Games and art

Thought:

TV and movies (and music) can turn their mood on a dime, or excavate an emotion to extraordinary depths - thanks to editing, which is a unique feature of recorded media. There can be an extraordinary intellectual and emotional thrill to the swift juxtaposition of compelling, contrasting images and sounds. (Watch the intro to Space:1999 if you don't believe me. And it's not like this technique was invented in 1975, or that it belongs there - you have no idea how pleased I was to see it crop up in the new Battlestar Galactica.)

Live theatre basically can't do this, because you can't completely recompose the scene in a split-second. I enjoyed some of the attempts in the play "Tear The Curtain" to innovate in this respect in Vancouver last year, using projected movie clips to show closeups of scenes being rendered live on stage, but unfortunately the form far outpaced the content... and that's about the only example that comes to mind, because it costs a fortune, and live theatre doesn't usually have that kind of money.

On the other hand, if you want to talk about a medium which does have the money... I work in computer games, where we often have budgets of $20-30m, and I find it fascinating that mainstream computer games, which can do this, and have the wherewithal... usually don't. Hence the striking, standout nature of the few which do, e.g. the G-Man visions in the Half-Life games.

Often the problem is a sadly pedestrian technical issue: the speed at which assets can be streamed from the disk means there are limits to how big a high-quality world you can build up and tear down in a split-second.

But games *can* cheaply cut the camera, change the lighting, edit the music - and all with the same perfect timing you'd expect from recorded media. They can also do the more languid, elegant effects like sweeping the light sources to suggest the fast passage of time while a character sits or lies still and ignores it... fading back and forth between two sequences set at different times in the same room, viewed in the same tracking shot*... and playing with localized time distortion, sharpening the focus on a single character in real time while the crowd blurs into motion, to suggest dissociation or isolation.

They can... they just don't. And isn't that a shame. Because this kind of experimentation with the reality of place and time, often relating it to a character's state of mind - lifting you out of the linear progression of time and using tricks and tools to force you to understand how reality appears to someone else, or to use paradox and impossibility to render emotions in your mind - is one of the things which for me defines and poeticises televisual art. And I think its absence in computer games is one reason why it's kinda easy for me to see Roger Ebert's point, and side with him in dismissing most games as 'not art', scratching my head and asking exactly when the medium will indicate an interest in being, or even the ability to be, 'art' in more than theory plus a handful of scattered examples - which are usually feted and derided in equal measure by people in the industry.

You can point at a number of brilliant storytelling tools used by TV shows in the last few years (the in-place flashbacks of Mad Men, the endings of Six Feet Under and The Sopranos, the tortured solipsism of Life On Mars, the increasingly sophisticated use of time as a weapon against the future - or to heal the past - in Doctor Who). But I'm not clear on where you would point to such innovation in storytelling in games - even in their cutscenes, let alone integrated into their gameplay - beyond the ever-reliable example of Braid (considerable spoilers here btw). To find previous examples of storytelling which has cleverly moved me, I think I'd have to go back as far as text adventures.

(This is not to discount the achieving of emotional effect through good writing presented straightforwardly - e.g. Beyond Good And Evil... spoilers there too, but if you do watch it, you'll probably note that the emotional content comes through despite old-fashioned graphics and slidey animations; the French know what they're doing. But the point is, it achieves the effect without innovation; it uses old tools well.)

Some argue that the imposition of storytelling in games is an attempt to make computer games something they're not, and that ultimately games allow the construction of your own narratives - and I think that's kinda true but also kinda useless in this discussion. Most people's narrative skills are pretty flimsy, and if they're being exercised during gameplay, they're going to be improvisational, and thus tend towards comedy. (Hardly anyone ever posts a sad YouTube clip about something which happened to them through "emergent gameplay in a sandbox environment", and adding an operatic soundtrack to something funny doesn't make it tragic.) There's not really such a thing as "improvisational tragedy", because tragedy relies far more on devices such as foreshadowing, which need planning. And tragedy, and our response to it, is where art truly lives. Hence the success of Braid - and for that matter Half-Life, which is amongst many other things the tragedy of Gordon Freeman (and which also, it's just struck me, might be the inspiration for Source Code, which is that rare thing, a tragedy which manages to extend itself into redemption).

It's not like I'm not fully convinced of the entertainment value of computer games, after thirty years playing and programming them - but entertainment isn't the same as art, and mainstream computer games aren't cutting it as art for me. Which is a bit lame, considering movies and TV had managed it by their fortieth birthday.

Thoughts?


* An otherwise dull FPS called Project Snowblind did this in one cutscene - it looked great.

The Jaysmiths Hit California (part four): kettledrums gone berzerk

Everything else about our California vacation was planned around Sunday March 27th, when Long Beach Opera presented their second performance of Philip Glass's opera "Akhnaten".

