Dispatches from Cyberspace

My late grandfather was a coin collector in a small way. His usual technique for collecting was to sort through the coins in his pocket, looking for issues that he didn't already have. The oldest coin in his collection was an 1878 silver dollar, which I doubt he found in his pocket, but I don't know how much business with coin dealers he may have done. Probably not a lot. He kept his main US collection in Whitman coin folders, and none of them were complete.

He also had a miscellaneous box of foreign coins, which he'd picked up on world travels in his later years, and some varied currency notes of both US and foreign issue, as well as a number of US proof sets, mostly encased in plastic shells.

I showed some interest in this coin collection, and so when he was downsizing his possessions in the 1980s, he gave it to me. What I liked about collecting coins was the serried arrays they came in: otherwise identical coins with heads of presidents on them, marching down, distinguished only by year of issue and mint mark - mustn't forget the mint marks, of such vital interest to collectors. This is why I never got interested in collecting stamps. Though much prettier than coins, they didn't come in serried arrays.

For some time after receiving the collection, I kept it up by sorting through my own pocket change, but gradually I gave that up, mostly because the new clad coinage was less interesting than the old silver issues. My last spurt of interest came with the state quarter series of 1999-2008. I had great fun looking for those in my change - to my mind, buying one from a dealer would have been cheating - and eventually I got them all, and bought a folder to keep them in. But I discovered that collecting them had been more fun than having them. I rarely looked at the complete set, and if I was interested in the designs I can see them more clearly displayed on websites.

So now that I in turn am downsizing my possessions, I decided that selling the coins would be a good plan, a decision facilitated by my recent discovery that my once-keen eyesight had deteriorated in detail to the point where I couldn't read the mint marks and sometimes even the dates on the smaller coins. I once had a device that would magnify a coin but it never worked very well. If I were still interested in keeping up coin collecting I could look for a better one, but I'm not.

Just last week, then, an ad turned up in my mail that one of those antiques roadshow outfits would be setting up shop in a nearby hotel conference room for a few days to buy coins and jewelry. Perfect. I went down on the first morning to find it nearly empty: three buyers and no more than two other customers at a time (one of whom looked disconcertingly like the late Dave Rike). They carried the heavy box - which I'd put in the car in installments - in from the car and sorted through the contents. The buyer was especially pleased to find a couple of late 19C silver dollars with Carson City mint marks, plus an item my grandfather had been particularly proud of: an uncut sheet of six $5 bills of National Currency bank notes, series 1929. The buyer said this form of uncut sheets was rare. He paid a pretty penny for that and the lot of miscellaneous stuff, even taking my collection of aluminum tokens from the Shell gasoline presidents and states coin games from the 1970s. And so all that has found a home.

I don't often get to Philharmonia Baroque concerts, even when the traveling program does get down the Peninsula, which it doesn't always do. However, this one, which landed at the Concrete Tent in Palo Alto, I couldn't resist. It consisted of works by and inspired by C.P.E. Bach, and as C.P.E. (often called that to distinguish him from his colossal father J.S.) is one of my favorite 18C composers, I figured I had to go.

The C.P.E. work was No. 3 in F of his four Hamburg symphonies (Wq. 183), here being conducted by Philharmonia Baroque's former music director. It is, as the program notes point out, a quirky symphony both structurally and harmonically, but to my mind it's the tense and dark quality of the outer movements, a style called "Sturm und Drang" when other composers like Haydn took it up, though I suspect that C.P.E. invented it, that most appeals to me.

And this performance emphasized that. Led from the violin by guest conductor Shunske Sato (that is, though standing in front, he played along with the first violins for the whole concert, and let the orchestra pick up his directions from that), it was heavy, intense, even vicious, despite the small size of the orchestra.

