... so I have to admit a FAIL just on principle, even before we get to the details, which are also, if I remember correctly, pretty much fail-shaped. Memo to Kate, or it would be more efficient to send it to myself: doing a month of anything is hard, isn't it?
So the 22nd was... er... last Wednesday. So, Thursday, Kim came round and we nebbished. Friday, James and I went drinking, and boy was that fun, drinking in a relatively uninhibited way for most of the evening. Although apparently I'm out of practice as I sweated out the night in the second bedroom and didn't get up till past midday. Saturday, we went round to James' and toddled out to see the South African entry in the Celebration Of Light, a big annual fireworks-synchronized-to-music display/competition they hold in English Bay. It was raining heavily - Bear! we did ask nicely! (Bear has since apologized, grudgingly) - so we got somewhat drenched, but it was worth it for the middle section, where, with "Who Wants To Live Forever" playing loud, they saturated the sky with endless golden streams, making it look like Heaven was crying. It was overwhelmingly beautiful and I was in floods. Music-synchronized fireworks displays so often suck, and not just when the sync goes wrong - I don't really believe there's a whole lot of latitude in the grammar of fireworks, and mostly it just comes across as "Yes, something went bang broadly at the same time as the downbeat... so what?" But this was wonderfully effective. And once that was over, we went back inside and watched "Get Smart".
Sunday: Sarah back to "Rent" rehearsals... I spent most of the day sitting in the corridor outside the Arts Clubs rehearsal hall, trying not to listen to the sitzprobe (the first singthrough with the full band, but no acting) and then the first half of a full run. I'd brought my laptop, so I plugged in the earphones and watched "Eraserhead" and then "Transporter 2".
Now it must be said, after all these years and with so much implicit buildup, "Eraserhead" seemed ugly and horrible but not exactly unparseable - it's a man's fears about fathering a child, made explicit. I expect it shocked the crap out of people in the 70s (or in their 70s), and perhaps if I'd seen it at university when probably everyone else my age saw it, I'd have given more of a toss about it. But now, approaching 40, and rather aiming to have children myself... well, it was just a movie, and one I don't intend to dwell on a great deal.
"Transporter 2", on the other hand, was completely silly fun. With the exception of, well, some people being shot in the head and a chick being impaled on a load of spikes (but tastefully), this is actually the kind of harmless action movie which I have a lot of time for. The stunts are impressive, the fights are (largely) nonlethal, Jason Statham's character is the new Man With No Name in terms of cool (but don't take me too literally: his name's Frank) and his friend, an older French cop, is a little comic gem. I enjoyed "Transporter" much more than I was expecting to, and this sequel was well worth the 80 minutes it ran to. And I have the third one to watch when I get a chance.
(I have no idea how the sitzprobe and rehearsal sounded, by the way - that's what earphones are for. However, people who had won a competition to see the rehearsal effused about it no end, which is nice, especially if it means more ticket sales and concomitantly more kerching for Sarah ;-)
And she survived it, which is good. She also survived today's four-hour runthrough, although in somewhat less than perfect health. But, she's now healed enough that we can go back into the hot tub, which is holding things at bay. This plus uber-painkillers and I think she's gonna make it...
I was suddenly considering whether I deserve to buy a Xenon (sorry - an X-Box 360 as most people know it) and Sarah approved of the decision, so I may well come back one night with one. But, I know from plenty of past experience that I have a tendency to Buy Shiny New Stuff and then Rarely Or Never Use It, so I'm going to test myself by playing through my pile of Wii games first, and possibly borrowing a couple from the Radical library, and seeing if I still enjoy console games in general. If I do, then I'll get one at the start of Sarah's "Rent" run, and that should keep me busy for August at least.
Mmmm, a bit matter-of-fact tonight... a sure sign that I don't have anything to say and know how behind I was. P'raps tomorrow will be more inspiring. It wasn't really a very good day in most respects: my blood pressure was challenged by various computer crashes and work-related incidents. Really the only good news is that Sarah is smiling more with every passing day. That makes me so happy.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, days 20-22 (FAIL)
Normal service resumes after an action-packed Sarah Health Escapade. The pain got much worse on Monday evening and we ended up calling 911-James and heading off to St Paul's. Excellently, they took pretty good care of her, kept her in overnight, and concluded that the mesh they installed for her hernia repair was probably reacting badly - fibrosis? - but it would get better itself and meanwhile here are some "potent" painkillers. Speaking from a point two hours or so after she took the first of them (it took a while to collect them from the pharmacy), they appear to be (a) indeed quite potent, and (b) working quite well.
So that accounts for where I was on Monday night, and I was kinda worried so I didn't go to sleep till 6am on Tuesday morning - and Sarah called at 7:45am to arrange us picking her up and bringing her home. 105 minutes' sleep is not really a lot, for future reference, but I survived the day at work and then I survived the opening session of Strongbow Chorus. A whole bunch of us were pretty much dead on arrival - Elena freshly back from Paraguay, James suffering the same sleep deprivation as me, and so forth - but I think fun was had. This season we're doing the ensemble version of "Tonight", which Sarah has arranged for more ensemble-ness (the four-part female vocals she's added behind the big male solo are absolutely gorgeous, and yes, I do realize I'm talking about Sarah having the skills, and the balls for that matter, to not just attempt to but successfully improve upon Leonard Bernstein), and "The Swingle Song", which confounded us a little but then improved dramatically (I may be mostly talking about the tenor section there). Tara did sterling work at the keyboard while Sarah sat relatively still. Next week neither of them is here so I have to lead the rehearsal - by using Finale as a sequencer and the big keyboard as the sampler, with a lot of muting and solo'ing tracks to help people out. Which should be fun - I hope you all look forward to that, Strongbowers! But it was great fun, even though I was moderately punchdrunk.
Exercisewise, well, bit of a disaster until today, when I managed to walk back from work. Only takes me about 35 minutes though, and I had no music, having exhausted Zen during the day (too sleepy to recharge it recently).
But what have I been listening to lately, you ask... well now:
(And, in what might be considered a special kind of bonus content: there's no sign of U-God making any sort of guest appearance on this album. Winner!)
Well, the answer to all those questions is "Yes" - except the "how and why" one, to which the answer is, well, frankly, that's how I learned to filter out music which isn't really very good. I got into the habit in my 20s of listening to tons of music while doing something else, and relying on good music to intrude on my concentration and distract me so much that I have to listen to it simply because it's too good to miss. After all, why should I waste time listening to garbage? (I don't mean the band Garbage: their stuff usually does attract my attention.) If you want my attention, if you really think you're that good, Mr Musician, then prove it. Don't bore me while I'm listening to you: impress me while I'm not.
And that's why I now draw your attention to Radiohead's "OK Computer", because ten years later, this album is still able to focus my attention on it while it's playing. It's riveting. It's awesome. It was called the best album of the 90s, and there's a reason, man. I listened to it again today, and it made me listen to it.
Here are some of the disturbing videos it spawned. Warning: these push buttons. Be advised.
And this one's "Karma Police" - can't find an embeddable version, soz. But I should point out, this album is not all about creepy videos to songs of alienation. It's hard to describe, but this was one of the first albums to articulate the modern unspeakable, the unutterable that philosphers talk of. What is wrong with your life? What is wrong with our lives? How can that be voiced?
Radiohead tried. They did a magnificent job. This is why I listen to so much music. I'm always trying to find something else magnificent.
So that accounts for where I was on Monday night, and I was kinda worried so I didn't go to sleep till 6am on Tuesday morning - and Sarah called at 7:45am to arrange us picking her up and bringing her home. 105 minutes' sleep is not really a lot, for future reference, but I survived the day at work and then I survived the opening session of Strongbow Chorus. A whole bunch of us were pretty much dead on arrival - Elena freshly back from Paraguay, James suffering the same sleep deprivation as me, and so forth - but I think fun was had. This season we're doing the ensemble version of "Tonight", which Sarah has arranged for more ensemble-ness (the four-part female vocals she's added behind the big male solo are absolutely gorgeous, and yes, I do realize I'm talking about Sarah having the skills, and the balls for that matter, to not just attempt to but successfully improve upon Leonard Bernstein), and "The Swingle Song", which confounded us a little but then improved dramatically (I may be mostly talking about the tenor section there). Tara did sterling work at the keyboard while Sarah sat relatively still. Next week neither of them is here so I have to lead the rehearsal - by using Finale as a sequencer and the big keyboard as the sampler, with a lot of muting and solo'ing tracks to help people out. Which should be fun - I hope you all look forward to that, Strongbowers! But it was great fun, even though I was moderately punchdrunk.
Exercisewise, well, bit of a disaster until today, when I managed to walk back from work. Only takes me about 35 minutes though, and I had no music, having exhausted Zen during the day (too sleepy to recharge it recently).
But what have I been listening to lately, you ask... well now:
- Jean Grae, "Jeanius"... okay, she's amusing and she can rap reasonably well, but her material gets a bit monotonous after a while, and I'd rather listen to Sarah Jones:
- Juno Reactor, "Bible Of Dreams" and "Labyrinth"... so they have an awesome band name, and that's why, after a deeply unpromising start with "Beyond The Infinite" a while back, I tried them again today to help get me through some lengthy spots of coding. And, hey, their brand of averagely-inventive techno was somewhat more serviceable this time round. It's not like they do songs that will ever crack the charts (of any relatively tasteful record-buying public) but it's mood music and it does the job. They could do with more tracks like "Conga Fury", mind you. And they could also, really, just do with being better. Like this, for example:
- Jupu Group, "Ahmoo"... I didn't know what this was, and a day after listening to it, I don't remember what it is. I would take this as "not a recommendation". I think it was New Age keyboard stuff, if that either helps or deeply shocks you.
- Method Man, "Tical 2000 - Judgement Day"... ahh, one of the last great Wu-Tang solo albums. A winner in every way, frankly. The title track doesn't show up until the end but it has a fantastic beat and spacey keyboard decorations with a cross-rhythmic chorus. Before that point you've heard over 20 proper songs (with a couple of surprisingly amusing skits). A thoroughly worthwhile album, great value for money, and, er, yes, don't buy anything by the Wu-Tang Clan that's dated after this point, would be my advice. Think of this as "a great way for them to go out". And don't worry about the turgid visuals in the video, just give it a listen:
(And, in what might be considered a special kind of bonus content: there's no sign of U-God making any sort of guest appearance on this album. Winner!)
- Missy Elliott, "The Cookbook"... now here's the problem with most women rappers, exemplified to perfection: they're different from men, but the only thing they rap about is that they're different from men. It's dull as ditchwater. Missy was a whole lot better when she was trying to be funny and not self-important. Her last four albums have all sounded like this: monotonous cascades of songs indistinguishable from one another, demonstrating how old-school she is, how true hip-hop is dying, oh, and how she wants to "ride a nigga", and all that crap. A lot of that. Rinse and repeat. Even the beats are getting old. Missy. Stop. Now. Please.
- Moby, "Wait For Me"... I listened to this today and, well, it just kinda drifted past my ears in a general way. I'll withhold comment. It was pretty at the start and end, but that's all I remember.
Well, the answer to all those questions is "Yes" - except the "how and why" one, to which the answer is, well, frankly, that's how I learned to filter out music which isn't really very good. I got into the habit in my 20s of listening to tons of music while doing something else, and relying on good music to intrude on my concentration and distract me so much that I have to listen to it simply because it's too good to miss. After all, why should I waste time listening to garbage? (I don't mean the band Garbage: their stuff usually does attract my attention.) If you want my attention, if you really think you're that good, Mr Musician, then prove it. Don't bore me while I'm listening to you: impress me while I'm not.
