A trip to the symphony

This weekend, Omaha and I took the girls to the Symphony. It was thematically "a celebration of Asian music," but the first piece of the first half was Debussy's Pagode, and the entire second half was Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto #1.

The Pagode was competently performed. The second piece, Tabuh-Tabuhan was a highly modern piece for two pianos-- meant somehow to simulate the Gamelan, although I don't see how-- and the modernity did not translate well. I don't know if their timing was off-- it was one of those pieces with highly demanding precision-- but it came across as a wall of noise rather than a piece of music.

The third piece, Suizen involved the shakuhachi, a Japanese wood flute. It was described by the conductor as "meditative." As modern as it gets-- it was composed last year-- while it was well-performed, I don't know if I would call the creepy soundtrack-informed "murky swamp" and "rampaging beasts" motifs entirely meditative. The motifs were blatantly Hollywood-- John Barry at his most obvious.

The fourth piece was by far the most interesting. Composed in the mid-1980s by L. Subrahamin and performed that night by his son, already a virtuoso violinist, it was lively and powerful. Ambi Subrahamin clearly practices every day on the Indian violin (a violin tuned to Indian scales and with internal drone strings added), and his passion and power were evident when he played. You could see a few of the violinists in the orchestra looking over with a "How does he do that?" look.

But by far the piece of the night was the second half-- Rachmaninoff's Concerto #1 for Piano. The soloist was Nobuyuki Tsujii. Blind from birth, he had to be led to the piano and looked awkward finding his way to the keyboard and the chair.

But when he started playing, for the first time in my life I understood what piano snobs are looking for. He made the piano come alive, he made it *growl* when it had to. There are several call-and-responses with the orchestra that he starts, and when the orchestra responded with less energy than he did his second call would be utterly, perfectly attuned to the strength of the musicians behind him. He performed with such singular excellence that I couldn't really do ought but listen. It was amazing.

When it was over, he insisted on doing a solo encore that was equally powerful. I swear, he must have traded his eyes to get those extra fingers; he made the piano trill like water, shout like a wolf, it was astounding. And I think if they'd let him, he'd have played on and on for the rest of the day.

Sadly, the kids were bored by it. Bored and cranky by the end. But Omaha and I had a good time, and we're determined to subject them to yet more culture in the future. We can't have yogurt be the only culture they're ever exposed to.

I spot a Microsoft Surface in the wild!

 Omaha and I went out for lunch today, and while we were getting our bagels I noticed that the man sitting at the table next to ours had a weird looking tablet, but it was the chicklet keyboard that gave it away.  "Look," I told Omaha, "A Microsoft Surface in the wild."

The guy overheard me and snorted.  "Yeah.  Kinda weird, huh?"

"How good is it?"

He shrugged.  "It's not great.  But I need it for Excel."

And that encapsulates much of Microsoft's marketing since Windows 3.1.

Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford

Red Plenty is probably one of the finest, and saddest, books I have ever read. It's hard to tell what it is. The best description I've heard is that it's science fiction-- only the science is economics, and the fiction is entirely based on real history. Red Plenty is about the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, told in a series of stories-- anecdotes, in many cases-- of the lives of ordinary citizens, apparatchiks, and intelligenzia of the time.

Some of the vignettes feature an ordinary citizen we only see once-- to show us what Spuffords wants us to see, life in the Soviet Union under Stalin, then Kruschev, and finally Brezhnev. The central theme of the book is how close, how desperately close, the Soviet Union was to fulfilling its dream of red plenty, of turning Lenin's massive industrial push into a cornucopia machine that would crank out everything humanity ever needed, and how every opportunity the soviets had was squandered, in the end, by short sightedness, by ideology, by political maneuvering, by sheer human perversity, by bad luck.

Spufford is a talented writer at setting up scenes, at drawing word paintings of places we've never been to and showing us the beauty and decay, the joy and terror. He's good at showing just how human Kruschev was, and how desperately Kruschev wanted to be a good man, and how badly he fared at it. If you want to read a book that makes you cringe, and sigh, and cheer, then Red Plenty is that book.

It starts in 1938, with the invention of Linear Algebra, and how this became the start of what we now call "big data." The soviets started a crash course in it, and in 1959 began cybernizing their command economy, trying desperately to organize networks of networks of industries to produce everything every citizen would ever want or need. It ends in 1970, with Kruschev, retired and desperately depressed, looking back at all the potential wasted.

Every vingette ends with notes about what details are real, what quotes are authentic, and which Spufford crafted for dramatic effect. He's brutally honest with you, and himself, about how he's telescoped or compressed various events to make the drama more real. The EPUB version of the book is better than the print-- the notes are at the end of each chapters, and the truth of each note, dozens per story, are eye-opening. The print edition has the notes at the end of the book.

Every time you read how the SU screwed up-- how the cyberneticists simplified planning in 1960 by valuing every piece of factory equipment, no matter how simple or complex, no matter how hard or how barely used, by its weight-- how the "shadow pricing" system meant to simulate a demand economy without being a market economy was repeatedly overriden by politicians trying to keep the marketplace "familiar" to ordinary Russians-- how the soviets banned "bureaucracy" as they understood Americans did it, and thereby created a system of favors and graft-- how the soviets invented the Lamaze birth technique, then neglected to teach it to expectant mothers but forbade physicians from otherwise helping those women give birth-- how in the 1970s the Soviet Union stagnated because there was no program for tearing down factories, no notion of upgrading from a manfacturing base-- you die a little inside. So much suffering, and yet Spufford convinces you that they meant well. They really thought they were going to create paradise on Earth. They were no more evil than Americans, or Europeans, or anyone else on Earth. They really tried.

The most remarkable thing about Perestroika, at the end of the book, is that Gorbachev was a true believer. He wanted to believe that red plenty could happen; it was Brezhnev and his "managed socialism" that had led to stagnation. The great program of cybernizing the economy, Soviet Union, of making the great chain from farm and mine to consumer and back, could actually really work. But twenty years of slow decay had led the young people to give up. When he started to institute his reforms, popular sentiment revolted. The wall fell. The Soviet Union was over.

These little glimpses into many lives, 18 in all, obviously don't tell the whole story. But they do give concrete examples of why the system failed, and more importantly, why it couldn't recover: there were no alternatives. Exceptional experiments were not allowed. Scientific investigation was "administered" rather than "supported." You can't command what you don't know you want: and nobody knew what they really wanted from computers, or the economy, or industry. And without that freedom to fail, they never had a chance to succeed. No matter how close they were.

If you ever want to know what the Soviets were thinking, Red Plenty will give you a heavy dose of understanding. Worth every second of your time.