers him to have rather disgracefully let the side down, but neither does he seem, like his secretarial antecedents of E. M. Forster or J. R. Ackerley, even pretextually employed at the court of the Nawab. The British colony pronounces the censorious last word: "No Englishman has any business living in that palace." But of course he does, if a man as brilliantly virile and vulnerable as Shashi Kapoor's Nawab wants him there. Like a kinder revision of Cyril Sahib in Autobiography of a Princess (1975), Harry admits the possibility of queerness into the double-tracked heterosexuality of the plot. Bonding over the absurdities of imperial ritual with Greta Scacchi's Olivia Rivers, he drops the courteous hairpin of complimenting the playing-fields-of-Eton looks of her assistant collector of a husband, but his cynically comfortable company offers more than a diversion from the crashing propriety incumbent on a junior officer's wife: he's the dangerous proof that a sojourn in the subcontinent doesn't have to be circumscribed by casually racist platitudes and the insular summer exodus to Simla, that she too might meet something of the less tamely glamorous, princely India under the veneer of the Raj in the reciprocal person of the Nawab, for whom she is no more the typical memsahib than Harry is anything other than "a very improper Englishman." What she cannot see in her reckless innocence is the difference in the risks they run, how much more inflammatorily her cross-cultural desires intersect with the implacable conventions of both sides of the colonial project. Harry's situation is sufficiently ambiguous that the Nawab can claim him as if with the bridal cliché that his mother has gained rather than lost a son, but Olivia's unchaperoned visits to the palace set the rumor mill grinding even when their ostensible object is her heat-stricken countryman, reading all the London-fogged Dickens he can get his hands on. No political value is set on his virtue. And yet for just a little while before the tide of empire engulfs Khatm and strands its principal players in a flat in Park Lane, a chalet in Gulmarg, the denuded ghost of the palace left like a rain-stained shrine to its ruler's deposition, the triangulation of the friendship between Olivia and Harry and their mutual importance to the Nawab makes the three of them look like a ménage across borders, the charmed space of a triad not so totally unlike the tripartite composition of their writing-directing-producing team. The appeal of a hand on a shoulder, a fumble with unfamiliar undergarments. "We've left British India. Now you're in my power, like him. I'm only joking."

The production that broke them out on the international scene, Heat and Dust was model Merchant Ivory, produced by Ismail, directed by James, and closely and imaginatively adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from her own 1975 Booker winner with a cast as sumptuous and astringent as its dual-layered portrait of India. As the captivating Nawab, Kapoor gets to strike evasive, reflective, funny as well as mouthwatering notes, while Christopher Cazenove's Douglas Rivers may be a dutiful empire-builder, but we meet him first weeping for his wife: Scacchi's Olivia with her blossoming, owl-boned face moves against her colonial obligations out of defiance as well as naïveté and it suits a film so attentive to the limits of female autonomy that the resolution of her predicament should lie with Madhur Jaffrey as the regally chain-smoking Begum. By dint of wrapping itself around a mystery, the 1982 thread can't help feeling like a frame story even when interwoven with deliberate, blurring touches like a municipal office suddenly faded out of a bungalow, but Julie Christie and Zakir Hussein give the affair of Anne and Inder Lal enough of its own casual chemistry that it makes a contrast, although Ratna Pathak as Ritu is just sketched as the spouse this time around; the film seems more curious about the would-be sanyasi of Charles McCaughan's Chid, whose dead-end self-actualization lightly tweaks the latter-day colonialism of cultural appropriation. Walter Lassally shoots painterly set-ups and candid camera streets with equal assurance, including the introductory shot of Olivia looking straight out through the fourth wall of the letters to her sister that started Anne off on the whole quest to retrace her great-aunt's scandalous footsteps, whose bookend is an elegantly enigmatic, portrait-like moment where record and recollection have run out, leaving only the woman herself. The fact remains of my affection for Harry, who bridges the threads of time and when faced with the turmoil of dacoits and riots and the murky intrigues of the man he loves, admits frankly, "Well, when all these kinds of things happened, I just gave up and ran away to Olivia's house and begged her to play some Schumann." Fortunately, he and his film are prolifically available on various forms of streaming and more than one region of Blu-Ray/DVD. It only took me since before the last glaciation to get around to them. This indiscretion brought to you by my improper backers at Patreon.