And that's why I now draw your attention to Radiohead's "OK Computer", because ten years later, this album is still able to focus my attention on it while it's playing. It's riveting. It's awesome. It was called the best album of the 90s, and there's a reason, man. I listened to it again today, and it made me listen to it.
Here are some of the disturbing videos it spawned. Warning: these push buttons. Be advised.
And this one's "Karma Police" - can't find an embeddable version, soz. But I should point out, this album is not all about creepy videos to songs of alienation. It's hard to describe, but this was one of the first albums to articulate the modern unspeakable, the unutterable that philosphers talk of. What is wrong with your life? What is wrong with our lives? How can that be voiced?
Radiohead tried. They did a magnificent job. This is why I listen to so much music. I'm always trying to find something else magnificent.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day 19 (WIN)
I liked yesterday's walk so I did it again this evening, taking a different route through the south side of Stanley Park and finding some rapidly-narrowing paths which instantly put me in mind of "Doctor Who and the Seeds Of Doom". Suitably scared, I kept up a brisk pace and got to Stadium station just as my album-for-the-night ran out, which tells me I walked for, eh, let's call it just under 90 minutes, which if my Sun Walk time was anything to go by means I covered maybe 8.5k. I'm enjoying this.
Unfortunately tonight's album - in fact today's music, since I listened to an album at home this afternoon - was pretty poor. This "Complete Adventures Of The Style Council" pack I've got has been woefully tagged, and having listened to CD2, then CD1, tonight I found myself listening to CD5... and woe was I, for CD5 is the one with a round dozen 12" mixes. Now the Style Council appear to have done a whole lot of songs which only just filled out three minutes, so listening to them stretched out in late 80s style to six or seven minutes was.... somewhat excruciating. I couldn't honestly tell you anything about any of them, even just an hour later, except that the first one was called "Promised Land", and had about thirty words of lyrics all told. Woeful stuff, honestly. The things I do for the sake of fairness. I suppose the pacey drum machines kept my walking speed up, but ugh... Paul Weller is not Prince, nor should he have tried it on for size...
So the other album I listened to today was, and I'm not making this up, U-God's "Dopium". Yes, there exists in the world a mong so spectacularly mongly that he thinks "Dopium" is such a cool portmanteau word that he must title not just a song but his entire album accordingly. To give the full-spectrum analysis of this album I must take you back about fifteen years (but trust me, it won't take us fifteen years to get back to here - although it might feel like that long if you don't like how I write).
FX: TARDIS noises, and here we are back in 1994. Yr Host is living in St Albans, age 24, and getting well into music thanks to the local libraries. At this time I was getting and listening to 10-12 albums a week from libraries, and dramatically expanding my musical horizons. I was also reading three music magazines a month: Q, Vox, and Select. UK music magazines were, frankly, awesome; they pissed all over Rolling Stone in terms of quantity, and if they didn't have Rolling Stone's extensive (and, now that I've read it, really boring) political commentary attempting to engage "ver yoof" with the world around them, well, so what? We grew up watching Ben Elton on "Friday Night Live" - we already knew about politics.
So one month I pick up, I think, Select, and there's a big article about the new rap sensation coming across from New York, namely the Wu-Tang Clan. And I was hooked. This was a group of nine, count 'em, nine distinct, differentiated, high-quality rappers, who formed like Voltron into an invincible super-rap outfit and then split off to emit their solo albums. At the time the Wu-Tang catalogue comprised the collective's "Enter The Wu-Tang", Method Man's "Tical", and GZA's "Liquid Swords", with a bunch of followups soon after, such as Raekwon's "Only Built 4 Cuban Linx", ODB's "Back To The 36 Chambers", RZA's "Bobby Digital"... and I'm not even getting into the "Wu-affiliates". But trust me, just reading the article was like an electric wire to the brain. I bought those first three albums the next day, and "Liquid Swords" in particular has stayed with me; the Wu-Tang Clan made extensive use of samurai movie samples, moving on to mobster movies and Hong Kong actioners, and their production was this fantastically gritty lo-fi thing which now underlies UK grime such as Dizzee Rascal. I've had a bunch of musical revelations in my life, but this was a major one, and it was thanks to a magazine. It didn't at all hurt that not long afterwards Select started a two-page-spread feature analyzing a song's lyrics every month, and it was noticeable that the song they picked from "Liquid Swords" ("Cold World") was dense with allusion, NYC-specific facts, and references to black culture, whereas the crappy white limp-rock songs they picked in subsequent months were full of comments like "La, I just thought it sounded cool, right?" from the songwriter. These albums were packed with lyrics, and with anger and comedy and sorrow and energy.
And, of course, as the years rolled by, the Wu-Tang Clan became less relevant. Their second collective album has some stunning tracks and a few fillers; their third was maybe two-thirds good; their fourth started to lose the plot; their fifth, I can't honestly remember a single track from it.
And then there's the decline in the quality of the solo albums. GZA, the best lyricist of the bunch, has made six albums in total, including one which predates the Clan - the lyrics are fine, the beats are this dreadful boppy late-80s junk which is just embarrassing to hear now - but his latest effort, "Pro Tools", is a bit of a mixed bag, and includes a couple of grave missteps, such as a diss track about 50 Cent which I'm afraid (and I'm not even a 'Fiddy' fan) sounds like your dad complaining about kids today, and a live bonus track which demonstrates why people shouldn't go to rap concerts. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
The rest of the Clan haven't really fared any better. Ghostface has put out about eight albums and the last six have all sounded the same. You could make the same accusation about many rappers, sure, and you could also note that many rappers already sound like they're repeating themselves after just two albums - or just on the second half of their first one, in some cases. But he's got fabulous breath control and a real imagination... he just doesn't seem to get the beats, not since his excellent second album, "Supreme Clientele" (see, even the title is good). As for Raekwon, the fast talker and slang king who brought the Wu into the world of the mobster... I can't even tell what he's talking about these days. It's like glossolalia meets Tourette's.
But... and here we come back to the point... the weakest link in the Wu-Tang Clan was always, not the unpredictable and frankly often crap Ol' Dirty Bastard, but the completely predictable and always crap U-God. ODB was generally out of material, but my god, did he sound like nothing else on Earth when he was at the mic. There's a track he did with GZA which fires up the normally relaxed and restrained GZA into such a frenzy that they pass the lyric between each other and sometimes you can't tell who's talking. Fabulous stuff.
U-God: not so much of the fabulous. Basically, he just sucks. He really does. He was always the most jaw-droppingly dull of the Clan when he 'dropped' (note cool authentic slang there) a verse on a Clan track, but his was the last solo album I picked up while still in completist mode. Why did I stop? Because his first solo album was crap. It was called "Golden Arms" (see, even the title is crap) and even before it had finished he was out of ideas, his rhymes woeful and childish, his imagery nonexistent. Disaster!
So, today, while sitting at home hacking around the Finale file for "Tonight" in preparation for Strongbow Chorus on Tuesday, I listened to U-God's most recent album, "Dopium", having picked it up in the same sweep which netted me "Pro Tools". And, dear god, he was out of ideas by track two. Let me repeat that: track two. How the hell do you manage that? And no, it wasn't just the track sequencing: all the subsequent tracks had nothing to recommend them. At all. Argh.
As a capstone to this humiliation, the album ends with three remixes of the tracks which I suppose were the least laughable potential choices for release as singles. Remixes! Of a Wu-Tang song! Techno remixes! Dance remixes! Oh god, U-God, you are such a loser. I pity the record executive who had to okay this album. Presumably he knew he wasn't going to get anything better out of the man.
What all of this has been in aid of is: when you find something you find you love, you never consider that you will, most likely, outlive it. We think of love as being eternal, and perhaps I'm weak and flighty and not a True Believer. But more likely, the Wu-Tang Clan has just lost it, their youthful energy diluted by success, family, and not having to work for it. They can do what they want, and they have many options available to them, and making awesome, no, crucial records is no longer a priority. That's fine. It's just a pity, because for a while they were electrifying.
It reminds me of when Franz Ferdinand's third album came out earlier this year. I'd been really looking forward to it, and I'm afraid I thought it was tripe. And yet, look at all the reviews. Look at how many of them are basically positive. I'm happy to say, actually, that since I last looked at this page shortly after the album came out, there have been a bunch more low-end reviews expressing the view that Franz Ferdinand misfired badly with this one. But the one I like is that last one, and I'm pretty sure it'll stay the last one no matter what else, because only an independent magazine would dare to give a big commercial release a rating as low as 13%. And I quote: "Truly, the four dapper Scotsmen that constitute this group should be ashamed of their tuneless, thoughtless, meaningless new offering, which distorts the proud legacy of a band that once mattered."
"A band that once mattered." I know exactly what they mean.
Unfortunately tonight's album - in fact today's music, since I listened to an album at home this afternoon - was pretty poor. This "Complete Adventures Of The Style Council" pack I've got has been woefully tagged, and having listened to CD2, then CD1, tonight I found myself listening to CD5... and woe was I, for CD5 is the one with a round dozen 12" mixes. Now the Style Council appear to have done a whole lot of songs which only just filled out three minutes, so listening to them stretched out in late 80s style to six or seven minutes was.... somewhat excruciating. I couldn't honestly tell you anything about any of them, even just an hour later, except that the first one was called "Promised Land", and had about thirty words of lyrics all told. Woeful stuff, honestly. The things I do for the sake of fairness. I suppose the pacey drum machines kept my walking speed up, but ugh... Paul Weller is not Prince, nor should he have tried it on for size...
So the other album I listened to today was, and I'm not making this up, U-God's "Dopium". Yes, there exists in the world a mong so spectacularly mongly that he thinks "Dopium" is such a cool portmanteau word that he must title not just a song but his entire album accordingly. To give the full-spectrum analysis of this album I must take you back about fifteen years (but trust me, it won't take us fifteen years to get back to here - although it might feel like that long if you don't like how I write).
FX: TARDIS noises, and here we are back in 1994. Yr Host is living in St Albans, age 24, and getting well into music thanks to the local libraries. At this time I was getting and listening to 10-12 albums a week from libraries, and dramatically expanding my musical horizons. I was also reading three music magazines a month: Q, Vox, and Select. UK music magazines were, frankly, awesome; they pissed all over Rolling Stone in terms of quantity, and if they didn't have Rolling Stone's extensive (and, now that I've read it, really boring) political commentary attempting to engage "ver yoof" with the world around them, well, so what? We grew up watching Ben Elton on "Friday Night Live" - we already knew about politics.
So one month I pick up, I think, Select, and there's a big article about the new rap sensation coming across from New York, namely the Wu-Tang Clan. And I was hooked. This was a group of nine, count 'em, nine distinct, differentiated, high-quality rappers, who formed like Voltron into an invincible super-rap outfit and then split off to emit their solo albums. At the time the Wu-Tang catalogue comprised the collective's "Enter The Wu-Tang", Method Man's "Tical", and GZA's "Liquid Swords", with a bunch of followups soon after, such as Raekwon's "Only Built 4 Cuban Linx", ODB's "Back To The 36 Chambers", RZA's "Bobby Digital"... and I'm not even getting into the "Wu-affiliates". But trust me, just reading the article was like an electric wire to the brain. I bought those first three albums the next day, and "Liquid Swords" in particular has stayed with me; the Wu-Tang Clan made extensive use of samurai movie samples, moving on to mobster movies and Hong Kong actioners, and their production was this fantastically gritty lo-fi thing which now underlies UK grime such as Dizzee Rascal. I've had a bunch of musical revelations in my life, but this was a major one, and it was thanks to a magazine. It didn't at all hurt that not long afterwards Select started a two-page-spread feature analyzing a song's lyrics every month, and it was noticeable that the song they picked from "Liquid Swords" ("Cold World") was dense with allusion, NYC-specific facts, and references to black culture, whereas the crappy white limp-rock songs they picked in subsequent months were full of comments like "La, I just thought it sounded cool, right?" from the songwriter. These albums were packed with lyrics, and with anger and comedy and sorrow and energy.
