Category: Culture

Yes, someone still writes rags

I haven’t had a musical post for a while…

If you do a YouTube survey of ragtime playing, I think you’ll find that, like country music, ragtime playing is an area in which a great many poorly trained musicians are in it a for a good time and wearing bowties and funny hats. I’m all for a good time and funny hats, and yet ragtime is a serious enough musical genre that there’s room in it for highly talented and superbly trained musicians.

One such such musician and ragtime composer is Damon Carmona, whom I first met back in the 1970s when he was a music student. He composed the Gargoyles Rag in 2020, I believe.

Christina Pepper has a popular channel on YouTube. While we’re at it, here’s a John Philip Sousa:

Two parts snobbery per eight parts coffee


An imaginary 1938 espresso machine, in Italy. Image created by DALL-E 3. I could not find an image of a classic espresso machine that was in the public domain. But if you search for something like “classic Bezzera” you can see what they look like.

Given any good thing — wine, Scotch, or coffee — there are those who will happily settle for merely good and those who are willing to spend a great deal more for something better. But where does good taste end and snobbery begin? With espresso, my guess would be that the price of real espresso snobbery starts at about $2,000. But merely good can be had for considerably less.

Judged by the shockingly low American standard for coffee, I suppose I have been a coffee snob for many years. I make my morning coffee with the simplest possible method — hot water poured from a kettle into a cone filter, with the coffee going into an insulated decanter. My niece, who has an expensive coffee machine, said, “Wow. You’re old school.” But she liked my coffee. I would argue that the most important factor with coffee is the quality of the coffee itself. The machinery that one uses is less important, as long as one does not use one of those dreadful, ubiquitous coffee machines with which most Americans ruin their coffee by heating it — and thereby scorching it — after the coffee is brewed.

But not until recently did I start to think about how nice it would be to make espresso. Espresso requires a machine, something that can heat the water and send it through the coffee grounds under pressure.

Anyone who likes espresso or who wants to make it at home should read this excellent piece in Smithsonian Magazine — “The Long History of the Espresso Machine.” There are several things in the article that are important to know. First, that the earliest espresso machines were for making coffee, and that they were invented only for the purpose of making lots of good coffee, fast, in European coffee shops. Second, before too long it was discovered that coffee made under pressure was particularly good for some reason. The foamy “crema” that a pressure machine produced was soon seen as a virtue, not merely as scum that was some sort of byproduct of pressure brewing. Third, as snobs went to work and started searching for perfection no matter what it cost, it was discovered that more pressure was better, and that a pump was required, because the amount of pressure that could be safely produced inside a boiler was not enough.

Pressure can be measured in “bars.” One bar is the everyday atmospheric pressure. Two bars is about 28 pounds per square inch. Two to three bars of pressure was all the first espresso machines were capable of. The current consensus of espresso snobs seems to be that nine bars of pressure is ideal for espresso. That’s 130 pounds per square inch, an amount of pressure that is more than sufficient to cause the tires on your car to explode. Espresso snobs love to write about what makes a perfect espresso, and there are many factors beyond nine bars of pressure. But those are the factors that make the difference between espresso machines that cost a mere $400 versus the machines that cost from $2,000 up.

Because I’m perfectly happy with my morning coffee brewed in a cone, I’m not sure that I want to spend even $400 on a machine. There’s also the issue of counter space. As I Googled to educate myself on the snobberies of espresso, I learned that there are simple machines that can make coffee using boiler pressure. Espresso snobs will be quick to point out that, if it’s not made with nine bars of pressure, then it’s coffee, not espresso. Fine. But two to three bars of pressure will make a very fine shot of espresso-like coffee and a respectable amount of crema. Plus you get the ability to steam milk for cappuccino. My little Bellman coffee maker cost about $25, used, on eBay.

For what it’s worth, for years I’ve bought my coffee at Whole Foods from the bulk coffee dispensers. It’s an organic Italian roast and costs $10.99 a pound. I use the same coffee both for morning coffee and for low-pressure espresso. The word “espresso” means only that the coffee is made using pressure. Espresso can be made with any coffee, roasted light, medium, or dark, as long as the beans are ground fine enough to work properly in the pressure-brewing process.