I love Philip Glass music. I don't really know why, I've just arrived at the point where I do, having started at the same point most people do with his stuff, a kind of "Jesus, what the hell was that?" after watching a clip from "Koyaanisqatsi". It's repetitive, not just within a given piece but across huge swathes of his work, to the point where most people can identify "Glass" but honestly couldn't tell you which of fifty albums it comes from. He doesn't really use a huge palette of sounds. He doesn't really do "tunes". For the first few years of his compositional career, in the 60s, he wrote basically tedious conceptual rubbish; yes, you can play closed or open, potentially infinite sequences of notes... whatever. But after a while there's some interesting stuff ("Music In Twelve Parts") and then he got into composing operas, and that's where it really takes off. The two major threads of his work have been movie scores and operas, although there's a bunch of symphonies in there too.

In movie terms, we're looking at the "Qatsi" trilogy - "Koyaanisqatsi", "Powwaqatsi", and "Naqoyqatsi", which are three allegedly non-narrative documentaries showing off epic cinematography of the industrial world at work, juxtaposed against the beautiful emptiness and simplicity of the natural world, and soundtracked by this gorgeous rolling developing Glass music... I say 'allegedly non-narrative' because there's clearly a story being told, and I'm not wholly on the storytellers' side, but they make for compelling viewing. Thence, he's gone on to score numerous, more mainstream movies, including "The Hours", the two "Candyman" movies (I know!) - and, most famously I reckon, he contributed some music to "The Truman Show", where, in the coolest cameo ever, he appears in the studio performing "Truman Sleeps" at the piano while we watch Jim Carrey resting. It's a sublime, evocative two-minute piece, and is one of my handful of go-to tracks when I'm in a particularly introspective mood. (Along with Kristin Hersh's album "Hips And Makers", and The Stranglers' "The Man They Love To Hate", since you ask.)

Meanwhile, his first opera was "Einstein On The Beach" in 1975, and he went on to complete a trilogy of "portrait operas", covering Einstein, Gandhi, and Akhatnen, three men of science, politics, and religion whom he and his collaborators found fascinating. I'm sketchy about the philosophical content of the other two, and I just don't find the music from "Satyagraha", the Gandhi opera, as compelling - although why not check for yourself later this year, the Met is broadcasting it - but Akhnaten really is fascinating, by far my favourite of the three. Here's a man who attempted to turn Egyptian culture upside-down, to break the stranglehold of the priesthood, to reform the religion, to update traditional artistic styles, to build a new capital city... it didn't go well, suffice to say, and he and his wife were swept away by a priestly rebellion, stricken from and nameless in Egyptian history, the updates reverted within a few years. Sorry, spoilers, obviously, but that's history.

So, you might wonder how something like that gets presented in an opera, and Glass's approach, as hinted at by these being 'portrait operas', is that he doesn't tell a detailed story with a fabulous narrative libretto, but he does present key images from the character's life and deeds, sometimes as epic tableaux for us to admire, sometimes by presenting and watching related characters, sometimes by large-scale visual reference. It depends a lot who's directing it. All these operas were conceived in cooperation with a specific director, and I gather that Glass and co. make videos of their operas and release two versions for production: one which must exactly copy the version they did, and one which basically mustn't. So I'm guessing, given the fancy tech in use at the Long Beach Opera "Akhaten", that they were using the latter version, implementing their own vision for the music.

And it was really very fancy. It seemed to be something that could scan the entire stage looking for movement, or presence of any kind, and turn it into an image which could then be projected onto the stage, either on a translucent front curtain or onto the performers and backdrop. It wasn't used for traditional image-projection; it did things like create sand-like patterns of dots which responded to the arm movements of dancers proceeding across the stage, or creating huge vertical lines above everyone's heads, or showing an aerial projection of the wall being built by the chorus... various cool effects, which to their credit can't easily be described textually, so I'll just say this was an ambitious use of technology, and it seemed to work.

But unfortunately, just when you get all this ambition and technology organized to present a major modern opera for two performances only, disaster strikes! The role of Akhnaten himself is sung by a counter-tenor, which essentially means a man with a woman's voice. There aren't many counter-tenors in the world these days, as the effect used to be achieved through castration. It makes Akhnaten seem strikingly different from the three overtly masculine priests who sing in other numbers, and it represents the strangeness of Akhnaten's physicality as seen in his portraits and statuary - was he a hermaphrodite? did he have an unusual body condition? In the absence of Aida-style Egyptian costuming, and the epic gnarly bodysuit they made the guy wear in the first production in 1984, the choice of voice is a nice way to handle it. Unfortunately, it means when your counter-tenor gets a sore throat, frankly, buddy-boy, you're a bit fucked. Fortunately, they flew in another counter-tenor to sing the part. Unfortunately, he didn't have enough time to learn the staging. Fortunately, the first counter-tenor was able to do that. Unfortunately, for some reason, at one point they put the second counter-tenor on stage as well, and you could see him singing from his music and turning the pages. OK, fair enough, this is a major undertaking and I wouldn't expect him to be off-book with a week's notice, but did he have to be onstage at all? Strange choice.

