play and concert review
When I visited the Eugene O'Neill home in Danville last May, I noted that every fall a local theatrical group does an O'Neill Play Festival: usually just one of O'Neill's longer plays for a run of a couple of weeks. And this year the main play was to be Ah, Wilderness! known as his only comedy. Would I be willing to give that a try, after having had enough for a lifetime of intense and garrulous O'Neill tragedy?

Well, I wouldn't make the drive just for that, but since a matinee performance coincided with an evening on my subscription for the California Symphony in Walnut Creek nearby, I went ahead.

Ah, Wilderness! takes place in 1906 and was written in 1933; this production was staged as a radio reading from the '30s, with the actors supposedly standing in the broadcast studio. This simplified staging a lot.

Unfortunately I had slept poorly and nodded off enough during the play that I didn't always follow the action. But I followed enough that it was clear that, while the characters behaved like O'Neill characters, they weren't as annoying as other O'Neill characters, and the dialogue was passingly amusing. The acting throughout was strong and clear.

As for the concert, the gimmick was that all three works were written for performance in the U.S., though only one of the composers is American. Sibelius's The Oceanides, inspired by Greek mythology instead of his usual Finnish, doesn't sound like most Sibelius but depicts the rising and falling of an ocean surge pretty well. There followed an equally dynamic run through Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, more energetic than it was exciting, but still crisply produced. And, for a new piece, Jennifer Higdon's Cello Concerto, which its dedicatee Julian Schwarz has been taking around to various orchestras. Higdon has mastered the trick of ensuring that the solo cello is never drowned out by the orchestra; generally it's a meanderingly lyrical work without much particularly to note it by.

(Comment on this)

remake
I was never particularly fond of this classic Seventies rock song, but arrange it for the traditional Chinese guzheng (clever of those traditional Chinese to be able to make tape loops) and it becomes absolutely hypnotic.

(3 Comments |Comment on this)

three days at Oregon Shakespeare
B. and I have returned from our annual driving visit to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The weather at the shoulder season was pleasant, warm and mostly dry but not hot, but the physical rigors - walking around the hilly and irregular grounds, slotting in meals, and the long drive there and back again - were very hard on aging bodies, and this may well be the last time we go.

Nevertheless we saw some good productions - two A's and one B among six shows, not too bad a ratio.

Best of the Shakespeare shows was A Midsummer Night's Dream, a traditional production, with the usual double-casting and undercutting, great ensemble and teamwork among all the actors. The Pyramus and Thisbe play put on by the mechanicals at the end was so goofy in its acting as to be the funniest thing in the show.

Come From Away, the musical about the passengers stranded at the former transatlantic refueling stop at Gander, Newfoundland, during the airspace shutdown after 9/11 (so there was room to park lots of planes at a small town) and the locals who hosted them, was the feelgood show of the season. This despite it beginning with a number describing the passengers trapped on the parked planes for a whole day without being told what was going on, while the locals scrambled to assemble supplies. The fact that this was both energetic and entertaining was the amazing part: like Midsummer the show's ensemble teamwork in a very complex script was outstanding. The music was functional rather than memorable, but this was a great show.

How much of Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang is as autobiographical as the text claims is not clear to me. But Hwang, known for his opposition to using Caucasian actors in Asian roles, apparently got caught up in such a controversy involving another play of his, and wrote Yellow Face about the experience. The director of this other play - Hwang himself had no part in this - hired a white actor for an Asian part, thinking he was part-Asian. Apparently while such a casting is now utterly un-woke, Equity anti-discrimination rules prohibit asking actors what their ethnic origin is. The irony in this seems to me to be the real point of the story, though the play focuses on Hwang's embarrassment. Anyway, well-performed.

The Taming of the Shrew failed to follow through on the director's concept that the script depicts sexism rather than being sexist, and ended with the usual abjectly defeated Kate. Even more unfortunately, it was slowly and dully presented. Never have Bianca's suitors been more boring to watch. The set included what was evidently intended as a topiary of the word LOVE in letters six feet high, which gave the impression that the show was set in Pepperland.

Henry IV Part One was well presented - again, excellent byplay among the actors - whenever it wasn't depicting battles. Though costumed roughly for period, the battles were accompanied by huge clanging music that sounded like minimalist rock or sometimes like alarms going off. Since the ending of the play is one big long battle, it was brutal and spoiled the experience of the better, earlier part of the play. Should have left at intermission.