⬆︎ My bare-bones Bellman coffee maker


⬆︎ Espresso snobs would find many faults with this cup of cappuccino — that there’s not enough crema, that the microfoam isn’t micro enough, and that my artwork is primitive. It no doubt will take years, and a good many hundreds of dollars, to make a real espresso snob out of me. For now, merely very good is good enough.

Trains: Social glue we Americans will never have

When people ask me why I love Scotland, I have lots of answers. Most of them are nice, because there are so many nice things about Scotland. But I also have a snarky answer:

“Scotland,” I say, “is what white people are like when they aren’t Americans.”

We Americans are overexposed to wedge-issue social toxins and desperately underexposed to social glue. A train network, with stops in villages as well as cities, is a powerful social glue.

The village of East Linton is about 25 miles east of Edinburgh. Though East Linton is right on the route of the eastern train line between Edinburgh and London, the train station in East Linton had closed in 1964, and all the trains sped through without stopping. It was a very big deal when a new train station in East Linton opened a few days ago. There was a crowd, and there were bagpipes. The two people who made the video above are YouTube celebrities who travel around the United Kingdom making videos about trains.

A friend who lives in East Linton sent me the link to the video above. That new train stop will change his family’s life. They’ve been eagerly waiting for the new station to open. (The station, newly built, opened three months ahead of schedule. Scotland may have its ferry problems, but the trains are doing fine.)

Twenty to twenty-five minutes to Edinburgh Waverley! By car, it would be about 35 minutes or more.

On my first trip to the U.K. in 1985, I rode that train from Edinburgh back to London (there was no stop then in East Linton), and I’ll never forget it. North of Newcastle, the train line is often in sight of the English and Scottish coasts. That was my first-ever sight of those coastlines. Trips to other coasts — Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, and western Scotland — eventually followed.

It’s certainly true that Britain’s compact geography is much better suited to train travel than America’s sprawling vastness. American trains are good transportation between a few major cities, but there are no longer any passenger trains that are of any use to rural America. It’s all about cars now, of course. It could have been otherwise. But Americans wanted roads, not trains.

If the United States had invested in a train network rather than super-highways, would the country have fractured into a Red America and a Blue America? I doubt it.

The video above is a reminder that village life, in some places, still exists. We Americans have suburbs, and we have rural places. Villages? Not so much.

Five minutes of highlights, London to Edinburgh ⬇︎

Update:

Both the video above, and a comment on this post, mention the “Beeching closures” of the 1960s, when more than 7,000 miles of Britain’s railways were closed, supposedly in the name of modernization and efficiency. That this was a terrible mistake to which a certain kind of thinking always leads (in the U.S., think Republicans) is shown by how many stations have since been reopened. The man responsible for the closings was Richard Beeching, who was then chairman of British Railways. This deserves a political rant, but the video of the East Linton opening is so cheery, and speaks for itself so well, that I’m in no mood for a political rant.

Try my French verb conjugator

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I made a valiant effort to learn French. For three semesters, I went to night classes at the University of California (Berkeley) extension in San Francisco. With that foundation, I started reading. I never claim to speak French, and my aural comprehension is terrible. But I did learn to read French quite well, and I would have to say that the effort I put into it was well rewarded, because I was able to read some of the classics of 19th Century French literature — Les Misérables, Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, Notre-Dame de Paris (the English title is The Hunchback of Notre Dame), La Dame aux Camélias, and some of the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud.

Verbs, of course, are a major problem. Back then, no online verb conjugators existed, so I made my own. As a learning exercise, and working with books on the conjugations of French verbs, I typed in the conjugations of 1,446 French verbs. I imported all those verbs into a MySQL database and made a web interface for queries. Fortunately, I preserved the data over the years, though it existed only on old archive disks. Not too long ago I retrieved the data, put it into MySQL again, and got the query interface running again (written in php), just to preserve it. There are many conjugators (not to mention translators) on the web today, so my efforts are redundant. But I figured that it would be a shame to let all that work be lost.

