"I hate cars! Cars should be destroyed!" (Tuesday 19 June 2007)

Well, we had an action-packed weekend...

I'll get the rest of last week out of the way first: nothing much happened until Friday. We had a very tasty meal at Checkers on Davie, and there was the final High Spirits outreach concert on Wednesday, which was mildly fun. There, who said I suck at summaries? And now...

Friday. Off to Granville Island to see the Broadway Chorus perform a revue show called Misplaced, a spoof of Lost in the form of a revue show with a plot connecting the songs. Kind of like a pantomime, but with good music. They even had Sailing - although recast as a chorus number and sung for laughs, thanks to where it appeared in the plot. Plenty of songs from obscure musicals, and from bang-up-to-date musicals too which was more impressive - The Light In The Piazza and Seussical, plus For Good from Wicked. The chorus was basically very good, and certainly very enthusiastic. They don't have much in the way of choreography, which is good, and being an adults-only group there's no sensation of jailbait being thrown onto the front of the stage in skimpy outfits to please the audiences, specifically the two-thirds of the audience who are the parents of the jailbait in question. Not that we know any theatre groups where that used to happen, no sir! Some slightly flaky voices, but nothing dreadful. The biggest problem was the length: 21 songs in the first half, 14 in the second. Only maybe 20% of them were poor enough to be cuttable, but if they'd done that, we wouldn't have been somewhat exhausted in the second act and waiting for the show to end, which never reflects well upon the songs you're hearing.

So I might go and audition for them, as they rehearse on Tuesday nights, which are currently free, and they're a little short of men!

Saturday. We ran around doing things during the day, mostly trying to get our impromptu "recording studio" set up and working so that we could make a CD. The occasion? Ieva's 60th birthday party. We got to the venue for about 5:15pm and had just about enough time to rehearse the ensemble and solo stuff we were performing, and then people started arriving. By the time the party was in full flow, there were well over 100 people - Ieva has a big family and three choirs who all love her! Marvin (Regier, of the choir and singing workshops some weeks back) was Master of Ceremonies, and first we sat through some toasts and roasts, and then there were half a dozen musical tributes. A group from High Spirits sang May You Always, an Andrews Sisters song, and James's group My Lady's Chamber sang three songs including the hacked-about What Shall We Do With The Drunken Ieva? - which was a hoot.

And then on came Noisy Panda with his faithful lop-eared accompanist. I announced that we had been asked to write a song for the occasion, "or at least I hope we were asked, as we've written one anyway." (Looking back on it, we're genuinely not sure, but too late now.) And I sat happily on the edge of the stage to start singing it. Someone reported to me later that Marvin had offered me back the microphone I'd used for my introduction when he realised I was going to sing, but I'm not sure I noticed, or if I did I just pushed it away...

And then I woke up.

I've probably mentioned before how I have this alarming tendency to wake up while performing; I mean by that that I find myself fully understanding that I'm on the stage performing. This is alarming in that until then I've clearly been doing all the right things, because I haven't had to think about it; the song lyrics are stored in my throat, I'm acting the song out by rote and according to plan... it's all good. When I wake up, this is a problem: I may now enjoy it more, being totally aware and in the moment, but I'm also now 100% responsible for everything I do. Nerves! Crisis! Autopilot is much more relaxing.

So having clarified that, let me now tell you that I sang this entire damn song 'in the moment', which made for a very nerve-wracking four minutes as I had only just learned the lyrics, and was still having to think very hard about the shape of a couple of the lines. Plus performance in front of 120 people. Plus, it was an important occasion. I didn't want to screw up (a) our song, (b) in front of Ieva, to whom it was dedicated and by whom it had been inspired, or (c) in front of a crowd of 120 of her family and friends, many of whom had heard 'all about us' from her or by our scarily-spreading reputation.

I was mightily relieved when we got to the end. But I was also mightily pleased, because after passing the last point in the song where I was concerned about the lyrics, I took a moment to look around the room, and I heard and felt that incredible emphasised silence which tells you that right now, as far as your audience is concerned, you are the only thing in the world worth focusing on. And that is a hugely satisfying feeling - I ought also to say humbling, but bah! Ego trip all the way, baby. We finished the song and there was a standing ovation. Hurrah for Gil and Sarah. Very excellent, worthy of the occasion, and general proof that we are Musical Geniuses Wot Write Songs Wot Are Not 'Alf Bad.