We did leave at intermission for Emma, a ghastly adaptation of the Jane Austen novel that turned all the characters into juvenile nincompoops. Worse yet, it was well-performed for the conception. Watching a lot of good actors deliberately performing badly was too painful to continue with.

(Comment on this)

panel on Earthsea
In celebration of the Library of America's new issue of a definitive collection of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea stories, the publisher sponsored an online panel today about Earthsea, with Brian Attebery (scholar who worked with Le Guin and has edited the LoA's Le Guin volumes), Karen Joy Fowler (fiction author who knew Le Guin well), and Nghi Vo (representing I guess the next generation of fiction authors, influenced by Le Guin).

They discussed a lot of points, among them that the original Earthsea books were published as children's fantasy but they're not really children's books. Sober, Fowler called them, and she doubted she'd have appreciated them fully if she hadn't been in her 20s by the time she read them. I'm in somewhat the same place, having come across Earthsea when the first uniform paperback edition was published when I was 18. That's what sold me on Le Guin: I took one look at those maps and said, "This author has seen within my soul," and after that I'd follow her anywhere.

Later on they touched on Le Guin's comment that she was lucky she was in her 20s by the time The Lord of the Rings came out, so that she was mature enough to absorb it without it overwhelming her. The book from her childhood that did overwhelm her that way? She told Attebery it was Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright, and Attebery said he sees Wright's influence in the societies of Gethen (Left Hand of Darkness) rather than Earthsea.

One of the audience questions was about the current breed of libertarian society leaders who grew up reading Heinlein. What did the panel think would have happened if they'd read Le Guin instead? Answer, not much. Vo quoted the line that personality precedes politics, and Attebery chimed in by saying that they'd probably have misread Le Guin the way they've misread Tolkien.

(Comment on this)

book review
The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey, 2024)

This was the discussion topic at today's Mythopoeic Society book group meeting. We all liked the book and had a juicy discussion. Liking it was particularly unusual for me, because it's a murder mystery and is framed like one. Generally I don't like rule-obeying murder mysteries, but I enjoyed this one and the plot and storytelling had me captivated all the way through, an experience rare for me these days with any novel.

Part of what helped is that. although the book obeys the rules of murder mysteries - in particular there's sufficient clues to answer most of the mysteries if you're clever enough - it doesn't follow the formulas of the genre - save one, a scene in which the detective lays out her deductions in front of all the other relevant characters. There is, for instance, no array of possible suspects. The detective accurately fingers the culprit for the original murder fairly early on. But besides trying to find this person, who has disappeared, what keeps the story going is that there's a lot more to the plot than that. Much of the unveiling at the end is extremely clever; it's only the last couple onion layers of plot that seemed a little stretched and implausible.

The detective, says the author in a note, is a cross between Nero Wolfe and Hannibal Lecter. The Nero Wolfe influence is obvious: she (yes, it's a woman) is reclusive and prefers to stay in her room and ratiocinate; the narrator and principal character is her Archie Goodwin legman; but someone will have to tell me what makes her like Hannibal Lecter besides a taste for eating raw meat.

Besides being a murder mystery, the book is a fantasy? no, a science fiction novel. It takes place in an imaginary fantasy-world-like kingdom with a high technology that's botanically based rather than our metallurgical one. One result of this is that a person who dies when a large plant suddenly erupts from his body, while strange and disturbing even here, turns out to be not as utterly weird a thing as it would be in our world. I found that orienting myself to this world's characteristics made the first chapter rather challenging, but by chapter two the story was off and running. The author has a knack for throwing in twists and other surprises without derailing the story as it's been told; the balls are all kept in the air; the prose is clear and things like Geography and the relationship between characters is always clear.

This is book one of "Shadow of the Leviathan," but it's a complete finished story with no more loose end than a hint as to where the sequels will come from. B. has read the two sequels published so far and says they're just as imaginative and exciting as this one, so I'll probably indulge myself in them also, without a deadline like the meeting to get them done by.

(Comment on this)

movie review
Coyote vs. Acme (released 2026)

Perhaps you can attribute the tone of this post to local circumstances: it's been broiling hot the last few days, and not only have I been ill but I've been in the hospital for a pre-planned procedure, which involved looking inside me and not finding anything - which is not necessarily the best answer, because why then have I been feeling so crappy?