The verb conjugator lives on the site that I use as a hot backup for this blog. I synchronize the backup only once a month, so, other than the verb conjugator, you should ignore the backup site. The verb conjugator is here:

Verb conjugator: 1,446 French verbs

Reading (at least for most of us) is much easier than speaking. If we need a verb form while speaking, then the correct form of the verb needs to be on the tips of our tongues. But when we encounter verb forms in reading, all we need to do is recognize from the verbs’ ending what form of the verb we’ve encountered — whether the verb is singular, plural, indicative, conditional, subjunctive, etc. And of course many forms of verbs are very rarely used. In English, how often do you say, “I shall have been there for three hours before you arrive”?

Music soothes the skittish cat


Lily listens to Herbert Blomstedt conduct Richard Strauss’ “Metamorphoses.”

The television doesn’t always terrify my cat, Lily. It depends on what’s on. Long ago I started using headphones when I watch television, to accommodate Lily. Loud blockbuster movies scare the living daylights out of her. But she likes music. Last week, after we watched the weekly Saturday live stream from the Berlin Philharmonic with the speakers on, I accidentally changed channels to — you guessed it — a loud blockbuster movie. She had been lying beside me, and she shredded me as the speakers suddenly exploded and she jumped and ran.

Even with the speakers off, she knows what gunfights and explosions look like, and she’ll run and hide. But if she sees an orchestra, then she comes and lies down, and it’s safe to turn the speakers on.

Richard Strauss’ “Metamorphoses” is very agreeable to a sleepy cat. Written in 1945, the piece is an outpouring of Strauss’ grief over the destruction of Germany. According to Wikipedia, a few days after finishing the piece Strauss wrote in his diary:

“The most terrible period of human history is at an end, the twelve year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany’s 2,000 years of cultural evolution met its doom.”

Germany recovered, though Strauss was too old to witness that recovery. He died in 1949.

Blomstedt is 96 years old and very feeble. He was assisted on and off the stage by the concertmaster, Vineta Sareika-Völkner. The house was packed for what probably was one of the last occasions to hear Blomstedt conduct. This was the Berlin Philharmonic’s live stream on September 23, 2023.


Blomstedt conducts Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony.

The Name of the Rose


1986

While scouring for watchables, I recently came across the 1986 film version of The Name of the Rose, on Netflix. It’s truly a classic film and always worth watching again. Back in the 1990s, I read Umberto Eco’s novel on which the film is based. The novel, too, is worth reading again, now that I think about it.

It left me thinking about Umberto Eco and how scholars can be extraordinarily good novelists, even when their academic field is very narrow. Eco’s thesis for his degree in philosophy was on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. Horrors! As an unrepentant heathen, it is hard for me to imagine a mind uglier than that of Thomas Aquinas (except maybe Augustine of Hippo). But Umberto Eco’s mind was a mind ahead of its time. (Consider, for example, his 1995 essay on fascism.)

I don’t recall that Eco’s novel was as rich in dark humor as the 1986 film with Sean Connery and Christian Slater. There are only three people in the film whom we can easily bear to look at — Connery, Slater, and the peasant girl. Otherwise the film is hilariously cast as a pageant of ghastly old men — all monks. And, as with Thomas Aquinas, the monks’ minds are as ugly as their appearances. The abbot’s hairstyle, for example, is like that of Thomas Acquinas in a portrait by Benozzo Gozzoli.

Whatever Eco thought of the church, The Name of the Rose is a story about the ridiculousness of theologies. The church itself is the main villain. The year is 1327, and part of the plot is that theologians from Rome are arriving at the isolated abbey to settle, by debate, a burning theological question: Did Christ own, or did he not own, the clothes he wore? The structure of Eco’s story is entirely classic. The wicked get punished, the good prevail. The peasants not only save the peasant girl from being burned at the stake by the inquisition, they also give the grand inquisitor a horrible and much-deserved death. Much of the dark humor is Christian Slater’s constant terror, not only that he’ll be the next to be murdered, but also the terror of being surrounded by ugly minds — a terror not unknown to sane and decent Americans during the Trump era. In fact, this film would be a good starting point for a serious essay on what I call ugliness of mind.

There was a new film version of The Name of the Rose in 2019 which was, at least for a while, available on Sundance TV. But, as far as I can tell, that 2019 version is not available for streaming in the U.S., nor are DVD versions available that will play on American DVD devices. I hope that will change. I’d really like to see the 2019 version.


2019

Orchestras hate it, too


Jörg Widmann thrashes to try to help the orchestra detect a beat.