And, of course, as the years rolled by, the Wu-Tang Clan became less relevant. Their second collective album has some stunning tracks and a few fillers; their third was maybe two-thirds good; their fourth started to lose the plot; their fifth, I can't honestly remember a single track from it.
And then there's the decline in the quality of the solo albums. GZA, the best lyricist of the bunch, has made six albums in total, including one which predates the Clan - the lyrics are fine, the beats are this dreadful boppy late-80s junk which is just embarrassing to hear now - but his latest effort, "Pro Tools", is a bit of a mixed bag, and includes a couple of grave missteps, such as a diss track about 50 Cent which I'm afraid (and I'm not even a 'Fiddy' fan) sounds like your dad complaining about kids today, and a live bonus track which demonstrates why people shouldn't go to rap concerts. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
The rest of the Clan haven't really fared any better. Ghostface has put out about eight albums and the last six have all sounded the same. You could make the same accusation about many rappers, sure, and you could also note that many rappers already sound like they're repeating themselves after just two albums - or just on the second half of their first one, in some cases. But he's got fabulous breath control and a real imagination... he just doesn't seem to get the beats, not since his excellent second album, "Supreme Clientele" (see, even the title is good). As for Raekwon, the fast talker and slang king who brought the Wu into the world of the mobster... I can't even tell what he's talking about these days. It's like glossolalia meets Tourette's.
But... and here we come back to the point... the weakest link in the Wu-Tang Clan was always, not the unpredictable and frankly often crap Ol' Dirty Bastard, but the completely predictable and always crap U-God. ODB was generally out of material, but my god, did he sound like nothing else on Earth when he was at the mic. There's a track he did with GZA which fires up the normally relaxed and restrained GZA into such a frenzy that they pass the lyric between each other and sometimes you can't tell who's talking. Fabulous stuff.
U-God: not so much of the fabulous. Basically, he just sucks. He really does. He was always the most jaw-droppingly dull of the Clan when he 'dropped' (note cool authentic slang there) a verse on a Clan track, but his was the last solo album I picked up while still in completist mode. Why did I stop? Because his first solo album was crap. It was called "Golden Arms" (see, even the title is crap) and even before it had finished he was out of ideas, his rhymes woeful and childish, his imagery nonexistent. Disaster!
So, today, while sitting at home hacking around the Finale file for "Tonight" in preparation for Strongbow Chorus on Tuesday, I listened to U-God's most recent album, "Dopium", having picked it up in the same sweep which netted me "Pro Tools". And, dear god, he was out of ideas by track two. Let me repeat that: track two. How the hell do you manage that? And no, it wasn't just the track sequencing: all the subsequent tracks had nothing to recommend them. At all. Argh.
As a capstone to this humiliation, the album ends with three remixes of the tracks which I suppose were the least laughable potential choices for release as singles. Remixes! Of a Wu-Tang song! Techno remixes! Dance remixes! Oh god, U-God, you are such a loser. I pity the record executive who had to okay this album. Presumably he knew he wasn't going to get anything better out of the man.
What all of this has been in aid of is: when you find something you find you love, you never consider that you will, most likely, outlive it. We think of love as being eternal, and perhaps I'm weak and flighty and not a True Believer. But more likely, the Wu-Tang Clan has just lost it, their youthful energy diluted by success, family, and not having to work for it. They can do what they want, and they have many options available to them, and making awesome, no, crucial records is no longer a priority. That's fine. It's just a pity, because for a while they were electrifying.
It reminds me of when Franz Ferdinand's third album came out earlier this year. I'd been really looking forward to it, and I'm afraid I thought it was tripe. And yet, look at all the reviews. Look at how many of them are basically positive. I'm happy to say, actually, that since I last looked at this page shortly after the album came out, there have been a bunch more low-end reviews expressing the view that Franz Ferdinand misfired badly with this one. But the one I like is that last one, and I'm pretty sure it'll stay the last one no matter what else, because only an independent magazine would dare to give a big commercial release a rating as low as 13%. And I quote: "Truly, the four dapper Scotsmen that constitute this group should be ashamed of their tuneless, thoughtless, meaningless new offering, which distorts the proud legacy of a band that once mattered."
"A band that once mattered." I know exactly what they mean.
31 Days Of Panda, day 18 (WIN)
Daytime nothing much. Went for what I think was about a 7k walk, following the Sun Run route as far as the Burrard bridge but then going on around False Creek as far as Stadium. In the course of which I listened to one Asian Dub Foundation album and then some selected Scritti Politti tracks. The ADF album was a distinct downward slope of quality after a roaring beginning:
... but never mind, that track made up for it.
In the evening, a very civilized dinner at Kalypso with Kate & Theo, followed by some nattering back at the flat. All good, but nunya business ;-)
Sarah is fixing up 1+1 piano tracks and I'm fixing their tempos so that we have backing tracks ready for singers. We also did some hacking at the music for Strongbow Chorus (starting this Tuesday, erk). I entered the lyrics for "The Swingle Song", which is... well, 99% of the lyrics are either "doo" or "bah", and while those words may appear meaningless at a glance, let me assure you, by the time you've typed them several hundred times apiece, they enter whole new realms of meaninglessness so ultimate as to conceal the secret of life. It nearly drove me mad typing that lot. As for proofreading it - impossible. We'll all just sing what it says and cross our fingers. Meanwhile Sarah is arranging the theme for "The Muppet Show" and fixing up the ensemble "Tonight" (apparently just finishing her work on it ready for me to handle lyrics and dynamics, comes the word from the bunny in the big chair). This is looking like a fun Strongbow summer.
Almost bedtime - kthxbye.
... but never mind, that track made up for it.
In the evening, a very civilized dinner at Kalypso with Kate & Theo, followed by some nattering back at the flat. All good, but nunya business ;-)
Sarah is fixing up 1+1 piano tracks and I'm fixing their tempos so that we have backing tracks ready for singers. We also did some hacking at the music for Strongbow Chorus (starting this Tuesday, erk). I entered the lyrics for "The Swingle Song", which is... well, 99% of the lyrics are either "doo" or "bah", and while those words may appear meaningless at a glance, let me assure you, by the time you've typed them several hundred times apiece, they enter whole new realms of meaninglessness so ultimate as to conceal the secret of life. It nearly drove me mad typing that lot. As for proofreading it - impossible. We'll all just sing what it says and cross our fingers. Meanwhile Sarah is arranging the theme for "The Muppet Show" and fixing up the ensemble "Tonight" (apparently just finishing her work on it ready for me to handle lyrics and dynamics, comes the word from the bunny in the big chair). This is looking like a fun Strongbow summer.
Almost bedtime - kthxbye.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, days 16-17 (WIN?)
Thursday: daytime was nothing much. In the evening James came round and we had food from Hon's, recorded his vocals for "Choices", and played Top Trumps.
Friday: signed up with a new GP, at long last... Dr James Lai at the Broadway Medical Clinic. He seems nice enough. It took longer than I'd thought and it was the Radical Summer BBQ today, so I stayed at home to make sure she was OK, and she had a nice long nap all afternoon.
During which time I got progressively more panicky about the 1+1 script and how long it all is. I've been trying to be fair to all the characters to let them speak their minds, but it turns out they don't half witter. I timed all the dialog and the thing ran to over two and a half hours without even all the songs written yet. Argh! So when she got up, Sarah thoroughly edited the script and I went for a long walk (retracing the Sun Run route, in fact... it was nice). Now it looks like the show will run to two-and-a-quarter hours at most, which is much more like it. I write too much, then Sarah edits it: the unbeatable combo ;-)
We were due to go to the Rent Patio Party at the Rosedale but we decided Sarah wasn't up to that much transport and general hubbub and excitement, so hopefully everyone there had fun. She returns to Rent rehearsals on Sunday, subject to being well enough, and I'll be escorting her to make sure. In preparation for that, she takes today easy - we'll see how much exertion it is to take in dinner at Kalypso round the corner.
I'm generously awarding myself a win for doing a 10k walk yesterday, but I'd better keep that up. Now it's 2:40 and I have no particular plan for the next four hours. Perhaps it's time for another walk after all...
Friday: signed up with a new GP, at long last... Dr James Lai at the Broadway Medical Clinic. He seems nice enough. It took longer than I'd thought and it was the Radical Summer BBQ today, so I stayed at home to make sure she was OK, and she had a nice long nap all afternoon.
During which time I got progressively more panicky about the 1+1 script and how long it all is. I've been trying to be fair to all the characters to let them speak their minds, but it turns out they don't half witter. I timed all the dialog and the thing ran to over two and a half hours without even all the songs written yet. Argh! So when she got up, Sarah thoroughly edited the script and I went for a long walk (retracing the Sun Run route, in fact... it was nice). Now it looks like the show will run to two-and-a-quarter hours at most, which is much more like it. I write too much, then Sarah edits it: the unbeatable combo ;-)
We were due to go to the Rent Patio Party at the Rosedale but we decided Sarah wasn't up to that much transport and general hubbub and excitement, so hopefully everyone there had fun. She returns to Rent rehearsals on Sunday, subject to being well enough, and I'll be escorting her to make sure. In preparation for that, she takes today easy - we'll see how much exertion it is to take in dinner at Kalypso round the corner.
I'm generously awarding myself a win for doing a 10k walk yesterday, but I'd better keep that up. Now it's 2:40 and I have no particular plan for the next four hours. Perhaps it's time for another walk after all...
Thursday, July 16, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day 15 (HMMM)
I'm still a little short on sleep, but hopefully that will be fixed tonight as we're about to have supper and then perhaps be in bed before 1am...
Today in fitness: walked back from work.
Today in food: errr, okay I think. I'm holding up reasonably well in terms of snacks for the month: I had a cookie today, and I nommed six squares of Dairy Milk while Sarah was in hospital, but otherwise, pure.
Today in work: pretty good.
Today in Sarah's health: well, she's now lurking around the apartment in what we hope is post-surgery kind. We'll have to wait a few days to see if things generally improve, but then for the last two months waiting for a few days has always led to things generally worsening, so I imagine we'll know by Saturday or Sunday whether or not this has worked.
Today in music: a whole bunch of stuff which I'm too tired to go into in details: Blur "Think Tank", Mike Oldfield "Amarok" and "Islands", Manic Street Preachers "Send Away The Tigers", Juno Reactor "Beyond The Infinite".
Good initial responses to the announcement of this summer's Strongbow Chorus. Chirpy panda. Chirrup chirrup.
And we spent some of this evening working on One Plus One: Sarah has sorted out the guide piano for the finale, and I recorded guide vocals for two songs. Small steps for us all.
Today in fitness: walked back from work.
Today in food: errr, okay I think. I'm holding up reasonably well in terms of snacks for the month: I had a cookie today, and I nommed six squares of Dairy Milk while Sarah was in hospital, but otherwise, pure.
Today in work: pretty good.
Today in Sarah's health: well, she's now lurking around the apartment in what we hope is post-surgery kind. We'll have to wait a few days to see if things generally improve, but then for the last two months waiting for a few days has always led to things generally worsening, so I imagine we'll know by Saturday or Sunday whether or not this has worked.
