Call to Action, and an orange dress 20110803

View 686 Wednesday, August 03, 2011

Call to Action! Well, for those who are fans of my works with Larry Niven.

NPR Top 100 SF&F

Dear Dr. Pournelle:

I did not know if you knew that you and Niven have 2 books on the NPR top 100 SF&F list and they are winnowing down to 10. Time to mobilize the fans?

The link is here: http://www.npr.org/2011/08/02/138894873/vote-for-top-100-science-fiction-fantasy-titles

Rick Cartwright

I wasn’t aware of that, but it’s certainly time to mobilize!

We went to the Hollywood Bowl last night. Concert, Rachmaninoff’s Third, by Yuja Wang. There was also Tchaikovsky’s Fifth.

I am not always in agreement with the LA Times’s Mark Swed, but I am much in synch with his review. It begins

Sporting a stylish new beard and an impressive new title as Los Angeles Philharmonic resident conductor, Lionel Bringuier conducted an unusually incandescent performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony at the Hollywood Bowl Tuesday night. The orchestra played with vibrancy. Bringuier will repeat the Tchaikovsky with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood Sunday afternoon. He’s 24. He’s clearly arrived.
But it was Yuja Wang’s orange dress for which Tuesday night is likely to remembered. The Chinese pianist, who opened the concert with Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, is also 24 and already a star. Her most recent recital CD is called “Transformation.” On the back, she is quoted as saying that her album “reflects the endless transformations in life and music.”

The rest of the review is very much worth reading, and even if you don’t care for music reviews, the picture of Miss Wang in that orange dress is worth looking up. But do read it, even if you don’t normally care for technical reviews of classical music. I particularly liked these paragraphs:

Actually, Hollywood’s idea of Rach 3 was the film “Shine,” which presented the concerto as the mountainous challenge that drove a mentally unstable pianist over the edge. Believe that, and the only explanation for Wang is that she must be some sort of cocky classical music cyborg.

Nothing, for her, looked even vaguely difficult. She was at her best in the most punishing passages. Rhythm is one of her strong suits, so the last movement, in particular, rocked.

I have a vague memory from high school of a movie – sometime in the 1940’s, I think in color – in which there is a female concert pianist, a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Second (which was far more popular in that time than the Third), and some kind of conflict both musical and romantic between the pianist and the conductor. I suspect that this was my first introduction to Rachmaninoff (good classical recordings were much harder to come by in those days), and as I recall I was quite taken with that movie. I would guess the year was 1946. My efforts to find it through Google have failed.  If anyone recalls that picture, please send me a note. Thanks.

IMDB lists “I’ve always loved you” in 1946 that seems to match the movie you described.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038629/

—

Bryan

“For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.”

— Sir Winston Churchill

That is certainly it. The movie greatly influenced my life, in that I think I can trace my interest in classical music to it. I was also in high school and took Miriam, who lived across the street, to see it. It may have been our first date; it was certainly one of the first. In those times it was very difficult to get recordings of classical music. I think there were only 78’s, although perhaps they had invented 33 rpm records. Hi-Fi was expensive and not very available. Concerts in Memphis were rare. WHBQ where my father was manager had a large record library but mostly of country and western. I only saw that film once but I have remembered scene from it ever since. Thanks.

I had a long standing appointment to hike with Paul Schindler, my BYTE editor in the days when BYTE transformed from a printed magazine to on-line, and today Paul and I took Sable up the hill. It’s a bit over two miles in each direction, and a 700 foot climb from Laurel Terrace to the heights above the Tree People at Mulholland and Coldwater. Not all that punishing, but for most of the month of July Roberta has been recovering from a severe sprain that keeps her from going on our morning walks, and despite Sable’s best efforts to talk me into going out daily, I haven’t been doing that much this month, mostly because it has been hot.

This hike has been scheduled for months, and Sable knows that Paul means hikes, so the weather was no excuse. It’s well over 90 out there, and there’s no water on the trail. I took a Baggie of ice cubes, and Sable got nearly all of them. A fur coat isn’t precisely the proper dress for this weather. Sable was fine, though. She loves that trail: there are fresh gopher holes ever few feet, and she keeps hoping to find a really stupid gopher. As long as she’s hunting I don’t worry about her reactions to the heat, and she left a trail of terrified gophers from bottom to top to back down again. She came home and curled up for a nap.

She’s still flat, and will be for the rest of the day. The crutch in the background is Roberta’s.

Paul reminds me that I don’t very often solicit subscriptions. I expect he’s right. If you haven’t subscribed, this would be a great time to do it. If you do subscribe, have you renewed recently? This would be a good time to do that… Of course I’m a bit behind on recording subscriptions, but don’t let that stop you. Subscribe or renew now!

Details

Rod Montgomery points out that my proposal to raise the eligibility age for Social Security by “one month per month” is indistinguishable from raising it to 68 in one fell swoop. Also, there is already a provision to raise eligibility to age 67 at two months per year. Which proves conclusively that one ought not pontificate over details without more work, and getting overly detailed in a discussion of generalities is never a good idea. Apologies.

My point was that Social Security does need reforms, and the easiest reform is to slowly raise the eligibility for primary Social Security (Old Age Insurance). There is also a definite need for reform on entitlement to Social Security for those who never paid into it in the first place. This has never been properly debated. Temporary payments to widows and orphans, for instance, is quite different from payments for disabilities, particularly work-related disabilities for those actively part of and paying into Social Security, which is itself different from disability payments to those who don’t meet those qualifications. This gets technical, and the law is quite complex, as you can find out here.

Of course one reason we’re in so much trouble is that there isn’t enough attention paid to details. The general notion of the Americans with Disabilities Act may have been a great idea, but the details mandate some really puzzling activities, such as fining companies for firing people who are drunk on the job, and requiring companies to hire a sign language interpreter to sit in meetings to allow a stone deaf programmer to participate. I dare say neither of those cases was intended in the original act. More: as Larry Niven observes, only wealthy societies can afford to do things like bash down the curbs to make wheelchair ramps, most of which may never be used by any disabled person, but are convenient for nannies pushing strollers. It may be a great idea, but you need to be rich before you think of spending that kind of money.

When economic times get tight, there ought to be ways to suspend laws that mandate heavy burdens on the economy. We don’t need to be borrowing money in order to protect the jobs of common drunks who happen to be alcoholics, and whose companies protect themselves by transferring the work to India where drunks can be fired instantantly.

We can all come up with examples.

The problem is that legislators deal with general principles: they are then implemented by people who often pay less attention to details than I did in my offhand statement about one month per month – the different being that my slip of the brain doesn’t result in millions to billions of dollars spent. I can hope that some of my proposals will be adopted, but I certainly wouldn’t ask for mindless adherence to offhand ramblings. Alas, our legislative process sometimes results in precisely that.