Anyway, this hot afternoon looked like a good time to spend in an air-conditioned movie theater to see the storied Coyote vs. Acme. I enjoyed the old Road Runner cartoons as a kid, and got a kick out of the original lawsuit article in the New Yorker some years ago, so this tickled my interest.

I didn't like it much.

I suppose if what you want is to watch the old cartoon characters get banged up and abused, it might be funny. But one thing I want out of movies is a solid storyline, and this one fell down there.

I had prepared for going to see this movie by rewatching the only other live-action/toon film I knew, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which I'd seen when it came out and not since. It was quickly apparent that the problem with that movie was that the plot and writing came from a cheap downmarket film noir. I quickly lost interest.

Well, the problem with Coyote vs. Acme is that what it's derived from is contemporary action-adventure movies. Imagine a really, really bad Mission Impossible film (none of the actual ones are that bad). Subtract the specifically toon aspect, and that's all you've got. Do not imagine a courtroom drama; despite much of it taking place there, it isn't organized enough to be one. There are about three secret conspiracy plots that explain everything, one of which gets boasted about in court even though it's a secret conspiracy plot.

One of the big plot points of Roger Rabbit, that toons cannot be hurt or killed no matter how much physically abused (the coyote is always recovered again in the next scene, isn't he?) makes something of a cameo appearance in this film.

Besides the lame and overly fussy plot, the acting isn't much good either.

It got me out of the house and into an air conditioned room for a couple hours, for which I'm grateful, but I spent much of that time wishing I were reading something instead.

(Comment on this)

how to copy a key
1. Notice that a local supermarket has installed a self-service key copier.

2. Go there when you wish to make an extra copy of your front door key.

3. Insert the key to copy, then page through a whole series of screens offering extra-cost options you don't want.

4. Take the completed key home, and find it doesn't fit in the keyhole. Uh-oh.

5. Try your old key. It doesn't fit in the keyhole either.

6. Panic briefly, then realize that you'd picked the wrong key. This isn't your front door key. (Excuse for this boneheaded error: you're ill, and have been very tired.)

7. Return to the supermarket. Insert the right key this time. Notice that it wobbles a little in the slot.

8. Take the completed key home. It fits in the keyhole, but won't turn.

9. Return to the supermarket. Wobble the key in the other direction this time.

10. Take the completed key home. It won't turn either.

11. Go to the key counter at the local hardware store. Wait while the previous customer chooses among two kiosks of key designs.

12. It's your turn. Clerk rolls his eyes slightly ("What did you expect?") when you tell him you used a self-service machine and it didn't work.

13. Take the completed key home. It works. Cost less than the one at the supermarket, too.

(Comment on this)

my first worldcon
At the LACon panel on "Memories of Worldcons Past," I asked each panelist to begin by identifying their first Worldcon, and by telling an anecdote about it, preferably something funny and that reveals something about how worldcons past were different than they are now. Here, somewhat expanded, is mine:

It turns out I've been around longer than any of the other panelists. My first Worldcon was 1976 in Kansas City, MidAmeriCon - "Big MAC" it was called, mostly out of fears that it would be uncontrollably large.

For most of their existence, Worldcons had been under a thousand people. But lately they'd been getting larger, and in the last few years increasing rapidly: 1972 had 2000 people, 1973 had 3000, 1974 had 3500. The 1975 Worldcon was the first one in Australia, so nobody expected that to be very large, but what would happen in 1976? Would it be 4000, 6000, or what?

In the end it turned out to be not much more than 3000, but the convention went into a frenzy of planning for a really large turnout. Instead of the traditional banquet to present the Hugos, they rented a local theater. That was the first time that was done. Another innovation of MidAmeriCon's was the invention of escalating membership fees: if you bought early, your fee was less expensive than if you bought later. This is now so normal that many may not be aware it was once an innovation, but at the time many people were furious at this.

But the biggest innovation of all had to do with security. MidAmeriCon decided that using name badges as authorization to enter convention areas wouldn't work: they were too easily lost, and people would wear them in various spots, some hard to see or hard for security to spot quickly when trying to clear large numbers of people.

So they came up with something new and never done before, and oh how they chortled in the progress reports when they told the members about it. But they wouldn't say what the security device was, and you didn't find out until you checked in for the convention and found that it was:

A hospital I.D. bracelet. Plastic, with the MAC logo printed on it.