Much the same quality was brought to the rarely-heard Mozart work, the entr'acts from his incidental music to the play Thamos, King of Egypt, and a bit even to Beethoven's Symphony No. 1, a work as quirky in form and harmony as C.P.E.'s symphony. The work that didn't quite fit this format was Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in D Minor. This is the other Mendelssohn violin concerto, not the famous one, the one he wrote when he was only 12. It's partly like a Baroque concerto, evoking the generation before C.P.E., and partly like the Mendelssohn to come.

Anyway, a good concert.

I swear this was a coincidence. I was browsing through the memoirs of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, both of which I own and have read before, when I remembered that I'd never gotten around to reading the memoirs of their successor, David Cameron, though that was published seven years ago. So, having another errand in that direction, I went to the library and checked it out.

What's coincidence is that that same day I looked up all the major California gubernatorial candidates on Wikipedia to learn their background. Where I learned that Steve Hilton, one of the Republican candidates, though by now a U.S. citizen with something of a mid-Atlantic accent, started out as a Brit who was a political aide to David Cameron.

So what does his former boss have to say about Steve Hilton? Brace yourself:

Steve Hilton's ideas continued to be one part brilliant to several parts bonkers. However, his relationship with people in government wasn't working. He was no longer excused as a free spirit when he was late for meetings - he was seen as someone who had disregard for others. His antagonistic style was no longer helping him advance his cause - it had started to hurt it. And the relationship between the two of us became strained, too. Steve is a real ideologue in a way I'm not. He thought I was losing my radical zeal and falling for the trappings of prime minister. But I knew that to be a successful radical you have to play the game. And he wasn't interested in playing the game, just tipping it over and throwing the pieces all over the floor.

Well, it happened. Michael Tilson Thomas died yesterday. He'd been very ill and wound down his conducting career entirely a year ago, so it's not a surprise though it remains a tragedy. The San Francisco Symphony has announced that its performance of Beethoven's Ninth in June - led by the now-unavoidable James Gaffigan - will be dedicated to MTT's memory. That's appropriate, as the last time I heard him conduct was in Beethoven's Ninth in October 2023. He was scheduled to conduct another concert on my series later that season, but had to bow out due to frailty and illness. But his Ninth was well-appreciated. What I wrote at the time was:

Michael Tilson Thomas, music director laureate, returned to lead the SFS in the Big One, Beethoven's Ninth. What he did for SFS while stationed here was incalculable, and the love and affection that poured forth from audience and performers alike on his arrival onstage - and even more when the piece was over - was tremendous. The more so with his increasing health problems since his retirement, including a cancer operation two years ago that had him off work for months. If we never see him again, we want him to know that the last was the best. This was as fine and assured a Ninth as we've heard, particularly cherishable in a smooth and layered slow movement.

MTT served as music director of the SFS for 25 years (1995-2020), the longest service they've ever had, and he was probably the greatest director they've ever had, politely eclipsing Pierre Monteux, his predecessor in both distinctions. His arrival was announced with some hoopla, which turned out to be deserved. Taking up the orchestra rebuilding of his two immediate predecessors, he turned SFS into one of the world's great orchestras, and it's not fallen far since his departure, despite the crises of the last couple years. Beethoven's Ninth, which I think he led here several times, was one of his specialties; so was Stravinsky; so was American music when he could dub it as "maverick" whatever that means; so was Mahler, which I appreciated from him a lot less than from others. So it goes. I did appreciate him in a lot of other music, remembering especially some exquisitely burnished Sibelius, the Third in September 2016 and the Sixth in June 2018.

Matt Mahan: I'm the mayor of the third largest city in California!

Xavier Becerra: I've sued Donald Trump and won!

Katie Porter: I've sat down and talked with suffering Californians!

Tom Steyer: Let me repeat the question, slowly. Also, I'm the Change Agent!

Steve Hilton (or was it Chad Bianco?): All of California's problems are the result of Democrats running it for 16 years.

Chad Bianco (or was it Steve Hilton?): Yeah. Also, regulations are bad!