And boy, did we do a lot of schmoozing over the course of that party. More on that should anything transpire as a result.

Sunday. Argh! Owing to a slight error of timing, I ended up on at least provincial and possibly national TV, gleefully declaiming a rant (including the title of this post). This came about because Veronica from High Spirits was organising and appearing in a band playing at the Car-Free Day on Commercial Drive, and she'd invited us to come along to listen and generally soak up the ambience. Commercial Drive, at least this section of it between First and Venables, has a very Brightonian vibe, and in a car-free state it was like the North Lanes, albeit with much more street entertainment. We ambled around, listened to Veronica's band Toot-A-Loot, bought some stuff, and went home. But along the way, we were ambushed by a camera crew, who wanted to know how we'd gotten there - SkyTrain - and what we thought of the car-free concept. Gil, never short of a word or ten on the subject of "cars, and the evil that they do", launched into a prizewinning torrent of abuse of cars and drivers, praise for Vancouver's transit infrastructure, approval of London's congestion charge, political conspiracy-theorising about how the rich people get out of paying it, and so forth. Sarah stood faithfully next to me and nodded and chipped in with agreement about Vancouver's farsightedness (rather than, for example, saying, "But I like having a car"). As we departed the scene Sarah heard the interviewer saying something about "that was a perfect..." But we weren't aware of just what a "perfect..." it was until Monday morning when Josh at work informed me that he'd seen me on the news. Argh! Argh!

After a certain amount of searching we found the video online: if you have an FLV player, this is the link to it; failng that, I downloaded it and if I manage to convert it I'll post it up somewhere...

Sarah quizzed me on my panic yesterday evening. "What did you expect might happen if a TV news crew interviewed you on camera?" Well, clearly not this. Canada, consider yourself 'hit' again.

And now the weather. Or to be more truthful, some photos:

James working on our mirrors last weekend, with Gil looking on from a safe distance:


The view down Alberni Street.


A better view, showing the construction happening diagonally across from us. And yes, Podge was feeling very brave, poking his nose out of the window like that.


A picture of extremely happy bathing pigs, taken in the restaurant where we supped on Sunday after the High Spirits concert.


A very happy pig statue:


James and Susan (who are now together)


Wot Holidays?!


This is 'The Qube', an apartment building on West Georgia, the road down from us. Yes, it's being held up by straps. No, this is not safe. Next question.


A rather large water feature outside another building on West Georgia, its scale brought into focus by the presence of a small bunny. (She's actual size but she seems much bigger to me, as They Might Be Giants used to sing.)


Another, much smaller and prettier, water feature a little further down the street.


An odd tree trunk thingy outside a building. You may not be able to see pinecones squirming all around the base like living things. It was creepy.


I bet we've posted this before but it's just brilliant.


While waiting for the delayed Kim on Saturday afternoon. Mr Jaysmith's t-shirt by Monstrance.


Same location twenty seconds later.


At the car-free festival, much activism centred around a proposed new port extension and highway. Apparently 'marmots' will be threatened. (We spent quite some time estimating just what the hell this was before finding a sign saying it was a marmot.) But if they're this size, I foresee them having no trouble whatsoever in fending off construction crews.


Community drumming, led by our favourite star drummer Pepe! He's everywhere!


Birds of New York. (We're in a Blog TARDIS now; this is back to Sarah's trip to the east coast a couple of weeks ago.)


The world's dotiest piano?


Company is setting New York on fire. Lots of Tony awards. Sarah dug it.


Charlton Heston with a bunny. A rather large bunny. Proof that they get everywhere, and are secretly running the country.


And on the subject of 'getting everywhere':


Who was that blue-garbed superstar?


Oops, back to Vancouver. This giant (and nonfunctional) abacus sculpture stands outside the gate to an apartment complex in Chinatown. Wouldn't it be more fun if the access code for the gate had to be physically set on the abacus?


And back to the concept of superstars. An action shot, hopelessly (and hammily) posed while we were recording Love, Dance And Sing. Is there no stopping this panda?




Right, I think I deserve a rest after that. Cheerio, squires and squirrels... more next time. xxxxxx from Gil and Sarah.