You were supposed to wear these for the entire five days of the convention. In theory, at least, they were unremovable without being cut off. But wearing an I.D. bracelet in the hospital is one thing, during a convention was another. They became a nuisance, sliding around your wrist, as you tried to use your hands; and they got clammy and grotty if you tried to shower with the bracelet on.

So, unlike the escalating membership fees, as far as I know no other fannish convention has tried something like that, though other types of conventions have.

(Comment on this)

hu-gone
In my post on the Hugo winners I commented that few of the finalists in any category had I even heard of. Tis is quite a change from years past when I was familiar with the work of all of them and knew many personally.

When did I drop out? I decided to trace the history of one category, Best Fan Writer, as the one where my acquaintance was the closest. And I found that from 1980 to 2012, I rarely knew personally fewer than three of the finalists (and when it was less, it was two). Some I knew very well, others I'd just met or briefly corresponded with, but I knew them. One year, 1989, I knew all of the finalists.

But then it abruptly changed, and from 2014 on I've known only an occasional finalist. All the others are completely unknown to me. That was just about the time I ceased considering myself an active fan, and that may have had an effect, but I don't think it's the whole story.

(2 Comments |Comment on this)

Worldcon day 4: Hugos!
Sunday I was feeling poorly most of the day, so I skipped out on logging in to any program items. Had I been scheduled for a panel I could have made it, but anything I didn't have to do seemed a bit much.

But by evening I was a little better, so I watched the Hugo Awards ceremony - almost the whole thing - even though I had no horses in this race. I'm really out of it as contemporary SF and fandom go, and few of the finalists in any category had I even heard of. (Official statistics)

When I signed up for programming, I had to join the convention, and this made me eligible to vote for the Hugos. So I downloaded the finalist packet, but I didn't have time before the deadline to do very much with it, and I didn't vote. I read a few of the short fiction nominees, but, as it happens, none of the ones I read were among the award-winners.

The only Dramatic Presentation finalist I saw, in either category, was KPop Demon Hunters. I rather doubt I've had put it in first place, but on the other hand the other movies in that category were on my not-see list, so maybe I would have.

Only three or four people buried down amid the credits in the fan categories had I heard of at all. Once upon a time I'd have known everybody in those categories personally.

But I enjoyed the ceremony, even if it was a parade of people I hadn't heard of except for some of the presenters (and a few winners: Picacio, Clarke, Scalzi). I appreciated the acknowledgements that many of the sf community weren't there because of difficulties in travel to the US, I enjoyed the unusual animal facts from emcee T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon).

Now I want to read the Related Work winner (Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer) and the Graphic Story winner (Fred Fordham's adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea).

(Comment on this)

Worldcon day 3 part two: two more panels
These, in the late afternoon, both went well. My camera worked properly and I was awake.

"Foundational Fantasy You Should Read": pre-con conversations with the other panelists had convinced me that introductory remarks on Dunsany and Peake would be useful, and also some guide into Tolkien's obscurer gems, for which I resurrected The Forgotten Women of Middle-earth. Others recommended some authors I could really do without, but I kept silent about that. We talked a little about the forging of "fantasy" as a publishing genre in the 1960s, and my definition of "foundational" was "from before then," but some of the audience members defined it as anything from before their personal time, so we also got in UKL and DWJ.

"Writing Fantasy in Real Worlds": I'd originally signed up for this because I had things to say on this subject, but finding myself moderator of a panel with five pretty high-powered pro authors on it, including Andrea Hairston and Sarah Pinsker, whose work B. knew even if I didn't, I figured I'd better just pose the questions and let them talk. They gave good value, talking with detail but not from a self-promotional angle about what they've done with these settings, how, and why (notably Wole Talabi's story about rescuing stolen African treasures from the British Museum); and they all also responded with enthusiasm when I asked them to name such work by other authors they'd recommend. Both that and their own work were both more recent and more multicultural than my own knowledge of the subject, so leaving it to them was for the best.

After dinner, about an hour into the Masquerade I turned that on, to find some unskilled belly dancers flouncing around to some really irritating music. This going on for several minutes and showing no signs of ceasing, I turned the feed off.