Today in music: a whole bunch of stuff which I'm too tired to go into in details: Blur "Think Tank", Mike Oldfield "Amarok" and "Islands", Manic Street Preachers "Send Away The Tigers", Juno Reactor "Beyond The Infinite".
Good initial responses to the announcement of this summer's Strongbow Chorus. Chirpy panda. Chirrup chirrup.
And we spent some of this evening working on One Plus One: Sarah has sorted out the guide piano for the finale, and I recorded guide vocals for two songs. Small steps for us all.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day eleven (WIN)
Fast, as late: trekked to however you spell Tsawwassawwassawen (advice on how to stop spelling this place's name appreciated), sang for Mark & Bryn's wedding, trekked back, went to the gym while Sarah napped, ate sensibly(ish) at Hons, spent the evening with Sarah doing 1+1 stuff, knocked one song and one epic song/scene off the to-do list, nebbished for a while, went to bed about sixty seconds from now.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day ten (MODERATE WIN)
Oh boy, did I get a lot of sleep! Between zonking out on the couch yesterday evening and then relocating to bed not long after midnight, I got over twelve hours. Then I got up early-ish and walked into work. Result: extremely wide-awake Panda all day, and wow, do I feel better when I'm wide-awake.
Then Sarah and Tara (who had been shopping in Long & McQuade - Sarah spent her Broadway Chorus gift voucher and came home with about nine new books including "13" and "The Wild Party") picked me up and we went to The Main for food, then onwards to a rehearsal for tomorrow's "Skunkworks Singers" gig at Mark & Bryn's wedding, then back home, where we enjoyed a nice hot tub.
Tricky to come to a final score for the day, though: definite plus points for the exercise and the happy mood, but I got tumpy again because the tossers in the apartment below smoked some exceptionally stinky weed tonight in the ten minutes we were in the showers. Oh well. I'm trying not to be so hard on myself, so it's a bit of a win.
Today's music:
1) Radiohead, "The Bends". A compact yet elegant album with some gorgeous songs: the most obvious being "Just" (isn't this song crying out for a choral arrangement?) and "Street Spirit (Fade Out)" (sorry, apparently EMI aren't into allowing embeds).
2) Sablo Tolo, "Journeys Into Pure Egyptian Percussion". A lot of drumming, really. It passed the time.
3) Snow Patrol, "A Hundred Million Stars". At least one person has compared us to Snow Patrol, although I can't remember who. This was a lot more tolerable than I'd expected (but then I would say that now). Kind of like an acceptably more pretentious Kaiser Chefs.
4) and 5) The Offspring, "Americana" and "Conspiracy Of One". Well of course The Offspring are rightly legendary for "Pretty Fly For A White Guy", but I have to admire their songwriting style: they think of an idea, and then they write exactly what that idea suggests in a pretty direct way for three minutes, and then they're done. In fact it's possible they own stopwatches which don't count up as far as three minutes. I like that. You couldn't accuse this band of being boring. Repetitive, sometimes, but not boring. Sadly for them, I'm not going to link one of their videos, because listening to two of their albums in one session, while satisfying, made me think about a bunch of similar, earlier bands, and in particular I found myself wishing I still had my collection of Husker Du, who play even faster.
Sarah health report: adequate, considering.
Panda health report: good, as (generally) always.
... oooh, is it suppertime? Bye now.
Then Sarah and Tara (who had been shopping in Long & McQuade - Sarah spent her Broadway Chorus gift voucher and came home with about nine new books including "13" and "The Wild Party") picked me up and we went to The Main for food, then onwards to a rehearsal for tomorrow's "Skunkworks Singers" gig at Mark & Bryn's wedding, then back home, where we enjoyed a nice hot tub.
Tricky to come to a final score for the day, though: definite plus points for the exercise and the happy mood, but I got tumpy again because the tossers in the apartment below smoked some exceptionally stinky weed tonight in the ten minutes we were in the showers. Oh well. I'm trying not to be so hard on myself, so it's a bit of a win.
Today's music:
1) Radiohead, "The Bends". A compact yet elegant album with some gorgeous songs: the most obvious being "Just" (isn't this song crying out for a choral arrangement?) and "Street Spirit (Fade Out)" (sorry, apparently EMI aren't into allowing embeds).
2) Sablo Tolo, "Journeys Into Pure Egyptian Percussion". A lot of drumming, really. It passed the time.
3) Snow Patrol, "A Hundred Million Stars". At least one person has compared us to Snow Patrol, although I can't remember who. This was a lot more tolerable than I'd expected (but then I would say that now). Kind of like an acceptably more pretentious Kaiser Chefs.
4) and 5) The Offspring, "Americana" and "Conspiracy Of One". Well of course The Offspring are rightly legendary for "Pretty Fly For A White Guy", but I have to admire their songwriting style: they think of an idea, and then they write exactly what that idea suggests in a pretty direct way for three minutes, and then they're done. In fact it's possible they own stopwatches which don't count up as far as three minutes. I like that. You couldn't accuse this band of being boring. Repetitive, sometimes, but not boring. Sadly for them, I'm not going to link one of their videos, because listening to two of their albums in one session, while satisfying, made me think about a bunch of similar, earlier bands, and in particular I found myself wishing I still had my collection of Husker Du, who play even faster.
Sarah health report: adequate, considering.
Panda health report: good, as (generally) always.
... oooh, is it suppertime? Bye now.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day nine (FAIL)
Sarah had ultrasounds at 7:45am. They hurt a lot and didn't appear to detect anything. Within hours we were back at St Pauls, in Emergency this time. Busy day, it seems. We got back too late for me to go back to work, and in any case I was so tired I passed out on the couch pretty shortly afterwards. So now we're both awake but what a complete write-off of a day. Twines have left; apartment seems very empty. Panda Abort, Retry, Fail. Time for tomorrow I think.
31 Days Of Panda, day eight (SO-SO)
I was still moderately sleepy this morning. (Not as moderate as a moderately moderate thing, but still pretty moderate, moderately speaking.) So I took the Skytrain in and walked back. GM Place had something going on - it's always interesting trying to figure out what might be happening, based on the size and shape of the crowds outside. Today it was, frankly, a bit saturated with cougars. Disturbing, but explained by it being "American Idols Live".
We went to Kalypso for the first time in months. George is still there, still serving us extra pita bread and bringing a plateful of desserts once we're full with our main meals. The food there is still delicious, it's just a little too oily compared to The Main. (Also: no Strongbow.) But we had some spare, so tomorrow I dine, or possibly breakfast, on Twiney's unused ribs and pasta. Or she does, either is good.
No more Twines after tomorrow - they fly out in the afternoon. Sarah apparently spent most of today preparing backing tracks and recording Twiney at the microphone. I think there may be some camcorder footage of her singing "Titanic" coming up soon on Youtube - I'll link as necessary.
Today's music was a modern lot:
1) Asian Dub Foundation, "R.A.F.I." - an amazing thing, an ADF album which is occasionally slow and tired-sounding. The reason being, it's the original version of "Rafi's Revenge", which was their breakthrough album in the UK. Most of the tracks were rerecorded or remixed, with the electricity turned up to a million volts, and boy does it make a difference. On the whole I wouldn't recommend this album.
2) Cage, Hiller, Johnston, Salzman, "Cage, Hiller, Johnston, Salzman". This isn't so much an album as a collection of stuff: the full details of it are here. I'm a bit of a fan of the idea of avant-garde music, although I always reserve the right to declare something pretentious claptrap. This, being four tracks from two LPs published in 1970 (somewhat obvious from the artistic ideas on display, to be honest), is one of those cases... the Cage/Hiller compositions are alright, but the Salzman is like listening to that Velvet Underground track with lots of people talking over the guitars, or "Einstein On The Beach", only crap. The Johnston, which was a string quartet, was okay.
3) The Avant Garde Project is a great source of random stuff. Here's something else I got from it: Iancu Dumitrescu's "Medium II" and "Cogito". Dumitrescu, apparently, writes what's known as spectral music, whose fundamental point is to be an interesting sound rather than anything else. Spectralists evidently use frequency analyzers and other such tools to examine their own music and control its timbre. Dumitrescu's pieces here are nothing more than experiments in how interesting you can make a cello sound just in terms of its sound, rather than by playing a tune on it: the fact that he mostly kept my interest for 20-odd minutes each time is notable. I'm not saying you'll like it... in fact I suspect I'm actively recommending that you don't listen to it, as you'll just hate it and hold me responsible. But if you'd like to listen to something you almost certainly haven't heard before, try this one.
4) As opposed to Death Cab For Cutie, "Something About Airplanes", which bored me to tears. Even taking into account its first-album-ness, this was boring: if you're going to be an indie rock band you need to be a lot better than strictly average. In fact, your first album really shouldn't be boring: it's all the songs you've written in your life up to that point, and it should be brimming with originality and verve; it's the second album which falls apart, written on the road while frantically touring under your record label's amused supervision. That I can tolerate; this, not so much. And with such a good band name, too. Oh well.
Now I depart in hope and not in sorrow. Goodnight, my loves, goodnight: Sarah's ultrasounds tomorrow.
We went to Kalypso for the first time in months. George is still there, still serving us extra pita bread and bringing a plateful of desserts once we're full with our main meals. The food there is still delicious, it's just a little too oily compared to The Main. (Also: no Strongbow.) But we had some spare, so tomorrow I dine, or possibly breakfast, on Twiney's unused ribs and pasta. Or she does, either is good.
No more Twines after tomorrow - they fly out in the afternoon. Sarah apparently spent most of today preparing backing tracks and recording Twiney at the microphone. I think there may be some camcorder footage of her singing "Titanic" coming up soon on Youtube - I'll link as necessary.
Today's music was a modern lot:
1) Asian Dub Foundation, "R.A.F.I." - an amazing thing, an ADF album which is occasionally slow and tired-sounding. The reason being, it's the original version of "Rafi's Revenge", which was their breakthrough album in the UK. Most of the tracks were rerecorded or remixed, with the electricity turned up to a million volts, and boy does it make a difference. On the whole I wouldn't recommend this album.
2) Cage, Hiller, Johnston, Salzman, "Cage, Hiller, Johnston, Salzman". This isn't so much an album as a collection of stuff: the full details of it are here. I'm a bit of a fan of the idea of avant-garde music, although I always reserve the right to declare something pretentious claptrap. This, being four tracks from two LPs published in 1970 (somewhat obvious from the artistic ideas on display, to be honest), is one of those cases... the Cage/Hiller compositions are alright, but the Salzman is like listening to that Velvet Underground track with lots of people talking over the guitars, or "Einstein On The Beach", only crap. The Johnston, which was a string quartet, was okay.
3) The Avant Garde Project is a great source of random stuff. Here's something else I got from it: Iancu Dumitrescu's "Medium II" and "Cogito". Dumitrescu, apparently, writes what's known as spectral music, whose fundamental point is to be an interesting sound rather than anything else. Spectralists evidently use frequency analyzers and other such tools to examine their own music and control its timbre. Dumitrescu's pieces here are nothing more than experiments in how interesting you can make a cello sound just in terms of its sound, rather than by playing a tune on it: the fact that he mostly kept my interest for 20-odd minutes each time is notable. I'm not saying you'll like it... in fact I suspect I'm actively recommending that you don't listen to it, as you'll just hate it and hold me responsible. But if you'd like to listen to something you almost certainly haven't heard before, try this one.
