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.