Like a drumming spider...

I sense the Blog TARDIS may cartwheel into view next time. My grip on sequential time is a bit blurred. While I can focus on yesterday and today, though:

The evening of Wednesday May 9th: we went down to 16th Street to see Bill Bruford hosting a drumming clinic. Bruford drummed with King Crimson and Yes, took over the drums for Genesis on tour, and has run his own band, Bill Bruford's Earthworks. His technique is remarkable; his drums are flat, he has the snare, hi-hat and bass drum pretty much lined up in front of him with his toms alternating down to each side, and he's completely centred; he looks almost like a spider, moving just his wrists and ankles, rotating his entire upper body at the waist rather than bend anywhere else. Always upright. It looks remarkable. Sarah, never one for anguished musical self-expression in herself or others, admired his zen-like economy of movement. For $8 apiece, a very entertaining two hours. Then we casually sauntered down to the pub to meet the rest of High Spirits who'd been busily rehearsing while we were skiving, and I scandalised Kim with comments about goats.

Thursday May 10th: Sarah's next concert with Afternoon Delights. She felt much happier about this one than last Thursday's, which saw a somewhat fraught evening of bunny repair work to remind her that she was not in fact rubbish at all aspects of music. Then she hung out with Kim a bit, it seems. No doubt much female discussion of my genius was to be heard. Sarah is declining to issue me with full details. Actually she claims they talked about other things a lot of the time but I refuse to believe it.

In the evening... erm... well. Fans of Gil's Strongly-Held Opinions may be aware that I have very little time for old musicals. Because they suck. Whether this is a question of not dating well, or because they were intrinsically bad even then - who cares? It's 2007. They suck. Almost every musical written before, I dunno, call it 1978, is rubbish. Sure, pick out your favourite musical from 1977 or earlier, and tell me how wonderful it is. You're wrong. It's rubbish. Old-school big-production-value Broadway musicals, salt of the earth, yadda yadda yadda. They're all rubbish. The songs are rubbish. The dancing girls are pointless. The spectacle, the jazz hands, the ninety-second songs with hardly anything interesting in the music and with utterly generic lyrics, all these things are just elements of why these shows suck giant dusty Martian rocks.

And here in the Vancouver Public Library to demonstrate the verity of my claim, presenting a retrospective on the careers of lyric-writing partners Betty Comden and Adolph Green, I give you the APPLAUSE! Musicals Society, with seven of their singers showcasing twenty-odd songs from the team's fourteen musicals.

OK, look, they wrote On The Town. I'll give 'em that. Bernstein music, good story (but adapted from a play, I note) and OK songs, and it had Dan Dailey in the movie and that's always going to be alright by me since he looked like Daddy. But that's it. That's all they did that was any good. For the following fifty-something years they somehow made a career out of a perma-downward slope of movies and musicals which just weren't any good. The singers were significantly underrehearsed, and the accompanist was pretty grim, but out of twenty songs from a supposedly successful team I'd expect to hear a better hit ratio than two good, three OK, five listenable and ten awful. The presenter tried to make light of the fact that their shows often flopped (which is not of itself proof that they were talentless hacks) and that shows which featured their book but not their song lyrics often did well (which I'm afraid is stronger evidence). But towards the end it was just shameful. These people were, frankly, losers. They even worked on the movie of Singin' In The Rain and contributed just one song... Moses Supposes. Wonderful. Thank you. Now go get some talent and write something good.

The presentation was nominally part of this society's "Musicals 101" series of related lectures, but it was also a massive attempted plug for Do Re Mi, their forthcoming show with lyrics by, you guessed it, Comden and Green. Now we did appreciate their semi-staged The Mystery Of Edwin Drood a few weeks ago. In fact, did I write about that? Perhaps I should do that in a moment. But look, there's a reason why a lot of stuff almost dies out and is kept alive only through the diligent efforts of a few hardworking volunteers. It's because it's old, irrelevant crap, and only the volunteers like it, and it should be allowed to die out to make room for the new stuff, which is the crap-to-be for the next generation but which right now is what we ought to be listening to. Those who remember the past this intensely, and particularly those who excavate it with such dedication - and half of the singers in APPLAUSE! weren't old enough to have seen a Comden and Green show themselves - well, they're doomed to repeat it, and they'll sit there convinced that this is the way it should be, and that all this modern new-fangled tuneless claptrap is just a fad, probably something to do with homosexuality, and it will pass soon, and then once more we can rejoice in the presence of good old-fashioned red-blooded shows with lots of dancing girls and songs about love, moon, June, spoon, croon. NO! It makes me nauseous. Let the past die out, let the future reign, and for god's sake let no-one ever be forced to sing crap songs from crap 1940s and 1950s musicals ever again. Argh!

Side note: never ask me what I think of Oliver! unless you want your ears damaged at a molecular level.

News of almost complete immateriality: we've found cheap tasty bread. Sarah is picky about bread; I'm more picky about it being brown, and preferably seedy. I don't know what the story is with farm products here. Groceries are surprisingly expensive in general, but bread - 65p for a no-label loaf is the cheapest we've found in regular shops, and you can get bread that costs three pounds a loaf. Three quid! For sixteen slices of bread! Milk is also somewhat more expensive... even comparing it to Cravendale, which was pretty much all we drank for the last few years in England. "2% milk", i.e. semi-skimmed, is easily 50% more expensive than in England. It all points to British farmers being able to keep prices down thanks to subsidies. Although, my understanding was that in America the subsidies are almost worse, or at least that farmers had powerful lobbyists to help them out. Maybe that doesn't work up here. Eh. I don't care enough to research it - even the thought of opening another browser window to Google for "farm subsidies Canada" almost physically revolts me with its implicit and unendurable endorsement of intellectual inquisitiveness - but, well, food is expensive. Tump.

Tonight we tripped off to London Drug to get sleeping tablets for Sarah. Let's hope SleepMD does the job. Nano-diffusers (TM) are on the job, apparently. Will she sleep tonight? The drama continues! Could have been worse, though. The product on the next shelf was called Zim's Crack Cream - new extra creamy formula, it proudly proclaimed. And we have pictures if you don't believe me, once we can be bothered to wire up the phone.

This kinda worked, didn't it? Perhaps I can convince myself not to accidentally abandon you all for another fortnight like last time... goodnight for now, though.