4) As opposed to Death Cab For Cutie, "Something About Airplanes", which bored me to tears. Even taking into account its first-album-ness, this was boring: if you're going to be an indie rock band you need to be a lot better than strictly average. In fact, your first album really shouldn't be boring: it's all the songs you've written in your life up to that point, and it should be brimming with originality and verve; it's the second album which falls apart, written on the road while frantically touring under your record label's amused supervision. That I can tolerate; this, not so much. And with such a good band name, too. Oh well.
Now I depart in hope and not in sorrow. Goodnight, my loves, goodnight: Sarah's ultrasounds tomorrow.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day seven (WIN against considerable odds)
So Sarah had to go to Emergency at 3am. As usual, immense chocolate-flavoured kudos must go to James, who rolled out of bed at a moment's notice and Falconed us up the hill. And, damn, Monday night / Tuesday morning is the go-to shift at St Paul's if you want good service and drugs delivered promptly. They separated us for 15 minutes or so, but when I got in to see her, she was already being IV'ed, with the painkillers waiting to go straight in. They gave her plenty enough to kill the pain (which doesn't always happen - one time the English bitch nurse put a second dose of morphine into the IV and then took it out before it had even reached her system) and a very nice doctor prescribed her something else which she can take at home. So it's all good. They didn't even hurt her hand taking the IV out. Except for the minor detail that there was lots of pain up until 3am, and we didn't get back home and to sleep until 6:30, it was as excellent as a night at Emergency can get.
So Panda staggered onto the Skytrain and got to work for just about 10am on three hours' sleep, and was relatively nonfunctional for the next couple of hours. I woke up some in the afternoon, and walked home in the mild rain which I'm informed by Bear has been scheduled because he's arranged so much sunshine in recent weeks that he now has an excess of rainclouds which need draining somewhere. It's cooling, which is handy.
Sarah and Copious Twineage had been clothes-shopping this afternoon as a fun day out, of which Sarah has experienced Very Few in the last two months, and she came back with a ton of new clothes, many of which look very nice indeed. Then we went to the hot tub, and I'm now trying to stay awake on the couch with the aid of tea provided by Twiney. The Twines are trying to figure out how to pack two entire closets' worth of clothes into two suitcases. Fail-in-the-making ;-)
Today's music, sleepy as I was:
1) grinConvention, "... a demonstration": I think we picked this CD up at one of those MusicBC schmoozing evenings last year. They're a Canadian band who do a kind of intricate pop thing: one of those cases where you'd end up listing about two dozen influences but it would be embarrassing and unfair because they're not (yet) really as good as any of them. The songs tend to sound jaggedly half-finished, and the lyrics are a mixture of Another-Female-Fronted-Band eh-ness (actually, an unplugged Sleeper is not a wholly unfair comparison) and the occasional sparkler: "It's not my fault the Beatles died in the wrong order", the singer complains. Rather than crush them in a comparison with anyone you've heard of, I'd probably liken them to bands like The Judybats... I don't foresee them getting huge or really mattering to music history, but it was a nice harmless change.
2) Guns'n'Roses, "Chinese Democracy". (What? It was next on the random album shuffle.) I'm not at all a G'n'R fan, but the tracks I heard (back in the late 80s and when they did "You Could Be Mine" for the T2 soundtrack) were reasonable enough for what they were. We all used to have great fun singing along to "Welcome To The Jungle" in our student digs, and seeing how much vibrato we could put into impersonating Axl Rose's cover of "Knockin' On Heaven's Door-or-worrrr". So, eh, let's give this a listen. So yeah, it's alright. Sean Gibson pointed out on Friday night that really it's just another G'n'R album that happens to be about twenty years late, which gives it novelty value but also twenty years of lateness to overcome. But I reckon it sounds pretty good, and advantageously, it doesn't appear to be grotesquely sexist or anything like that. And you can't deny Axl Rose can sing higher than you can, for most values of "you", which is usually quite thrilling to listen to. Comparing them to yesterday's experience with The Strokes, I find infinitely more energy and interest from the band in making a song self-destruct from self-perceived awesomeness. Which, y'know, isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it was a reasonable way to pass an hour.
You know what? Let's have some of that T2 stuff:
... which of course just makes me want to watch T2 again as soon as possible, because even when interspersed with that iffy Terminator-enabled performance video (boys, you are not Duran Duran) the movie footage in there still looks totally magnificent.
3) Oops. I could've sworn I listened to something else. P'raps not. Oh well.
They're trying to make me go to bed as some kind of anti-tiredness trick, but I am defiant, and I have tea. More on this exciting battle of wits tomorrow.
Oh, and I remembered on the walk home tonight that we had recorded the four of us singing "The Choices We Make" at the party on Saturday. So I listened to that. Twice. And it was awesome. Moohahahahaha.
So Panda staggered onto the Skytrain and got to work for just about 10am on three hours' sleep, and was relatively nonfunctional for the next couple of hours. I woke up some in the afternoon, and walked home in the mild rain which I'm informed by Bear has been scheduled because he's arranged so much sunshine in recent weeks that he now has an excess of rainclouds which need draining somewhere. It's cooling, which is handy.
Sarah and Copious Twineage had been clothes-shopping this afternoon as a fun day out, of which Sarah has experienced Very Few in the last two months, and she came back with a ton of new clothes, many of which look very nice indeed. Then we went to the hot tub, and I'm now trying to stay awake on the couch with the aid of tea provided by Twiney. The Twines are trying to figure out how to pack two entire closets' worth of clothes into two suitcases. Fail-in-the-making ;-)
Today's music, sleepy as I was:
1) grinConvention, "... a demonstration": I think we picked this CD up at one of those MusicBC schmoozing evenings last year. They're a Canadian band who do a kind of intricate pop thing: one of those cases where you'd end up listing about two dozen influences but it would be embarrassing and unfair because they're not (yet) really as good as any of them. The songs tend to sound jaggedly half-finished, and the lyrics are a mixture of Another-Female-Fronted-Band eh-ness (actually, an unplugged Sleeper is not a wholly unfair comparison) and the occasional sparkler: "It's not my fault the Beatles died in the wrong order", the singer complains. Rather than crush them in a comparison with anyone you've heard of, I'd probably liken them to bands like The Judybats... I don't foresee them getting huge or really mattering to music history, but it was a nice harmless change.
2) Guns'n'Roses, "Chinese Democracy". (What? It was next on the random album shuffle.) I'm not at all a G'n'R fan, but the tracks I heard (back in the late 80s and when they did "You Could Be Mine" for the T2 soundtrack) were reasonable enough for what they were. We all used to have great fun singing along to "Welcome To The Jungle" in our student digs, and seeing how much vibrato we could put into impersonating Axl Rose's cover of "Knockin' On Heaven's Door-or-worrrr". So, eh, let's give this a listen. So yeah, it's alright. Sean Gibson pointed out on Friday night that really it's just another G'n'R album that happens to be about twenty years late, which gives it novelty value but also twenty years of lateness to overcome. But I reckon it sounds pretty good, and advantageously, it doesn't appear to be grotesquely sexist or anything like that. And you can't deny Axl Rose can sing higher than you can, for most values of "you", which is usually quite thrilling to listen to. Comparing them to yesterday's experience with The Strokes, I find infinitely more energy and interest from the band in making a song self-destruct from self-perceived awesomeness. Which, y'know, isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it was a reasonable way to pass an hour.
You know what? Let's have some of that T2 stuff:
... which of course just makes me want to watch T2 again as soon as possible, because even when interspersed with that iffy Terminator-enabled performance video (boys, you are not Duran Duran) the movie footage in there still looks totally magnificent.
3) Oops. I could've sworn I listened to something else. P'raps not. Oh well.
They're trying to make me go to bed as some kind of anti-tiredness trick, but I am defiant, and I have tea. More on this exciting battle of wits tomorrow.
Oh, and I remembered on the walk home tonight that we had recorded the four of us singing "The Choices We Make" at the party on Saturday. So I listened to that. Twice. And it was awesome. Moohahahahaha.
Monday, July 6, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day six (WIN!)
It's still too hot.
Sarah needed me to drop our keyboard stand back to the hotel where the Rent crew rehearses - we'd borrowed it back for the Bowen Island gig but in the end didn't take the keyboard - so I walked into work, nearly half of the way with this ungainly metal contraption in one hand. I also walked back this evening. It's nearly 40 minutes each way, so I'm feeling quite virtuous and am awarding myself a Win for today, even before considering my sterling dietary choices - fruit, lettuce leaves, turkey slices, no bread, etc, plus the bizarre but curiously edible dish at Hons tonight - sauteed chicken, peppers, and peanuts in spicy sauce. All told it's a bit of a shame that work itself was a bit crap, but whatever.
Today's music was an uneventful selection. I finished listening to D-12 "D-12 World" which I had gotten halfway through in the gym on Saturday. Damn, that's got some fast tracks on it. Jog or crosstrain to those, it'll do you good. Eminem's knack for an extremely catchy and offensively funny chorus doesn't desert him - in fact you might wonder why his faster, catchier stuff isn't on his own albums, as he does it so well - and the rest of the group are... well... they're mostly there, except in a few places where they're mildly worth listening to. I'm not saying half of this slightly fat album isn't utterly pointless drivel, mind you. "My Band", "How Come", and "Get My Gun" are easily the best tracks with some considerable distance to the track in fourth place, whatever it is. (That's how much I can uniquify the rest of the album for you.) But still, three excellent tracks isn't at all bad for an album these days...
Then there was the second, or rather the first, disc from The Complete Adventures Of The Style Council. Thanks to my Zen player missorting the album tags, I listened to disc two last week, but have now fixed that ordering problem and correctly located disc one. It's more of the bizarre mixture of straight-up pop-funk, some desperately political stuff which drags my memories back to the mid-80s (and how we were all convinced we'd never escape them, apparently), and some forward-looking stuff which still sounds vaguely plausible today. I'm not sure I would recommend this exact package to anyone innocent of Paul Weller's sophomore band, but hey, it's got some reasonable stuff: try the samples at Amazon. And in particular, I was so close to thinking I had identified (purely by chance) the legendary "bop - banana" song which we love to bounce along to at The Main - until it turned out to only be the same song for the first fifteen seconds, and then it did something similar but different. What am I talking about? Listen to "Me Ship Came In!" on disc one. I wonder if there was a 12" remix or something.
Finally I listened to The Strokes, "First Impressions Of Earth". Well, this isn't really my thing. There's a distinct impression of Lou Reed about it, and I'm not that bothered about him either. The songs suggest potential but they never quite achieve it save for the occasional surprising development (like the melody line going all over the place in a great way on "Ize Of The World"), but they generally sound like a timid version of Coldplay. This is not a promising comparison, and I shan't really make an effort to hear The Strokes again.
Sarah and Copious Twines are due back from various alarums and excursions any moment, so I'll leave it there for tonight. Ohweeeey :)
Sarah needed me to drop our keyboard stand back to the hotel where the Rent crew rehearses - we'd borrowed it back for the Bowen Island gig but in the end didn't take the keyboard - so I walked into work, nearly half of the way with this ungainly metal contraption in one hand. I also walked back this evening. It's nearly 40 minutes each way, so I'm feeling quite virtuous and am awarding myself a Win for today, even before considering my sterling dietary choices - fruit, lettuce leaves, turkey slices, no bread, etc, plus the bizarre but curiously edible dish at Hons tonight - sauteed chicken, peppers, and peanuts in spicy sauce. All told it's a bit of a shame that work itself was a bit crap, but whatever.
