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:
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