"Don't Die" (Tuesday 12 June 2007 )

What's new chez nous? This week's stream of consciousness:

We got two mirrors from Sarah's voice tutor, Sonia. James The God helpfully provided transport - these monster panes were 6' by 4' and 7' by 2'6" - but unfortunately Gil The Mong bounced one of them off the ground while we were carrying them down to the van, with the result that an enormous crescent snapped out of the long side. Fortunately - this is just like a game off I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue - James is an artist in glass, and he took us and the injured mirrors to his workshop at UBC, where he performed several dangerous cutting-and-snapping operations. Now I'm not often impressed by people in their professions. I don't expect you to be impressed by what I do in my job, because it's my job; it's what I spend, and have spent, the bulk of my life doing, and if I were no good at it, I'd be doing something else. And likewise this is your job, and I expect you to do it well even if I know nothing about it. But James? His work is something else. His motto when working with enormous chunks of glass is "Don't die", and ten minutes of helping him carry and operate on these mirrors convinced me of the ghastly ease with which you could kill yourself at a moment's notice in this line of work. This is no namby-pamby artistry with a palette and easel; this is hardcore stuff worthy of an Irving Stone novel, with someone hauling his own granite from the quarry and generally getting extremely physical with his materials, with the consequent risks of them getting physical right back at him. So my respect for him is now at an all-time high for any man I know; all this and he sings too! And, although they no longer possess the measurements given above, we now have two mirrors leaning against walls in our apartment, and they look good.

Even better, because they're leaning against rather than being fixed to the walls, they make us look good. Or better, anyway, as our weight loss continues to spread.

The High Spirits concert happened on Sunday 10th, with a dress rehearsal on the Saturday. Venue: the Unity Church on Oak and 40th. Nice place, nearly 400 seats, and not a bad stab at filling it, although bear in mind this is a choir with 50 members and a reasonably active community of former members, so I expect there's a certain amount of familial arm-twisting in the LMCS style. Sing Sing Sing went with a bang and my scatting was pretty good. Grumble Too Much, the song dissing women in general and whoever we pick on from the soprano and alto sections in particular, was a hoot - James and I launched into an impromptu dance. We are very silly in that song; it's the only way to play it. The full programme ran to eighteen songs, which is a Posse-ish number, and was acceptably diverse. I don't have the list to hand but I'll run it next time. I do appreciate the way Ieva puts together a real potpourri of stuff, with nothing too long or dull. (Although Barter comes close, but fortunately James and I can leave the skirts to sing that.)

The one thing that's always bugged me about amateur shows, and I accept we indulged ourselves in this when we did our farewell-to-Burge rendition of With A Little Help From My Friends in East Preston (1), is when the show ends - except there's a presentation of flowers - and a speech or two - and much love is shown in all directions - and all in front of the audience. As a professional concert-goer this stuff bores me. I'm not exactly enthralled by it while I'm on stage. But I accept that an amateur concert with an indigenous audience has an excuse for it. I just prefer to see something which starts strongly and ends without petering out, and that's what 'showing the love' feels like to me. But I also know from Posse experience that talking to the audience afterwards is, if self-indulgent, very rewarding, and they like it too. As usual I'm two people on this topic and at least one of them is a hypocrite.

What else, I ask myself, seeing as how it's midnight-thirty and we're trying for an early night for the umpteenth time? Panda Swimming continues apace - I still haven't managed a second breath, but I'm working on it. Still immensely proud of that. We wrote a song for Ieva's 60th birthday party, coming up this Saturday. James' ensemble is working on Sarah's The Blackbird Of Derrycairn and loving it. We might get our relocation expenses back from Radical sometime soon. It's been too hot here, and then it rained lots at the weekend. Podge the polar bear has taken to hanging out of the bedroom window - at an altitude of about 180 feet. Tenpence is trying casually to push him all the way out.

And Sarah had her first voiceover audition, although it's for unpaid work and she won't know the outcome until July. But the feedback was very positive and the work is professionally recognised and would be good experience anyway.

Visuals later in the week - now, beddybyes. Much love to all.


1. And after all our efforts, Burge kept coming back! I imagine myself singing Empty Chairs At Empty Tables at his funeral and he'd come busting up out of the coffin to add a harmony line. Never dead!

There Are Pandas In The Sky (4 June 2007)

So I expect everyone is paralysed by the need to know: did I survive without Sarah, while she stayed with Jane & Ed in New York?

In brief, no, or at least I did but only for five days, which was unfortunate, as she was away for seven.