(Comment on this)

Worldcon day 3 part one: two panels
I had two online panels in the early wee hours this morning, at just about the time when I normally would finally fall into actual sleep. I didn't do that; instead, it looks as if I'm going to be tired, but without actual sleep, all day. At least I stayed awake and alert for both panels. But my camera wouldn't turn on for either panel, and nothing the tech staff did would fix it.

"Fandom as a Found Family": We all agreed that fandom is, or has been, a refuge for friendless children on the autism spectrum, and that the biggest obstacle is the lack of introductory social skills by many fans. Formal introductory material - panels explaining cons to new attendees, guidebooks to lingo and customs - are filling in the gap.

"Memories of the Worldcons Past": Mostly wound up as a comparison between Worldcons of the 1980s and today. Fewer opportunities to run into big names casually, but more caffeeklatches to meet them in small groups. (Again, formal introductory material filling in the gaps.) More dazzle. A feeling that Worldcons, although they haven't shrunk in size, are now the smaller siblings of the likes of DragonCon and Comic-Con.

(Comment on this)

Worldcon day 2: one concert
The great part of not actually being at the worldcon is that you don't feel guilty for missing anything. I didn't watch any panels today (though I'd have liked to see the recording of one from Thursday that I missed if they'd put up the recordings yet), but around evening-time I wondered what they were doing for evening entertainment tonight, as the costumes are tomorrow and the awards on Sunday.

It turned out to be a concert of anime music. A group which both looked and sounded like a high-school jazz orchestra played some occasionally modestly interesting jazz-type compositions while the emcee stood in front, embodying the "wave arms around until music stops" school of non-conducting when he bothered to do anything at all.

(Comment on this)

Worldcon day 1: one panel
So it's the first day of the Worldcon, and I watched an all-Zoom virtual panel, on the topic of "Can We Enjoy the Art of Unethical People?" The Zoom worked very well, everybody was clearly visible as well as audible. The Discord comment channel sucked, though. I couldn't figure out how to submit a post; no instructions I found online worked, and the con's e-mail help line was worse than useless.

In another universe, I'd haven taken notes and submitted a summary, but I think it's been recorded and you can watch it later. What I have instead is some of my own thoughts in response.

First I should say, that we in classical music have faced this dilemma for centuries. Richard Wagner and Ludwig van Beethoven are unquestionably two of the greatest composers there ever were; we could not do without their music; yet they were both thoroughly unsatisfactory human beings.

Our answer has been yes, we listen to their music, while acknowledging their personal failings. The only exception is in Israel, which maintains an unofficial boycott against Wagner.

Of course, the fact that they're both long dead makes it easier; they're not making any money off our purchases, and this distinction was made at the panel; one panelist mentioned that the estate of Roald Dahl is trying to make amends or at least apologies for his failings.

Yet I'm a little uncomfortable with the dead v. alive distinction. If they're not in prison, a person needs to be able to make a living; is it right to withhold money you would otherwise spend on their work because of their past misdeeds? On the other hand, continuing unapologetic offenders like Rowling - the idea of giving them money is repulsive, and there's probably enough cretins who agree with them that they won't starve.

The panel also talked a lot about the difference between misdeeds in life and as depicted in fiction. Stories being as they are, you have to expect repulsive things to happen often enough. How does the author convey that they don't approve? General opinion was, don't worry about it; you can't control what people think. Nobody mentioned Resnick's Kirinyaga, but that would have been a good example. Koriba gets his comeuppance, but not until the last story; the first one seemed to a lot of readers as if he had authorial approval.

Sometimes you have to depict misbehavior to convey the point. Someone brought up the n-word in Huck Finn. It would have been false to the setting of the story to leave that out; that's the way people talked then, and we need to know it. That the word didn't have the encoding then that it does now was one important point.

On the difference between life and fiction in general, I remember an old comment: "Murder is illegal. Writing about murder is not. Sex is not illegal. Writing about sex is." Of course restrictions on writing about sex have loosened over the years, but it's still a good distinction.

The question was asked, should we write about authors we disfavor? Yes, we should; people need to know. One panelist recounted having been, in her youth, a big David Eddings fan, only much later learning of his unethical behavior and being taken aback. I was taken aback by that, as I hadn't heard anything about Eddings. So I looked him up and found he'd been imprisoned for child abuse before he became an author. This was on the public record but was not generally known until after he died - or by me until just now.