Mike's Blog Round Up

Sep. 28th, 2025 01:02 pm
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Posted by Batocchio

alicublog: Roy Edroso breaks it down.

Rewire: Trump's second term hits differently now that I'm out of the closet.

TomDispatch: The death of civil rights in the age of Trump.

Letters from an American: The Wounded Knee Massacre.

Jen Sorensen: Rage at the ragged.

This installment by Batocchio. E-mail tips to mbru AT crooksandliars DOT com.

(no subject)

Sep. 28th, 2025 02:07 pm
watervole: (Default)
[personal profile] watervole

 Theo is growing rapidly.  He'll be one year old by the end of October, and it hardly seems possible.

He's a cheeky little monkey, outgoing and very confident.

He's totally adorable when he sees me. Gives a big smile and crawls, very fast, over to see me. Grabs hold of my legs, pulls himself to standing, and asks to be picked up.  (Not verbally, but it's a very expectant face)

Which I love doing - he's very cuddly.

But, he's also getting heavy.   Very heavy...

And my back is suffering.

I've got to learn to resist that happy face, and play with him on the floor.  And read books to him on the floor as well.  I think that lifting him onto my knee when I'm reading to him is actually the biggest source of the back pain, as I have to lean forward to do it.

 

 

 

 

 

The Power of Shazam! (1995) #4

Sep. 28th, 2025 02:04 pm
iamrman: (Power)
[personal profile] iamrman posting in [community profile] scans_daily

Writer: Jerry Ordway

Pencils: Peter Krause

Inks: Mike Manley


Could Mary Bromfield be Billy’s long-lost sister? (Spoilers in the tags.)


Read more... )

Watercolor-making...

Sep. 28th, 2025 02:52 pm
eller: iron ball (Default)
[personal profile] eller
...or: the chemical adventure goes on. I was missing a yellowish color in my little landscape paint set, so, this is what happened. Still very wet; will likely need ages to dry. As usual.


Living-Desert

When used relatively dry, the color looks like a relatively neutral "normal" ocher. When used very wet and/or on textured paper it unmixes into warm yellow and (thanks to the PW18, which is a dark dusty rose really) more reddish dark zones.

Pigments: PY138, PY154, PV19, PW18
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Posted by Heather

The state of the economy and who is to blame wasn't the only thing VP JD Vance blatantly lied about during his interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox on Friday night.

Vance was also asked about the looming government shutdown, and pushed the same bullshit we heard from Speaker Mike Johnson, who, as Politico reported, wrote this on the evil bird site:

“Democrats are holding the AMERICAN government HOSTAGE — in an attempt to give FREE health care to NONCITIZENS, which was just outlawed by Congress,” House Speaker Mike Johnson wrote in an X post today.

Johnson is referring to a portion of Republicans’ domestic spending megabill that penalizes California and other states for using state tax revenue to cover undocumented residents by expanding their versions of the federal Medicaid program.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries pushed back on this narrative during a news conference today.

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Posted by Conover Kennard

Donald J. Trump announced on Truth Social Saturday that he plans to send troops to "war-ravaged Portland," Oregon, to protect ICE facilities, claiming the city is "under siege" by Antifa.

"At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists," Trump wrote. "I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary. Thank you for your attention to this matter!"

Jinkies, I wonder if this is why:

Portland authorities are in a standoff with the Trump administration over an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in the Oregon city, after an investigation found the administration is using the facility for overnight detentions, in violation of its city-issued permits.

Portland is part of the United States, and Trump is launching a war within the US against the US. The news isn't going down well.

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Posted by Chris capper Liebenthal

Rep Drunken Van Orden has tweeted more than 1,000 times since Charlie Kirk's death. By far, the majority of his tweets involve doxxing and threatening American citizens who don't like Charlie Kirk and didn't praise him after he died. DVO has gone as far as blaming reporters and threatening funding to an entire city if two council members don't resign.

And now he is threatening federal funding for the Mayo Clinic because of the posts from one person:

screenshot_2025-09-27_013747

Heartland Signal reports that when one of DVO's constituents called into a show where DVO was a guest, DVO got belligerent and insulting to the caller:

When asked if this funding should be removed because somebody at Mayo Clinic said something that he didn’t agree with, Van Orden got defensive and doubled down on his pledge to remove all federal funding from the Mayo Clinic and falsely claimed that the organization is “inciting violence.”

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