I did get up to some drinking hi-jinks (hi-drinks?) on Friday and Saturday night, which kept me happy - and surprisingly chirpy the morning after - but I crashed and burned in terms of things to actually do on Sunday and Monday.

Tuesday night I went to see Into The Woods with Kim from High Spirits. Kim loves this show and sang a very creditable version of Giants In The Sky at the performance party last month. I've heard the soundtrack once, but nothing really stuck out. It's a Sondheim show: the first half is a bunch of fairy tales working themselves out, and the second half is a kind of examination of what happens when you get what you wish for, plus a mass murder of cast members the like of which I haven't seen outside of And Then There Were None or a teen slash movie. Nothing to complain about there, although I strongly suspect the first half is deliberately long so that the principals who get wasted in Act Two don't feel like they're only being given half a role. So I sat there at the back, watching this, and I thought: this is incredibly dull and only slightly funny, and (although technically I had forgotten the details of the Rapunzel story) this show is just telling me a bunch of fairytales which I already know. No dramatic tension, even in the little story of the baker and his wife trying to steal an important fairytale object from each of the plotlines so as to persuade a witch to lift a curse of infertility on their house. In other words: blah.

Now Act Two is much better. Radically better, and the only problem is, although it needs Act One in order to function dramatically, Act One is so goddamn dull that you have to wonder if this was the only way Sondheim could find to tell the story. Because, had I not been operating on instructions from Sarah to watch and report, I would have left at the interval. Calling it the halfway point would be an extreme stretch of fractions... 1/2 is not equal to 2/3 even for a value of 1/2 as large as this. And it's not like the music improves in Act Two; it's somewhat simplistic throughout, and there's only a couple of actual tunes in the whole show. But, under orders, I stuck around, and was rewarded by the aforementioned random killing spree at the hands (or rather feet) of an irate giantess, and by a couple of good-ish emotional songs, and by at least an attempt to explore an interesting theory of how to live life.

Unfortunately, here's where my several upscale criticisms come in. The point of the show is (sort of) that you should live your life as best you can, grab the amazing moments and cherish them, because your life might be cut short without warning at any moment. Now that's a laudable point, and there are some great stories to be told around it. But it doesn't help that the characters in this one are nominally from fairytales. I found it very difficult to think of them as real people. Telling a symbolic story with symbolic characters isn't as effective as telling a symbolic story with real ones. Wicked, and other such fairytale retellings grounded more thoroughly in a realistic or semi-realistic history, only work for me because of those details and that grounding.

(Magic is always a problem; you need to spend an awful lot of time investigating and defining the rules, or people will say "Well, it's just magic isn't it? Why don't you just magic them back to life or whatever?" And indeed, considering that the story featured numerous people being killed in a very final manner, it didn't help that in the first-half closer, the witch character brings a cow back to life with no obvious side-effects - no "Buffy's mom" issues, or see also the excellent joke "What would Beethoven say if he was alive today? Let me out of this coffin!")

Another problem, and it's somewhat unfair of me to level this accusation at a show written in 1987, but I'm going to do it anyway: if you want to see a show about how death can strike at any moment and you should make the most of your life, well, there's a better one, and I've been in it. After A New Brain, everything else is, well, a bit downhill. I don't just say this because I've been in it, mind you; I just think it's a better show. It's more compact, it has more tunes, it's funnier; it's just generally better. It has real people in it and if anything it creates a modern fairytale, like the Mr Men. I appreciate that Into The Woods came first, and that if I'd seen it in 1987 I might have been as dumbstruck by its genius and its metaphorical content as I was a few years ago by A New Brain. But I didn't, I wasn't, and I ain't; sorry, Stephen.

And still more unfortunately, thinking it through a bit later, I realised that the theme of the show, to be explored in detail in Act Two, is mentioned very casually and then dismissed in a song in Act One, which for me made the lengthy exploration of it a bit moot. "Yes, you said that earlier", etc.

I think it was at best an interesting failure - which is better than a dull failure, but obviously less actual fun to watch than many kinds of success. I should say the cast - most of whom were professionals working for free, in a two-night concert performance in aid of preservation efforts in Stanley Park - were pretty damn good. Which I expect when I go to see a show, but it's nice when it actually happens. And Agony is a very funny male duet (with an equally funny reprise) which would be cool for Burge and I to do sometime. Somehow. So the upshot is, I can't blame the cast for my not rating the show. They did a bang-up job; I just didn't like the material.