Tim Curry, who just died, got a mention. His original fame was for Rocky Horror, which surprises some people today, though it's where I first heard of him. He recently wrote: Is Rocky Horror problematic today? Yes it is. But remember it was written just a few years after being actively gay ceased being illegal in England, and it was daring and necessarily transgressive at the time.

There was much more to the panel, but that's enough for a post.

(Comment on this)

ghost at Worldcon
The Worldcon is coming up, but though it's only a few hundred miles from here, I'm not going. Remembering from past LA Worldcons the sheer expanse of the Anaheim Convention Center, I don't think I'm any longer up to the expenditure of space and of time that goes with attending a Worldcon.

But I will be there virtually, for at least part of the con. I was contacted by programming and decided to volunteer. So I'll be on four all-online panels, all of them on Saturday. I'm moderating two of these, "Memories of the Worldcons Past" and "Writing Fantasy in Real Worlds," and will be a panelist on two others, "Fandom as a Found Family" and "Foundational Fantasy You Should Read." I'll try to report on these after they happen.

Because they're online and panelists can be anywhere, these programming tracks run 24 hours. My first panel is at 4.30 am. At the` time I signed up for programming, this would have been fine, being about the time I'd get up anyway. But in the last few weeks, it's been just after I finally fall asleep. I don't know what's going to happen, but the last time I tried to get up in the early morning, I was groggy and exhausted all day.

(Comment on this)

stupid stupid software creatures
There is one additional thing I'm using AI for, besides asking it to find words that I know but have slipped my mind. And that is, finding commands or fixing glitches in programs and apps. This occurs constantly.

For instance, the upcoming Worldcon is using Discord for its chat function, and while I've used Discord before when Mythcon employed it for the same purpose, I didn't much like it and it's been a long tiem since then. But as a panel moderator, I'd best use it, so I followed the con's advice to try it out and get used to it.

And then I had to ask Google AI, "How do you log off Discord?", a question I remember having to ask some help function on a previous occasion. The answer is that the log off command is hidden at the bottom of a non-obvious menu.

Sometimes the answer doesn't work, or it refers you to a command that I can't find where it's supposed to be, so I resubmit the question with "I've done X" or "There is no Y" added in. The following is an actual example from today of my adding no fewer than five "I've done X" to my original question because none of the previous answers worked.

in Excel, I've highlighted the cells I want to print, and I've cleared the print area, and I've re-selected the data range, and I've selected Set Print Area, and I've changed the print setting to Print Active Sheets, and the cells are not empty or hidden, but when I go to print them, I get an error message that says "we didn't find anything to print"

The actual solution turned out to be "close the program and start over," which hadn't occurred to me because I'd already tried that and it didn't work the first time.

If software makers had access to AI question logs concerning their products, they could learn a lot about what users can't figure out. In the meantime, these glitchy programs and their stupid user interfaces are as bad as AI.

(Comment on this)

lost Gilbert and Sullivan
I attended an online Zoom presentation by the Lamplighters, the San Francisco Gilbert & Sullivan society, of three songs recently discovered (like, three months ago) that were cut from G&S's opera Iolanthe before the work was finalized for regular performance in 1882. They were found by a G&S scholar named Marc Shepherd, who was browsing through a rehearsal score in the British Library that apparently nobody else had examined closely before. Sullivan's practice was to destroy any material he didn't use in the final opera, but this rehearsal score must have been missed. Probably they were deleted for the reasons that songs are often deleted from stage musicals at a late stage: unnecessary for plot development, slowing down the action, difficult to sing.

I hadn't heard of this discovery before - except for the text of the third song, which Gilbert published among his poetry - nor did I know until the program that the songs had already been released. Here is Shepherd's account of the songs, and here they are being sung by, as the Lamplighters also did them, professional-quality G&S performers.



I don't find them hidden gems, but they're enjoyable enough, especially in these performances, and I'm glad we have acquired these nuggets.

(Comment on this)

movies with Benedict Cumberbatch in them
I came upon a list of lesser-known Cumberbatch film performances, and decided to watch a few, mostly late at night in between fitfully trying to get to sleep. So my evaluations may not be totally reliable.

Starter for 10 (2006)
As in "starter question, ten points." James McAvoy plays a whiz kid student at the University of Bristol who aims at winning at a varsity tv trivia quiz show. He barely makes the Bristol team, and then both his quizzing and his academic work, as well as the movie, are derailed by his attempts at beginning a love life. Benedict Cumberbatch plays the prissy team captain, who chokes under pressure. Intermittently and modestly amusing.