Today's music was an uneventful selection. I finished listening to D-12 "D-12 World" which I had gotten halfway through in the gym on Saturday. Damn, that's got some fast tracks on it. Jog or crosstrain to those, it'll do you good. Eminem's knack for an extremely catchy and offensively funny chorus doesn't desert him - in fact you might wonder why his faster, catchier stuff isn't on his own albums, as he does it so well - and the rest of the group are... well... they're mostly there, except in a few places where they're mildly worth listening to. I'm not saying half of this slightly fat album isn't utterly pointless drivel, mind you. "My Band", "How Come", and "Get My Gun" are easily the best tracks with some considerable distance to the track in fourth place, whatever it is. (That's how much I can uniquify the rest of the album for you.) But still, three excellent tracks isn't at all bad for an album these days...
Then there was the second, or rather the first, disc from The Complete Adventures Of The Style Council. Thanks to my Zen player missorting the album tags, I listened to disc two last week, but have now fixed that ordering problem and correctly located disc one. It's more of the bizarre mixture of straight-up pop-funk, some desperately political stuff which drags my memories back to the mid-80s (and how we were all convinced we'd never escape them, apparently), and some forward-looking stuff which still sounds vaguely plausible today. I'm not sure I would recommend this exact package to anyone innocent of Paul Weller's sophomore band, but hey, it's got some reasonable stuff: try the samples at Amazon. And in particular, I was so close to thinking I had identified (purely by chance) the legendary "bop - banana" song which we love to bounce along to at The Main - until it turned out to only be the same song for the first fifteen seconds, and then it did something similar but different. What am I talking about? Listen to "Me Ship Came In!" on disc one. I wonder if there was a 12" remix or something.
Finally I listened to The Strokes, "First Impressions Of Earth". Well, this isn't really my thing. There's a distinct impression of Lou Reed about it, and I'm not that bothered about him either. The songs suggest potential but they never quite achieve it save for the occasional surprising development (like the melody line going all over the place in a great way on "Ize Of The World"), but they generally sound like a timid version of Coldplay. This is not a promising comparison, and I shan't really make an effort to hear The Strokes again.
Sarah and Copious Twines are due back from various alarums and excursions any moment, so I'll leave it there for tonight. Ohweeeey :)
Sunday, July 5, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day five (WIN?)
Walked back from Granville Island to the apartment. In sandals. That's reasonable exercise. Also, still holding firm on the no-chocolate thing. Good panda.
Today: god, it was hot. We both woke up stupendously early and spent some time staggering around the apartment alternately prostrating ourselves before the Great God Fan and cursing the potheads in the apartment below ("Reefer Madness" take note: there are people who get fucked up on marijuana and cause a general nuisance... I couldn't care less whether they're hooligans and whores, their stuff stinks and we can't open our goddamn windows in the middle of summer).
The Twines went out shopping (again? shocking) and we melted a bit more.
Then they returned, and Sarah and I did our big dramatic presentation of the whole of "One Plus One" for our captive audience of two. It took two and a half hours, which is probably just a little longer than the show will actually run - we have 17 songs done out of about 25, and a lot of the script, so we had to handwave through a few songs and plot points, but also we stopped and explained a couple of things and describe the action on stage and say who was speaking (ten characters, but only two of us reading and singing). The result was satisfying and validating: the plot apparently makes sense to the Twines, and they were in tears at numerous appropriate points, and giggling so hard at one point they fell over on the couch. By the time we reached the final song we were a bit exhausted and not quite up to faking seven parts, but whatever. So I personally am EXTREMELY happy, having written most of the script and been on tenterhooks as to how it works, and doubtless Sarah and I will have a lengthy conflab about how it was to perform the whole thing.
But the next thing that happened was that we bundled off to Granville Island where the Twines and I had food and Sarah had a Rent rehearsal. And then I walked home, and now I await their collective return, still melting despite fans, open windows, and ice cubes.
I haven't listened to any music today - but I did finally listen to my first podcast! I read a lot of comics but there are precious few comics websites which are at all worth reading more than once: Mindless Ones, Thoughts On Stuff, and If Destroyed are the only real contenders for me. Paul O'Brien from If Destroyed has been podcasting with a friend for some months now, and I've always meant to try them out - but it's taken a long time to persuade myself to put aside the time to try it, because podcasts are basically audiobooks, and I really don't have time to listen to them when I could be reading something at about 40x the speed. However, it was hot and I have nothing else to do so I tried one. And it was pretty good fun. Part of my 31 Days Of Panda thing involves me not now downloading all the previous editions in the vain hope of making time to listen to them all, but I've broken the ice, lost my virginity, skinned my first polar bear, insert your choice of metaphor here... and if I find myself relaxing with 45 minutes to spare in the future, I might try another.
Mmmm, that spare bunny chicken from last night was delicious... nom nom nom. Protein :)
Today: god, it was hot. We both woke up stupendously early and spent some time staggering around the apartment alternately prostrating ourselves before the Great God Fan and cursing the potheads in the apartment below ("Reefer Madness" take note: there are people who get fucked up on marijuana and cause a general nuisance... I couldn't care less whether they're hooligans and whores, their stuff stinks and we can't open our goddamn windows in the middle of summer).
The Twines went out shopping (again? shocking) and we melted a bit more.
Then they returned, and Sarah and I did our big dramatic presentation of the whole of "One Plus One" for our captive audience of two. It took two and a half hours, which is probably just a little longer than the show will actually run - we have 17 songs done out of about 25, and a lot of the script, so we had to handwave through a few songs and plot points, but also we stopped and explained a couple of things and describe the action on stage and say who was speaking (ten characters, but only two of us reading and singing). The result was satisfying and validating: the plot apparently makes sense to the Twines, and they were in tears at numerous appropriate points, and giggling so hard at one point they fell over on the couch. By the time we reached the final song we were a bit exhausted and not quite up to faking seven parts, but whatever. So I personally am EXTREMELY happy, having written most of the script and been on tenterhooks as to how it works, and doubtless Sarah and I will have a lengthy conflab about how it was to perform the whole thing.
But the next thing that happened was that we bundled off to Granville Island where the Twines and I had food and Sarah had a Rent rehearsal. And then I walked home, and now I await their collective return, still melting despite fans, open windows, and ice cubes.
I haven't listened to any music today - but I did finally listen to my first podcast! I read a lot of comics but there are precious few comics websites which are at all worth reading more than once: Mindless Ones, Thoughts On Stuff, and If Destroyed are the only real contenders for me. Paul O'Brien from If Destroyed has been podcasting with a friend for some months now, and I've always meant to try them out - but it's taken a long time to persuade myself to put aside the time to try it, because podcasts are basically audiobooks, and I really don't have time to listen to them when I could be reading something at about 40x the speed. However, it was hot and I have nothing else to do so I tried one. And it was pretty good fun. Part of my 31 Days Of Panda thing involves me not now downloading all the previous editions in the vain hope of making time to listen to them all, but I've broken the ice, lost my virginity, skinned my first polar bear, insert your choice of metaphor here... and if I find myself relaxing with 45 minutes to spare in the future, I might try another.
Mmmm, that spare bunny chicken from last night was delicious... nom nom nom. Protein :)
31 Days Of Panda, day four (WIN!)
Definite win for today: I squeezed in an hour at the gym between our getting back from "Reefer Madness" and the beginning of our Small But Perfectly Formed Gatherage. Several people couldn't make it either in advance or after it had started (boo to bad circumstances and hugs to all involved) but we had fun with those who were there (that sounds bad, like we were experimenting on them or something) and the party has just wound up at 2:12am after a 7pm start, so that's not at all bad.
Twiney sounds like a total superstar singing "I Dreamed A Dream", which song you'd think would be boring as hell by now. And naturally she makes our songs sound even more awesome than they already are. Tee hee hee. Recordings sometime, perhaps.
"Reefer Madness"... we seem to be seeing a lot of musicals lately where an extremely talented cast and crew throw themselves at material which just doesn't end up satisfying me. It's rarely anything against them, it's just... all the shows seem to be a bit... slight. This show, a spoof based on a 30s scaremongering public information newsreel, is somewhat like "Little Shop Of Horrors", although the distancing effect is even more pronounced, so right from the word go, your emotions are pretty much completely disconnected save for comedy. So you can admire the writing as they put these stock characters through an unusual wringer, but there's absolutely no heart in it - it's all about the satire, the jokes and the inappropriate characterizations. Which, sure, are all funny. In the end a lot of singing and dancing is done, and this lot (mostly recent Cap graduates of Sarah's acquaintance) did it well, but... eh, lack of heart either in the material or the presentation is why I don't like most musicals. At least it passed the time. And, unusually, Act Two was more fun than Act One... most of the time I survive Act Twos by thinking "This will be shorter than Act One, and also when it ends there isn't another act after it," but I managed not to think that this time.
At the gym, I squeezed in half an album, and while listening to it my brain was highly active, and I propose a certain test. First, clear your mind of all preconceptions of rap music. Second, put aside thoughts of musical theatre. Third, don't worry about the video so much as the song. There. Ready? OK, now listen to this:
Now be honest: isn't that just completely awesome? It's from D-12's album "D-12 World". I was considering a longer post sometime about tastes in music and authenticity and stuff like that, but listening to this song again after a few years preempts that. I just want to effuse about rap for a few moments. I listen to a lot of rap, and I find it invaluable for several reasons. For one thing, Eminem appears to have lungs like an elephant - although witness also Ghostface (yeah yeah, the lyrics are appalling, I know, whatever... my point is, listen to how fast he's delivering them):
and the awesome Abdominal (lyrics less disgusting, but song a bit of a slow burn - skip to 2:45 if you like):
Overdubs, bah - singing this live is entirely possible, but nothing like easy, and I practise with these songs and others like them. It's much more fun practising with songs which I don't know for sure I can sing (and for the same reason, I like singing songs higher than I should). Then, note that their diction isn't at all bad, especially considering the speed they're going at. Finally, on the creative side, some rappers' rhymes are just fantastic. Eminem is an obvious leader here. I still chuckle at his rhyming "oranges" with "hinges" and "syringes" on the song "Business". And while chuckling, I pay a lot of attention. Rap, especially the way he writes it, gets through a lot of words per song, with a consequent high number of rhymes required, and even though he uses a lot of slightly vague rhymes, the sheer shotgun volume of them is admirable, and the rules he bends or breaks to get them in there are worth noting and testing for myself.
It's all completely fascinating to me, even without analyzing the sociology, the business, or the authenticity of it all. Just musically, I love it. Just thought you should know :-)
We're flagging a bit so it's bedtime. Yeah, I think I award myself a win for today. I even only had two cans of Strongbow, and then switched to milk. Milk! What a healthy panda. Of course I did drink nearly two pints of it...
Twiney sounds like a total superstar singing "I Dreamed A Dream", which song you'd think would be boring as hell by now. And naturally she makes our songs sound even more awesome than they already are. Tee hee hee. Recordings sometime, perhaps.
"Reefer Madness"... we seem to be seeing a lot of musicals lately where an extremely talented cast and crew throw themselves at material which just doesn't end up satisfying me. It's rarely anything against them, it's just... all the shows seem to be a bit... slight. This show, a spoof based on a 30s scaremongering public information newsreel, is somewhat like "Little Shop Of Horrors", although the distancing effect is even more pronounced, so right from the word go, your emotions are pretty much completely disconnected save for comedy. So you can admire the writing as they put these stock characters through an unusual wringer, but there's absolutely no heart in it - it's all about the satire, the jokes and the inappropriate characterizations. Which, sure, are all funny. In the end a lot of singing and dancing is done, and this lot (mostly recent Cap graduates of Sarah's acquaintance) did it well, but... eh, lack of heart either in the material or the presentation is why I don't like most musicals. At least it passed the time. And, unusually, Act Two was more fun than Act One... most of the time I survive Act Twos by thinking "This will be shorter than Act One, and also when it ends there isn't another act after it," but I managed not to think that this time.
