Author: Laura Conrad

Shakespeare’s Kings

An
Age of Kings
was originally live broadcasts on the BBC in the
early 60’s of the sequence of Shakespeare’s history plays from
Richard II (which I’d never seen before) through Henry IV, Henry
V, Henry VI (which I’d also never seen) and Richard III. They’re
now being sold as 5 DVD’s.

They were using the then upcoming young actors, so it’s fun to
see a very young Judi Dench play Katherine flirting with Henry
IV, and a young Sean Connery conspiring against Henry IV.

Another good thing about the series is that characters who
reappear in several plays are played by the same actor in each,
which wouldn’t normally happen on stage, since someone of the
stature to play Richard III in the play of that name, wouldn’t
be asked to do the bit part of Gloucester in Henry VI.

The actor who plays Prince Hal and later Henry V is Robert
Hardy. Every time I see him, (most recently as a hanger on of
Mr. Merdle’s in Little Dorrit) I realize that I know him well, but
can’t quite remember where from. He has quite a long list of
credits, many of which you’ve seen. His Henry V is a very youthful,
athletic, endearing performance.

Another standout performance is by Paul Daneman as
Richard III. He also has a long list of credits, but I mostly
haven’t seen them, but I may look some of them out now. I still
haven’t seen a production of Richard III that really reconciles
the opening monologue, which seems to me to clearly say “I’m
going to get the world because I’m so ugly that no woman will
ever love me”, with the seduction of Lady Anne, where Richard always
seems to be played as a matinée idol who assumes that of
course a grieving widow will just fall into bed with the man who
murdered her husband, her father, and her brother. But Daneman
rolling around on the floor laughing (“Was ever woman in such
humor wooed; was ever woman in such humor won?”) after the
seduction scene is really fascinating.

Finishing watching the plays leaves me wanting to read some of
the history — surely there was gunpowder and not just swordplay
at Bosworth Field? And did the battles really resolve themselves
by the major characters killing each other? None of them ever
got killed by a minor character?

In general, the productions are good for what they were. The
music is what seems most old-fashioned to me, but luckily there
isn’t much of it. Richard III, the last of the plays, seems
more truncated than the others, so one wonders if maybe they ran
out of money.

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What I Talk About When I Talk About Running


This book is a memoir by the Japanese novelist Hideki Murakami
about the place long-distance running has in his life.

I’ve enjoyed a couple of his novels (
Kafka
on the Shore and Norwegian
Wood) quite a bit, and I enjoyed this memoir too.

He took up running when he stopped running a
bar/restaurant/jazz club so that he could write full time.
Running the bar had been fairly active work, but sitting at the
desk and writing wasn’t. So he needed to do something and he
decided on running. He runs at least one marathon a year, and
has experimented with triathlons and ultra-marathons.

He often discusses the
relationship between running and writing novels:

Right now I’m aiming at increasing the distance I run, so speed is
less of an issue. As long as I can run a certain distance,
that’s all I care about. Sometimes I run fast when I feel like
it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I
run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end
of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of
tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day
right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and
the next day’s work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest
Hemingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to
keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term
projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The
problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed — and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.

He also says things that resonate with me about the importance
of daily practice:

Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running
every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I
push myself? How much rest is appropriate — and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself? I know that if I hadn’t become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have been vastly different. How different? Hard to say. But something would have definitely been different.

This is a bit how I feel about practicing musical instruments
every day.

There’s also a fair amount of discussion about how aging is
affecting his ability to run, and really good descriptions of
what the last couple of miles of a marathon feel like.

I have friends who run as an important part of their life, and
the way they discuss their times and their injuries isn’t
anything like as interesting as this book.

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A clever way to get a ride

The New York Times obituary
for Gene D. Cohen has a good story in it:

His in-laws had arrived for a visit in Washington in the midst of a snowstorm and emerged from the subway lost. Unable to hail a cab or reach the Cohen family by phone, Dr. Cohen’s father-in-law had an idea. He and his wife walked across the street to a pizza parlor, ordered a pizza for a delivery to the Cohen house, and then insisted that the delivery man take them, too.

Dr. Cohen was a geriatric psychiatrist, and he used this story
as an example of how decades of experience can lead to agile creativity.

Whatever Works

This
movie is a pleasant Woody Allen romp through New York.

If you don’t know Woody Allen, this isn’t where to start. If
you find him irritating, this isn’t going to convince you
that he isn’t. But if you usually enjoy his movies, you will
probably enjoy this one.

The plot is ridiculous, but it is fun to see a family come from
backwoods Mississipi and find fulfillment in academic/artistic/gay
New York.

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Report on the November 10 meeting

We played:

Schedule

We will continue our regular dropin meetings on November 17 and
24. These will take place at 7:45 at my place.

For the first three weeks in December, the meetings will be
restricted to the performers in the December 17 concert.

On December 17, three of us (me Ishmael and Anne) will be
playing a concert at the Boston Public Library at 2 PM in the Rabb
Lecture Hall. (More
information about the program.) If you’re going anywhere where
people would want to know about this, please take them a flyer.

I haven’t heard any objections to the party being on December
20, so that’s when we’ll have it. I’ll have invitations shortly.
We usually start around 4 in the afternoon.

Other events

If you like our music plus food and drink format, you might
also enjoy the Pub Carol Sing Sunday, December
6.

Program for the December 17 concert

We’re starting to get settled on the program for the concert
we’re playing at the Boston Public Library at 2 PM on December
17, in the Rabb Lecture Hall. There’s not a lot of time for
rehearsing, so we’re having to limit the amount of new stuff we
play, but these are mostly people who haven’t heard us before,
so it won’t matter to them.

There will be three sections, with me playing Diego Ortiz
Ricercada’s in between sections.