Amazing Grace (2006)
I actually saw this when it came out. I didn't get very far on a rewatching. Recounts the political campaign by haughtily moral William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd) to outlaw the slave trade in the British Empire around 1800. Benedict Cumberbatch plays his semi-reliable ally William Pitt. Pitt, as you'll recall from The Madness of King George, where he was played by Julian Wadham, was a rigid and rather characterless fellow, so Cumberbatch doesn't have much to do. Like many political history movies, it's written mostly as pontifications based on the screenwriters' reading of the history books. I quit after Pitt outlines his secret plan to become Prime Minister, which relies both on a surety of future knowledge and an oversimplification of those events that stretches credibility.

Four Lions (2010)
Whackabout comedy about a group of incompetent radicalized British Muslims who want to become suicide bombers. Comedy on such a subject is a risky business, and to enjoy this movie you have to overlook that (spoiler alert, sort of) they do all manage to blow themselves up, and a lot of people get killed, not all by the terrorists. The movie tries to brush that aside as incidental or insignificant. It's the erratic pacing, rather than the content, which makes this film duller than it could be. Benedict Cumberbatch has a cameo role as a police negotiator.

Black Mass (2015)
An unrecognizable Johnny Depp plays real-life Boston mob boss "Whitey" Bulger, who throughout this film is more usually called Jimmy. Focuses on his subsidiary career as an informant for the FBI on the competing mobs and whether the FBI gets anything worthwhile out of this. (Mostly they don't.) Kevin Bacon plays the FBI supervisor who's disgusted by the whole thing. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Jimmy's respectable and politically successful brother Billy, who maintains a distant but friendly relationship with Jimmy but utterly refuses to do any favors solicited by third parties or otherwise get involved on Jimmy's behalf. (Jimmy, who is utterly ruthless, especially in his way of assuring minions that they haven't screwed up just before he has them whacked, isn't foolish enough to ask Billy for anything.) Quite a powerful true-crime thriller.

Brexit: The Uncivil War (2019)
British tv movie about the Brexit referendum campaign. Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Dominic Cummings, the campaign director for Vote Leave, and the focus is entirely on Cummings and his unorthodox methods of running the campaign. He succeeds by targeting non-voters and by appealing entirely to their emotions rather than making intellectual arguments. It's only after he wins that he begins to realize what an uncontrolled id he has unleashed. This, unlike Amazing Grace, is how you make a movie about politics, and Cumberbatch is set loose to give an impressive performance. First-rate, if the subject interests you.

(Comment on this)

didn't go
This weekend there was an Asian Food Fest at the San Mateo fairgrounds. I was hoping to attend and have a report here. The fest opened each day at 10 AM, and I know from past experience with such events that if you want to accomplish anything without standing in line for an hour first, you'd better get there early. Furthermore, parking is expensive, but the fairgrounds are a block from a train station, so if I caught the 9:12 AM train from my local station, I'd be there by opening. But that requires getting up early, and my current so-called sleep schedule has me waking up about 9:30. Of course I could set an alarm and be groggy all day, but that's not compatible with attending a festival nor desirable for a voluntary event. So I didn't go.

(1 Comment |Comment on this)

more distress
So here's another one. A few days ago I lost my datebook, a little paper-and-pencil calendar in which I write all my appointments. (I don't like electronics for this purpose.) It occasionally disappears and usually turns up again within a few days, but this time I wasn't so sure: a lot of things have vanished from obvious spots lately and never turned up again, like a bill on the kitchen table.

So I set out to find a substitute and re-create the calendar. Instead of mail-ordering another, my usual source, because I didn't want to wait, I checked the few remaining office supply stores. I found the ideal substitute in the office section of Walmart, of all things.

At this time, my upcoming appointme3nts are mostly medical and concerts, the latter not starting till next month. I sorted through my tickets, and checked websites of vendors I subscribe to that haven't sent their tickets yet. My main medical provider lists all my upcoming appointments online, but others, such as dentists, don't. The ones I couldn't reach by phone were very local, so I just went in and asked at the counter.

I know I got everything this way, because a day or two ago the original datebook turned up. In a place I had already looked through thoroughly. Elven intervention, both positive and negative, is not out of the question.

(1 Comment |Comment on this)