At the gym, I squeezed in half an album, and while listening to it my brain was highly active, and I propose a certain test. First, clear your mind of all preconceptions of rap music. Second, put aside thoughts of musical theatre. Third, don't worry about the video so much as the song. There. Ready? OK, now listen to this:
Now be honest: isn't that just completely awesome? It's from D-12's album "D-12 World". I was considering a longer post sometime about tastes in music and authenticity and stuff like that, but listening to this song again after a few years preempts that. I just want to effuse about rap for a few moments. I listen to a lot of rap, and I find it invaluable for several reasons. For one thing, Eminem appears to have lungs like an elephant - although witness also Ghostface (yeah yeah, the lyrics are appalling, I know, whatever... my point is, listen to how fast he's delivering them):
and the awesome Abdominal (lyrics less disgusting, but song a bit of a slow burn - skip to 2:45 if you like):
Overdubs, bah - singing this live is entirely possible, but nothing like easy, and I practise with these songs and others like them. It's much more fun practising with songs which I don't know for sure I can sing (and for the same reason, I like singing songs higher than I should). Then, note that their diction isn't at all bad, especially considering the speed they're going at. Finally, on the creative side, some rappers' rhymes are just fantastic. Eminem is an obvious leader here. I still chuckle at his rhyming "oranges" with "hinges" and "syringes" on the song "Business". And while chuckling, I pay a lot of attention. Rap, especially the way he writes it, gets through a lot of words per song, with a consequent high number of rhymes required, and even though he uses a lot of slightly vague rhymes, the sheer shotgun volume of them is admirable, and the rules he bends or breaks to get them in there are worth noting and testing for myself.
It's all completely fascinating to me, even without analyzing the sociology, the business, or the authenticity of it all. Just musically, I love it. Just thought you should know :-)
We're flagging a bit so it's bedtime. Yeah, I think I award myself a win for today. I even only had two cans of Strongbow, and then switched to milk. Milk! What a healthy panda. Of course I did drink nearly two pints of it...
Saturday, July 4, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day three (FAIL?) (WIN?)
I dunno, does running around doing a ton of errands and then shipping out to Bowen Island so Alexis could sing a gig at Mik*Sa restaurant count as fail or win? I guess it does. I got a lot of sun and did a bunch of equipment-toting, if that helps. I think I'll award myself a tentative win. And you can't say the futon we slept on wasn't 'healthy', in that it was rock-hard and agony to lie flat on ;)
Today (day four) we have Gatherage this evening, so that's not exactly going to be a Panda Health Win either. You know what? I picked the wrong flipping month to try this shit...
Today (day four) we have Gatherage this evening, so that's not exactly going to be a Panda Health Win either. You know what? I picked the wrong flipping month to try this shit...
Friday, July 3, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day two (FAIL)
I spent the day on tenterhooks about Sarah's health. She and the Twines and Kim went to see Les Mis in the evening and I found at ten to midnight that I'd passed out on the couch for four hours. On her return, off we went to Emergency. We tried VGH this time. They were generally nicer and the facilities were better, but it turns out that of course the hospitals aren't networked and they had no access to her St Paul's results, and they looked like they'd get stroppy if we went there again. So she's good for another few days, but Panda Fail in terms of anything to do with taking care of myself. But that's gonna happen on Emergency Days...
Thursday, July 2, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day one
Happy Canada Day, and I say that as a permanent resident.
And now: oops. Apparently I should've started my health kick with slightly less extravagance. Today I was reasonably healthy with the food, but after walking the Twines down to Canada Place at 3pm so they could meet up with Barney and listen to the drummers, I turned off down Cordova with my Zen player playing loud, and walked, er, all the way down Cordova and then all the way around Stanley Park before returning home up Robson.
It turns out that my previous two efforts to circumnavigate Stanley Park have failed at significantly earlier points than I had thought. When I tried going around it anticlockwise last year, and the path was closed from the landslide, I hadn't gotten much further than the SS Empress Of Japan before having to climb up to the main road and walk across to the Sequoia restaurant and come back from there. So, bit of a fail, but I thought I'd gone quite far. A few weeks ago, after we'd manfully represented for Broadway Chorus before the Rape Relief walk (thinking about it, 'manfully' was perhaps a tactless choice of word there), I left Sarah at home, in more pain than I realized, and got what I thought was halfway around going clockwise before she rang and I had to run back.
So today I thought "Eh, I must've pretty much nearly closed the loop, how bad can it possibly be?" And the answer is, well, it's 5.5 miles. Which isn't really that bad, I used to walk nearly that far across London most Friday nights to get home, but that was, er, fifteen years ago, and I'd already walked down to the Park, and then I walked up afterwards.
So the upshot is, having started at just after 3pm, I got home at ten to six. I had at least remembered to buy some water, so I looked considerably less grey than when Sarah met me after the Sun Run - which I did with a hangover after an epic singing party with a hangover and no breakfast or water - stupid panda! - but I've been somewhat achy since then. A trip to the hot tub and a very relaxed night with Barney and Sara in the apartment along with the Twines (I know, I know... "relaxed" has such an elastic meaning sometimes) has just about fixed it all. But I expect post-traumatic ache disorder tomorrow morning...
This is all because there were two noisy people with a ghettoblaster in the gym room on the third floor. If they hadn't been there I'd've just done half an hour on the treadmill. I blame society.
You may, correctly, ask whether I couldn't tell how long I'd been walking by how much music I'd listened to. Well, I thought that too, but apparently, while I listened to only two albums, they were both long ones:
1) Camel, "Breathless". Mmmm. I'm a bit of a fan of prog rock, which got a bad rep in the 70s. But if it was like this, I can sorta see why. I'm a big fan of Genesis because of their sci-fi stylings and the undeniable keyboard excellence of Tony Banks, and I'm a big fan of Jethro Tull because they were winking all the time, except when they weren't. But this, eh, it's just kinda there, with precision-perfect instrumentation but GOD IT'S DULL... and the lyrics are dreadful... witless, charmless, pointless, and not even a hint of pretension to redeem them. And the singer... well... he's just not very good. So, y'know, it's a problem. I have a bunch of Camel albums to listen to thanks to a hint on Wikipedia that they were of a proggish disposition - I'd never heard of them until a couple of months ago - but I'm hoping their earlier stuff is better... "Breathless" comes from 1978, and their 1979 album "I Can See Your House From Here" wasn't much better. I foresee this collection may be more of a chore than a pleasure. Ho hum. (That's the sound you hear when listening to the women standing around outside the Penthouse Club on Seymour. Sorry.) Here's a sample track, "Echoes", from "Breathless". This entire album sounds like this...
2) Blur, "13". Mmm. I've been listening to Blur's albums again in order, and here we are at their sixth. Very interesting career trajectory, by no means unique:
Now I'll grant you that the opening track, "Tender" - while lyrically sounding a lot like Damon Albarn had just seen the spine of the novel "Tender Is The Night" and thought, "That's wicked! Just add parallel structure" - is quite a nice song... if twice as long as it needs to be for us to get the point. I would advise stopping watching about halfway through to compensate:
And then there's "Coffee And TV", which I'm warning you right now will make you sob...
... and then there's the rest of the album. And if you were expecting, er, songs... well, sorry, please take the next left turn...
It's interesting to listen to "13", because what happened next to Blur was that main songwriter and singer Damon Albarn went off and formed Gorillaz for a while (for which the videos are even more interesting than the music, look for yourselves if you don't believe me), Graham Coxon was sacked for bad attitude (he's the guitarist; he did a bunch of solo albums which sound suspiciously like "13"), and the other two... well, they're the rhythm section, no-one cares what they did.
There's one more Blur album, "Think Tank", which I don't remember listening to at the time. Apparently it goes still further in this direction. It's fascinating to see this band, who in 1994 were pitched against Oasis in the ultimate Britpop battle (and there's a whole story to tell about that sometime), concluding that they just aren't interested in repeating themselves, while Oasis went on to forge a careful career for themselves by exactly repeating themselves over and over... and over and over and over. Now hey, there's nothing intrinsically wrong in writing the same song twelve times on every album - the Red Hot Chili Peppers do it, to name but one example, and theirs is really quite a good song so it doesn't hurt too much to hear it a lot - but it does mean your music ends up fitting that excellent description "It is what it is". Whereas I don't think anyone would accuse the Blur of "13" of sounding like the Blur of "Parklife".
And yet... I did like Blur's songs, when they actually had them. On "13" you get a couple of songs, and then a lot of soundscapes (good word, that), images, textures, drones, and a whole bunch of other things, none of which are bad... but the one connecting factor is that none of them happen in C-major or in an AABA kinda way. And that's a shame.
I feel you should get to see this, from "The Great Escape":
And to be honest you should just watch every Gorillaz video right now, but here are the most awesome ones:
And now: oops. Apparently I should've started my health kick with slightly less extravagance. Today I was reasonably healthy with the food, but after walking the Twines down to Canada Place at 3pm so they could meet up with Barney and listen to the drummers, I turned off down Cordova with my Zen player playing loud, and walked, er, all the way down Cordova and then all the way around Stanley Park before returning home up Robson.
It turns out that my previous two efforts to circumnavigate Stanley Park have failed at significantly earlier points than I had thought. When I tried going around it anticlockwise last year, and the path was closed from the landslide, I hadn't gotten much further than the SS Empress Of Japan before having to climb up to the main road and walk across to the Sequoia restaurant and come back from there. So, bit of a fail, but I thought I'd gone quite far. A few weeks ago, after we'd manfully represented for Broadway Chorus before the Rape Relief walk (thinking about it, 'manfully' was perhaps a tactless choice of word there), I left Sarah at home, in more pain than I realized, and got what I thought was halfway around going clockwise before she rang and I had to run back.
So today I thought "Eh, I must've pretty much nearly closed the loop, how bad can it possibly be?" And the answer is, well, it's 5.5 miles. Which isn't really that bad, I used to walk nearly that far across London most Friday nights to get home, but that was, er, fifteen years ago, and I'd already walked down to the Park, and then I walked up afterwards.
So the upshot is, having started at just after 3pm, I got home at ten to six. I had at least remembered to buy some water, so I looked considerably less grey than when Sarah met me after the Sun Run - which I did with a hangover after an epic singing party with a hangover and no breakfast or water - stupid panda! - but I've been somewhat achy since then. A trip to the hot tub and a very relaxed night with Barney and Sara in the apartment along with the Twines (I know, I know... "relaxed" has such an elastic meaning sometimes) has just about fixed it all. But I expect post-traumatic ache disorder tomorrow morning...
This is all because there were two noisy people with a ghettoblaster in the gym room on the third floor. If they hadn't been there I'd've just done half an hour on the treadmill. I blame society.