First there will be songs about drinking, dancing, and
smoking. Most of these we’ve performed many times before, and
the one that we haven’t is mostly a vocal solo by a very
experienced performer.

Then there will be a group of “religious” music. When you
first start playing Renaissance music, you tend to think that
everything religious was church music and everything secular was
performed in the home, but in fact there were wide swaths of
Europe where the established church discouraged polyphony in the
church, and people liked it, so they played it in the home. There
are a couple of carols that everybody knows, and a Byrd about
Susanna, and a round about Judith and Holofernes.

The last section will be all Thomas Morley. We’re mixing the
Fantasias from the Two-voyce canzonets with the vocals from both
the two and three voice canzonets.

There’s a flyer, which includes the program
which you should give to all your friends. If you’re someone
who could possibly go to a 2 PM concert in Boston’s Back Bay,
you should come.

Fados

I once went to a live Fados concert, because a Portuguese
friend assured me that I would like it. I did enjoy the music,
but it was vocal music, and I understood very little of the
words. This concert was in New Bedford, where a majority of the
residents probably speak more Portuguese than I do, and I’m sure
it was a vast majority in this audience. The rest of the
audience seemed very enthusiastic, so I’m sure the performers
made the right decision to not bother with trying to put the
words across to non-Portuguese speakers, but I would have
enjoyed it more if I’d known what they were singing about.

This
movie is what I was looking for. The performers are making
no concessions to explaining their performances, but there are
subtitles. The movie just moves from one performance to the
next, often beautiful productions with scenery and dance and
fluid costumes.

There are titles on the performances, but it’s not always clear
whether they’re the location, the name of the song, the name of
the group, or the name of a style. But it really doesn’t
matter.

The director, Carlos Saura, has produced other movies like
this. I’ve seen Flamenco,
which I enjoyed but wasn’t as interested in as I was in Fados.
But Tango
might be worth checking out.

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Group brewing

Yesterday’s was another time-delay post; I was in West Roxbury
brewing a imperial oatmeal stout.

My homebrew club has
discovered the joys of using a 60 gallon liquor barrel as a
fermentation vessel, but of course, homebrewers don’t have the
equipment to brew 60 gallons at a time. But the club
has several dozen people with the equipment to brew 5 gallons at
a time. So the organizing problem is how to get at least a dozen
people to brew their 5 gallons to the same recipe at the same
time.

It isn’t anything that would have occurred to me, since I do
all my brewing on my kitchen stove. But the answer they came up
with last year and refined this year was to get people to bring
their equipment to somebody’s back yard and all brew together.
The way this works is that people with better access to their
back yards than I have have usually concluded that it’s faster
and less messy to do the boil on a propane stove in the back
yard. So in theory, everybody brings their stove, their
brewpot, and their mash-tun to the group brewing site. I said
that I could only bring the pot and the mash-tun (in my case a
10-gallon Gott cooler with a plastic false bottom), and they
assured me there would be an extra propane burner for me to
use.

It was actually a brilliant piece of organizing. There were
about a dozen people brewing, and two or three other people
dropped by to be assistants or just hang out. Some people were
able to brew more than 5 gallons, so we ended up with a couple
of fermenters going besides the barrel, which will be used to
top up the barrel, and to provide a control to see what flavors
are being contributed by the wooden barrel.

They had the grain all crushed and measured, so when you were
ready to mash, you just took a bag and added it to the heated
water. The hops were similarly measured out in little bags for
the 60 minute, 10 minute and 1 minute additions.

One of the assistants manned the grill, so there were sausages
and sweet potatoes for lunch, and donuts, cookies, chile, and apples for breakfast and
snacks. Brewing is mostly waiting around between bursts of
activity, so it was nice to have people to talk to in between
the activity. And of course, you get to see everyone else’s
equipment in action. And we had ideal weather — 50’s and sunny.

My major reason for going was that I haven’t brewed since the
hip arthritis flared up, and I thought it would be good to get
back into it with lots of strong young men around to help with the
heavy lifting. I think they weren’t really any more necessary
than they would have been 15 years ago when I was brewing twice
a month or so. But there was an incident that would have lost
more wort if there hadn’t been assistants easily to hand.

Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade

This is another hot topic on the blogs and forums that discuss
such things. See the slashdot
discussion for examples. The reason people use the Ubuntu flavor of Linux is
that it consistently gives you an upgrade every 6 months, so you
don’t have to be way behind the new, improved versions of
programs, but 6 months is usually enough time to get a set of
tested applications together.

I installed my laptop last week, and have not managed to solve
the problems that my fairly trivial usage on that system shows
up, so it will be a while (or maybe never) before I put it on my
desktop.

The most obvious problem was that the screensaver was asking me
for a password whenever I came back to it. I couldn’t find a
screen where I could tell it not to do that.

I also found a couple of times where the machine was hung when
I came back after being gone for a while, so I removed
xscreensaver, and went with gnome-screensaver, which does have a
screen to tell it not to ask for a password, but it ignores it.

The machine also hung in gnome-screensaver, so I told it not to
run. But it’s still asking me for a password.

This is not behavior I can put up with on the desktop, and if
just going away from the computer is going to break things this
badly, I would say the distribution probably got inadequate
testing.

On the other hand, I haven’t yet found any major problems when
I’m actually using the computer. Firefox, rhythmbox, and Adobe
digital editions under Wine all work fine. There’s one little
glitch with the firefox packaging — you expect there to be a
little firefox icon at the top of the screen. There is a firefox
button, but it’s blank. This is the kind of problem you expect to
encounter in a new distribution. Changing your screensaver
options on you with no path to get them back again is not.

Apparently there are people in the world for whom this upgrade
was easier than the one last April, but I’m not one of them.