Why would anyone pay up to $90 a seat to listen to someone beat on the back, the sides, and the neck of a violin, tunelessly sawing and scraping the poor thing when not beating it?

Lots of people won’t, which is why there were so many empty seats in the house for yesterday’s concert by the Berlin Philharmonic. (The concerts are live-streamed to online subscribers in the hinterlands such as me.) Those who did buy tickets at least knew that, if they could survive a violin concerto (plus some silly but virtuoso solo noodlings on the clarinet) newly composed by Jörg Widmann, then after intermission and a few drinks they’d be compensated with a Mendelssohn symphony.

The truth is, orchestras hate new music as much as audiences do. Some years ago, an old friend of mine was in the San Francisco Symphony (he’s now in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra), and he used to complain mightily about having to play new music. Orchestras have to play it, though, for political reasons. Else orchestras would be accused of playing only “museum music” and failing to support living composers.

It may be apocryphal, because I read it years ago and can’t verify the story anywhere on line today. But I believe the story was about the American composer Aaron Copland, who was in the audience for some new music — maybe Arnold Schönberg or something. Copland noticed that the man sitting next to him was fidgeting and squirming. At intermission, Copland said to the man something like, “What’s the matter? You don’t like it? Sit up and take it like a man!”

Copland, bless him, wrote quite listenable music, not least because he unapologetically borrowed from the late Romanticists rather than resorting to mere noise to rebel against them.

By the way, the soloist for Widmann’s violin concerto was his wife. And Widmann himself conducted. No further comment.

I believe the Berlin Philharmonic has a very successful business model, so no doubt they’re well aware of what sells tickets and what doesn’t. Looking over their schedule for the 2023-2024 season, it seems to me that they clear the decks of the new music early in the season (September). And then, come October, November, and December, when the people of Berlin are much more in a concertgoing mood, the programs change — Mozart piano concertos! Mahler symphonies! Mozart’s 40th! Brahms’ 4th! Beethoven’s 4th! A Beethoven piano concerto! Wagner overtures!

If there are valid political reasons why orchestras have to play new music, fine. But nobody should have to pretend to like it — except maybe the composer’s wife, if even she does.


Carolin Widmann

Not a book for the squeamish

Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land. Jacob Mikanowski. Pantheon, July 2023. 378 pages.

If some perverse god created the earth, then it’s almost as though that perverse god reserved Eastern Europe as a place dedicated to the relentless refinement of human misery. The book describes how life there has never been fair, not any time in recorded history, and not in the present, either.

First I should mention why the title includes the word “Goodbye.” This is explained early in the book and in the jacket copy. No one wants to be from Eastern Europe anymore. The people there would prefer other identities: “Ask anyone today, and they might tell you that Estonia is in the Baltics or Scandinavia, that Slovakia is in Central Europe, and that Croatia is in the eastern Adriatic or the Balkans. In fact, Eastern Europe is a place that barely exists at all, except in cultural memory.”

We know even less about the pre-Roman history of Eastern Europe than we do about Western Europe. But we do know that when the Roman religion made its way into Eastern Europe, it was just as brutally violent, including genocides, as it was in the west. Not only did the brutality come from Rome, though. The arrival of religion in Eastern Europe was a triple whammy — the western church out of Rome, the eastern church out of Constantinople, and Islam out of whatever hell it came from, each as horrible as the other. After the Christians came, Eastern Europe was used as a source of slaves, who were sent overland in chains to slave markets in the Mediterranean. At times, Jews were welcomed in some places and were temporarily safe, but for the Jews safety was always temporary. The Roma (the gypsies) rarely had it easy either. Though the agricultural potentials of Eastern Europe were and are enormous, famine and starvation were all too often a way of life, as was war. I think it is fair to say that states and cultures were almost always poorly rooted and precarious, because there was rarely the kind of stability that could be found in Germany, Britain, or Scandinavia. The five maps at the front of the book show how national boundaries have changed since 1648. Every change came with turmoil.

During World War II, westerners learned a great deal more about what life in Eastern Europe was like, starting with Czechoslovakia and Poland. But everyone suffered, from Bulgaria in the south to Lithuania in the north. And then there’s Russia. The west looked away from Eastern Europe after World War II ended, but the human suffering wasn’t over, especially for surviving Jews who wanted to return home from hiding (often in the forests) but found that their homes and properties now had new owners who refused to give it back. Jews continued to die.