And I got to say 'moot', so it's not all bad.

Moot!

Sarah's flight arrived at YVR (Vancouver Airport - at least try to look cosmopolitan will you?) at 1:40am on Wednesday. A dutiful, although somewhat tired, Panda was awaiting her in the arrivals lounge. I stood by the glass and stared at the visible end of the travelator, mentally admonishing each passing traveller for Failing To Be A Bunny, until finally - she was there! WHEEEE! I bounced up and down a lot and grabbed her the moment she came into reach, even though there was a big railing in the way. I missed her awfully.

New York was, in summary, fantastic and beautiful and emotional, and I'm glad she got to go. Sometime soon I'll join her on a trip. (I might try to persuade her to write about it, although I suspect the best you'll get is me taking rough dictation.) Excellently, she found me a couple of James Agate books. James Agate was an English theatre critic whom I discovered thanks to a Radio 4 programme years ago. He was arrogant, opinionated, verbose, and utterly dedicated to quality in theatre, and his diaries and reviews make for fascinating reading. The period and literary references alone take me ages to track down. But I can't get enough of it. We've slowly pieced together a semi-collection of Agate's books - his diaries, Ego, run to nine volumes of which I think I have six, plus some samplers, and I have some of his criticism as well. It's a collection I'm expecting will take years to complete, and that suits me, because everything I have thusfar by him stands up to rereading like nothing else on Earth. Quite remarkable. And Sarah spotted these two collections on a top shelf in a random bookshop where she had a ten-minute time limit. Wotta goil!

And now the Jaysmith Music Update. LA!

You'll remember (at least I think I've said before) that Ieva runs three choirs: High Spirits (which we both belong to), Afternoon Delights (Sarah only), and Simple Gifts (neither of us here). High Spirits performed this season's first Outreach concert - a snazzy term for playing in an old people's home, like Princess Marina House - this Wednesday. We survived it rather than excelling, although most of it didn't sound too bad. I still can't be having with songs in foreign languages, but the audience likes the sound so who can complain? You know what I'm like before, during, and after a performance: buzzing! I did approach one song near the end with a feeling like a student who knows he hasn't revised, but fortunately, as happens oftimes, my throat knew what was expected of it even if my conscious brain was a bit trepidatious.

On Saturday we had an extra, somewhat epic, rehearsal, the high point of which was the addition of drums and bass to some of the songs. Now I and several other lucky members of the choir (including James The God) can hear drums anyway while we're singing, but having real ones is always good. Songs like Sing Sing Sing positively blistered along. Result! So the full concert (on Sunday) should sound legendary. And Panda has to scat! Twice! This actually makes me feel very nervous. I should definitely do what Marvin recommended at the workshop, which had occurred to me as a good plan anyway: learn a couple of excellent-sounding scats, and make it look like I'm improvising them on the spot.

On Sunday, Simple Gifts performed their big church concert for the season. And, to our surprise, Ieva invited Sarah and I to perform as guests! We thought about what to do for a while, and then decided, on about Thursday, that we should write a couple of new songs. To perform on Sunday afternoon. Are we nuts? Well, a bit. I don't know that we really convinced ourselves that this was a workable idea until Friday night, but the upshot was, we came to the concert armed with As Yet Unnamed Song About Travelling, a folky Sarah solo, I Gotta Get Me One Of Those Girls, an enthusiastic Rat Pack blast for me, and All You Have To Say, the wedding song we wrote a few weeks back. We sang with microphones, which worked a treat - I think we're both still a bit nervous with them owing to our much greater experience not using them, but their power is clear to behold, especially the radio mic I had! - and the songs went down a bit of a storm.

And today Sarah wrote the music for some lyrics I wrote a few weeks ago, for a song called Fireflies. At this rate we'll have an entire album in a couple of weeks' time. Family & Posse members will receive copies of this as soon as possible :)

It's been really far too hot here for the past fortnight or so, even with the new bedroom fan we bought before Sarah went away, and which in her absence I promptly forgot we owned, leading to seven nights of sweltering in my stupidity. So we've had the balcony door open all night, and it's just about cool enough to consider going to bed. So, take care, pay your taxes, and in Justine's case, watch out for the world's funniest birthday card, arriving soon. Of course it might just be us who think it's funny... tee hee! Much love to all; Panda zonk now.