You may, correctly, ask whether I couldn't tell how long I'd been walking by how much music I'd listened to. Well, I thought that too, but apparently, while I listened to only two albums, they were both long ones:
1) Camel, "Breathless". Mmmm. I'm a bit of a fan of prog rock, which got a bad rep in the 70s. But if it was like this, I can sorta see why. I'm a big fan of Genesis because of their sci-fi stylings and the undeniable keyboard excellence of Tony Banks, and I'm a big fan of Jethro Tull because they were winking all the time, except when they weren't. But this, eh, it's just kinda there, with precision-perfect instrumentation but GOD IT'S DULL... and the lyrics are dreadful... witless, charmless, pointless, and not even a hint of pretension to redeem them. And the singer... well... he's just not very good. So, y'know, it's a problem. I have a bunch of Camel albums to listen to thanks to a hint on Wikipedia that they were of a proggish disposition - I'd never heard of them until a couple of months ago - but I'm hoping their earlier stuff is better... "Breathless" comes from 1978, and their 1979 album "I Can See Your House From Here" wasn't much better. I foresee this collection may be more of a chore than a pleasure. Ho hum. (That's the sound you hear when listening to the women standing around outside the Penthouse Club on Seymour. Sorry.) Here's a sample track, "Echoes", from "Breathless". This entire album sounds like this...
2) Blur, "13". Mmm. I've been listening to Blur's albums again in order, and here we are at their sixth. Very interesting career trajectory, by no means unique:
- "Leisure" - rubbish, but at least it exists and it shows they were a band.
- "Modern Life Is Rubbish" - not great, but they're figuring out what they want to do.
- "Parklife" - all of a sudden, an astonishing document of London in the 90s. Awesome.
- "The Great Escape" - better and better - now they're summarizing England. Remarkable. So many good tracks.
- "Blur" - errrrr... what's... happening... album... not... quite... the... same... as... the... last... one... - leading to huge sales in America, because it sounded American and the band didn't actively try to piss on the country... you've probably heard "Song 2" from this album, but it's so irritating I'm not going to embed it, it's the one where he goes "Wahoo" a lot.
Now I'll grant you that the opening track, "Tender" - while lyrically sounding a lot like Damon Albarn had just seen the spine of the novel "Tender Is The Night" and thought, "That's wicked! Just add parallel structure" - is quite a nice song... if twice as long as it needs to be for us to get the point. I would advise stopping watching about halfway through to compensate:
And then there's "Coffee And TV", which I'm warning you right now will make you sob...
... and then there's the rest of the album. And if you were expecting, er, songs... well, sorry, please take the next left turn...
It's interesting to listen to "13", because what happened next to Blur was that main songwriter and singer Damon Albarn went off and formed Gorillaz for a while (for which the videos are even more interesting than the music, look for yourselves if you don't believe me), Graham Coxon was sacked for bad attitude (he's the guitarist; he did a bunch of solo albums which sound suspiciously like "13"), and the other two... well, they're the rhythm section, no-one cares what they did.
There's one more Blur album, "Think Tank", which I don't remember listening to at the time. Apparently it goes still further in this direction. It's fascinating to see this band, who in 1994 were pitched against Oasis in the ultimate Britpop battle (and there's a whole story to tell about that sometime), concluding that they just aren't interested in repeating themselves, while Oasis went on to forge a careful career for themselves by exactly repeating themselves over and over... and over and over and over. Now hey, there's nothing intrinsically wrong in writing the same song twelve times on every album - the Red Hot Chili Peppers do it, to name but one example, and theirs is really quite a good song so it doesn't hurt too much to hear it a lot - but it does mean your music ends up fitting that excellent description "It is what it is". Whereas I don't think anyone would accuse the Blur of "13" of sounding like the Blur of "Parklife".
And yet... I did like Blur's songs, when they actually had them. On "13" you get a couple of songs, and then a lot of soundscapes (good word, that), images, textures, drones, and a whole bunch of other things, none of which are bad... but the one connecting factor is that none of them happen in C-major or in an AABA kinda way. And that's a shame.
I feel you should get to see this, from "The Great Escape":
And to be honest you should just watch every Gorillaz video right now, but here are the most awesome ones:
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day zero
Very civilized meal out tonight at The Main with The Twines and, er, The James. We bought James a print of his favourite cartoon and he was very pleased. Least we could do, really, considering how he's been our eternal taxi for the last two months. Food at The Main is always pretty civilized, obviously, but it was a very relaxing evening, and James got to witness how, just as with Broadway Chorus plots, the automatic response when regaled with almost any Twine story is a slightly stunned "Of course" - e.g. "Of course you got innocently and accidentally locked inbetween glass doors in the psychiatric section of a deserted hospital. In Finland."
Sarah and Twiney apparently made much sweet music together today while I was busy finishing my last day of work for the week. I'm chirpy because I had a good-ish day with lots of good feedback from my users, and it doesn't take much positive validation to make me a happy panda... and also because Sarah reported that Twiney has fallen in love again with our song Just A Moment.
Today I was kinda healthy foodwise: a bowl of cereal, two peach yogurts, four slices of turkey, an apple and a pack of chewing gum... and then, er, Mediterraneo pasta and four pints of cider... what? (That's kinda healthy by my standards. You should be asking why I don't block out the sun, given my diet of the last 20-odd years.)
Today's music collection was the experimental mixed bag I hope to sustain for the month, too. Let's see, I listened to what turned out to be CD 2 from a five-disc pack of The Style Council's greatest hits... oooo, it's "funk"(TM) - I have heard of this before. I sort of vaguely registered The Style Council at the time - it was Paul Weller's next band after he broke up The Jam - but while possibly too experimental and advanced for the time, it's also possible that he was just competing in a slightly clustered market, and, y'know, not all of it is that good, based on this disk. Synth bass and drums give it a slightly cheap feel, and it's painfully obvious that the acoustic guitar songs such as Ghosts Of Dachau somewhat piss all over the sub-Sting funk:
But then again you could argue that the better funk songs, such as "Walls Come Tumbling Down":
... were prefigured by The Jam's "A Town Called Malice", which is the only reason you'll ever need if you want to argue that the movie of Billy Elliot is better than the musical ;-)
... oh alright then, if you insist:
So, four more disks of the same to go. I must confess to a slight "Eerrrk" at that, but the point of this month is that hope will spring eternal, by force if necessary. And I seem to recall having a huge liking for the big keyboard solo at the end of their otherwise negligible B-side Party Chambers. I wonder how it's aged and whether it now just sounds like a tin whistle gone wrong...
But enough of crazy footloose video embedding, at least for now. Also today, I finished listening to The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's spoof musical A Shoggoth On The Roof. Yes, it's a rewrite of Fiddler On The Roof with, er, lots of tentacles. But! This is less lame than it (a) sounds and (b) could have been. The thing with spoofs is, you have to pitch it just right, maintain a theme (not necessarily the original one), and carry it off with complete sincerity. A fine example is the superb West Bank Story. Not-so-fine examples would include, er, Anything In The Last Twenty Years Starring Leslie Nielsen. And, to my surprise - since it wouldn't be a 'thing' if everyone naturally did it right - this felt like a success. I'm not a dedicated Lovecraft fan - in fact I've only read Cthulhu-related by Clark Ashton Smith and Alan Moore - but from what I've picked up by tentacular osmosis, this is already very amusing. The singing is solid, the plot seems well-adapted, and I grinned a lot. I prefer it to (the admittedly rocky recording of) Evil Dead - The Musical... but then, I'm actively uninterested in the source material for that so it had to work a lot harder, and didn't.
And for variety, I slapped on Asian Dub Foundation's Conscious Party. I've liked ADF since they showed up on, I think, The Late Show, back in the early 90s. They sounded like a petrol bomb, and age has not particularly withered, etc. Excellently, their studio albums have so much energy that their live albums are effectively the same super-complicated street-techno but with a rawer mix, so you don't miss out on all the lovely texture but also you don't feel like the live albums are now your only option. Heavily political - and strangely successful at it, where The Style Council now seem embarrassingly emo - and yet still totally danceable, ADF should be required listening. Here's an example:
I could get used to this whole multimedia thing. That's another aspect of life I intend to loosen up about.
Anyway that was my last day of June, and when I next wake up we'll be properly into 31 Days Of Panda. And I note that Barney is already posting pictures of red pandas, based on my promise to declare July as an amnesty-tastic time for the little... crimson darlings. G'night for now.
Sarah and Twiney apparently made much sweet music together today while I was busy finishing my last day of work for the week. I'm chirpy because I had a good-ish day with lots of good feedback from my users, and it doesn't take much positive validation to make me a happy panda... and also because Sarah reported that Twiney has fallen in love again with our song Just A Moment.
Today I was kinda healthy foodwise: a bowl of cereal, two peach yogurts, four slices of turkey, an apple and a pack of chewing gum... and then, er, Mediterraneo pasta and four pints of cider... what? (That's kinda healthy by my standards. You should be asking why I don't block out the sun, given my diet of the last 20-odd years.)
Today's music collection was the experimental mixed bag I hope to sustain for the month, too. Let's see, I listened to what turned out to be CD 2 from a five-disc pack of The Style Council's greatest hits... oooo, it's "funk"(TM) - I have heard of this before. I sort of vaguely registered The Style Council at the time - it was Paul Weller's next band after he broke up The Jam - but while possibly too experimental and advanced for the time, it's also possible that he was just competing in a slightly clustered market, and, y'know, not all of it is that good, based on this disk. Synth bass and drums give it a slightly cheap feel, and it's painfully obvious that the acoustic guitar songs such as Ghosts Of Dachau somewhat piss all over the sub-Sting funk:
But then again you could argue that the better funk songs, such as "Walls Come Tumbling Down":
... were prefigured by The Jam's "A Town Called Malice", which is the only reason you'll ever need if you want to argue that the movie of Billy Elliot is better than the musical ;-)
... oh alright then, if you insist:
So, four more disks of the same to go. I must confess to a slight "Eerrrk" at that, but the point of this month is that hope will spring eternal, by force if necessary. And I seem to recall having a huge liking for the big keyboard solo at the end of their otherwise negligible B-side Party Chambers. I wonder how it's aged and whether it now just sounds like a tin whistle gone wrong...
But enough of crazy footloose video embedding, at least for now. Also today, I finished listening to The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's spoof musical A Shoggoth On The Roof. Yes, it's a rewrite of Fiddler On The Roof with, er, lots of tentacles. But! This is less lame than it (a) sounds and (b) could have been. The thing with spoofs is, you have to pitch it just right, maintain a theme (not necessarily the original one), and carry it off with complete sincerity. A fine example is the superb West Bank Story. Not-so-fine examples would include, er, Anything In The Last Twenty Years Starring Leslie Nielsen. And, to my surprise - since it wouldn't be a 'thing' if everyone naturally did it right - this felt like a success. I'm not a dedicated Lovecraft fan - in fact I've only read Cthulhu-related by Clark Ashton Smith and Alan Moore - but from what I've picked up by tentacular osmosis, this is already very amusing. The singing is solid, the plot seems well-adapted, and I grinned a lot. I prefer it to (the admittedly rocky recording of) Evil Dead - The Musical... but then, I'm actively uninterested in the source material for that so it had to work a lot harder, and didn't.
And for variety, I slapped on Asian Dub Foundation's Conscious Party. I've liked ADF since they showed up on, I think, The Late Show, back in the early 90s. They sounded like a petrol bomb, and age has not particularly withered, etc. Excellently, their studio albums have so much energy that their live albums are effectively the same super-complicated street-techno but with a rawer mix, so you don't miss out on all the lovely texture but also you don't feel like the live albums are now your only option. Heavily political - and strangely successful at it, where The Style Council now seem embarrassingly emo - and yet still totally danceable, ADF should be required listening. Here's an example:
I could get used to this whole multimedia thing. That's another aspect of life I intend to loosen up about.
Anyway that was my last day of June, and when I next wake up we'll be properly into 31 Days Of Panda. And I note that Barney is already posting pictures of red pandas, based on my promise to declare July as an amnesty-tastic time for the little... crimson darlings. G'night for now.
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