Russia’s war on Ukraine has made Eastern Europe visible again to western eyes, but reporting on the war is shallow. Westerners still know very little about what life is like for the people of Ukraine, Georgia, Romania, Belarus, Lithuania, and even Poland. Part of the story is about corruption and what corruption does to those who are exploited by it. My guess would be that the young people of Eastern Europe, as long as they are not deceived by the propaganda pumped out by corrupt states, know vastly more now than was formerly possible, because of the Internet. I can’t help but wonder how long they will put up with it. However the war on Ukraine ends, my guess is that after that war we will see more mass uprisings in Eastern Europe demanding democracy, as we have seen in Belarus after the stolen election there in 2020. Georgia also is a hot spot. As for us Americans, perhaps our interest in Eastern Europe would be greater if we were able to recognize that what the corrupt anti-democratic right wants for Eastern Europe is exactly what they want for us here.

This book, in spite of the light it sheds on that part of the world, really only serves to remind me how little I know.


From the book. Click here for high-resolution version.

Scapegoats 2, Republicans 0

The political death wish of the Republican Party is mind-boggling. Why do they go on fighting battles that they’ve already lost and that accelerate their slide toward permanent minority status and the contempt of history? — at least, in civilized places as opposed to places such as Florida, Texas, and Tennessee.

Banning books, and threatening librarians with prison sentences, can only backfire, given time. According to the Washington Post, at least seven states have passed laws that impose criminal penalties for books that Republicans deem obscene. Arkansas threatens librarians with prison sentences of six years, Oklahoma ten.

Don’t Republicans know about the internet? Young people have always found ways of finding out about things that adults don’t want them to know. Because of the internet it’s easier today than ever. Schoolchildren in Florida no doubt know that there are some subjects that their teachers aren’t allowed to talk about. The kids will work twice as hard to educate themselves on such subjects. They’ll also learn another lesson — that Republicans are hateful and contemptible. Florida’s law originally applied only to grades K-3, but earlier this year the state board of education expanded the ban to include grades 4-12.

One of the frequently banned books is Casey McCuiston’s Red, White, and Royal Blue. The book was a New York Times Bestseller. According to Wikipedia, translations have been published in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Sweden, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russia, Spain, Israel, and Uruguay.

Republicans might as well stand in front of a speeding train and wave a crucifix. Publishers must love it when a book is banned. For many books, a ban creates a sharp increase in sales.

A movie version of Red, White, and Royal Blue was released this weekend by Amazon Prime Video. The film is more serious than it appears to be in the trailers. There is an immigrant element (Mexico) as well as the gay element. Texas gets the middle finger. Only just now did I realize that “Royal Blue” is a double entendre, as one of the characters sets out to make Texas not just a blue state, but a royal blue state.

The cast includes Stephen Fry and Uma Thurman. Thurman was born in Boston, but she does a pretty good Texas accent.

The sound track is clearly meant for people younger than I am. That’s as it should be. But upon hearing a few lines of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “If I Loved You,” (1945), sung by a voice and in a style that just doesn’t work for someone my age, I had to pause the video and go listen to a proper performance. I’ve included a link to a video below, from Royal Albert Hall.

Young people have another internet hit to stream right now, the second season of “Heartstoppers,” on Netflix.

The devil now polls 58 percent in America


But which one is the devil?

“The Devil presenting St Augustin with the Book of Vices,” Michael Pacher, 1435-1498

There probably is a way to do the math, but my back-of-a-napkin estimate is that, at the current rate, the Enlightenment will have arrived in America in about 942 more years.

The Washington Post has an article today with this headline: “As organized religion falters, the devil falls on hard times.” It seems that the devil’s numbers have dropped. According to the article, a Gallup poll found that 58 percent of Americans now believe in the devil, down from 68 percent in 2001. The devil polls 20 points higher among Republicans at 78 percent, which is the percentage of the vote that Donald Trump got in my county in 2020.

Things like this make me realize what a naïf I am for thinking that people ought to know better than to spray glyphosate in their gardens, or to drink bleach, or to believe what they hear on television.

I think I need to go pour myself some Scotch and listen to some Beatles.