And then there was the far bigger problem with the start of the opera at least, which distressed me enough that I sat there with a very stern and distant look on my face for half an hour. One of my favourite parts of the opera is the funeral sequence for Akhnaten's father, which comes near the start and which features a tremendous ruckus, intended to wake up the gods so that they would pay attention to the funeral and be alert to the journey of the dead Pharaoh's spirit to Heaven. In the soundtrack, this is represented by a hefty percussion section. In the opera house, this was represented by a kettle-drummer who so completely overpowered the orchestra that at all points when he was playing you simply couldn't hear the rest of the music, and the singers were kinda submerged too. It was infuriating, desperately ill-judged, and the single worst piece of live sound-balancing I've ever heard, given the money we'd paid for those tickets and the gorgeous acoustics in play at all other times. Fuck you, LBO, I was thinking as I grumpily observed the ten-minute funeral scene. The band wasn't very together in a few other places, too. If this had been in Vancouver I would have left, like we did at "Lilian Ailing". Opera is not immune to the Panda's insistence upon being entertained and refusal to stick around for the second act if the first has been in any way perfunctory or under-par. I am reminded of James Agate attending a performance by his idol Rachel in Paris; as she blah'ed her way through her role to a half-empty summer audience, he sent a note backstage informing her that he had come a long way to see the finest actress in the world, and had not found her. She acted up a storm in the second act, and later asserted that she had been reminded of a valuable lesson: every show is someone's first, and they will judge you based on it, not on your reputation.

As it is, we decided to stay, and Sarah - not being so attached to the music (and particularly the sonically fugazi'ed funeral scene) - was the first to suggest that the problem was only that the production's reach exceeded its grasp; it failed in places, but it kinda failed magnificently. And I can't argue that the music and singing was generally extremely good - i.e. it sounded exactly like the soundtrack. So the question became for me: did I have trouble with it because I turn out not to like the visual presentation of opera? Because the visuals didn't add enough to the soundtrack to make me consider it value for money? Because grand but slowly-developing tableaux aren't what I want to see, MTV boy that I am? I did find some of the scenes boring. The overall visuals were reasonably striking, although very low-key in colour terms. The director had said up front that he wasn't using traditional Aida-style Egyptian costumes because he thought they would be silly, and I was fine with that; the outfits they'd chosen were simple, very linear, not quite monchromatic... they worked fine. I thought there was an attempt to attach a commentary on the Kennedys to the proceedings, from how they'd dressed Nefertiti and her mother, and that was interesting... but in the end, I dunno, man... it was nearly three hours long... that's a long time to be watching something without an explicit traditional narrative. Still, having fifteen-minute scenes ensures that you have plenty of time to assess and analyze what might be going on, and there's a kind of narration by a "Scribe" which hints at events in magnificent language.

It might've been nice if the plot, as such, hadn't been totally spoiled during a pre-opera discussion featuring an actual Egyptologist, the function of which chat seemed to be to ensure the audience wouldn't get confused by the Art. This annoyed me a lot, actually, especially since there's a clever and nominally quite moving epilogue - "which features THIS, and means THIS", the director and expert gleefully informed us. Thanks.

The other interesting thing about this opera was the demographics of the audience. I think Sarah was about the fourth youngest person, and I may have been the fifth, out of the several hundred who showed up for the pre-show talk. Oh, and there was a special line for Groupon ticketholders - and guess what? There were all the younger people after all...

In the end it was an artistic event which I wanted to see and it was a definite "experience". But was it worth the ticket price? After all, if I want to see Satyagraha later this year, I can fly to New York and see it live with expensive tickets, or I can pay a tenner and see it in the cinema. The question here is, what is a viable markup to pay for (a) the experience, live, on a big stage, surrounded by the sound and spectacle, and enjoying being part of an elite sharing that experience, and (b) investing in and enabling that experience, and paying into the profit pool which allows culture to take subsequent risks, having myself profited in the past from people doing exactly that? I'm a believer in progressive taxes and costs; as someone with money and (if you ask enough people) apparently with taste, isn't it right that I ought to ante up for the high culture, rather than get away with paying Groupon rates or watching it on the screen? I guess - although it's a sadly expensive principle, and I wish I had enjoyed the specific show as much as I was hoping to... but then, that was a lot, and I expect I should be pleased I enjoyed it as much as I did. It's just a touch disappointing that it wasn't the most excellent experience of the last however-many years, and perhaps it's a reason not to listen too excessively to a soundtrack (in this case, nearly fifteen years) before seeing a show. And yet, Sarah had been waiting for nineteen years to see "Falsettos", and when we saw it it was practically perfect. As usual, my attempts to find a poignant and absolute truth just in time for the final paragraph get nowhere fast. Drat it.

The Jaysmiths Hit California (part three): panda panda panda

I've been known as Panda for over ten years. I'm not clear on why. I mean, obviously, yes, I like pandas, I have various stuffed pandas, my non-GilJaysmith usernames are typically panda-related, and everyone calls me Panda, and I refer to myself as Panda, and wear panda-related t-shirts. But I don't remember when that decision was made, to effectively change my social identity to 'Panda'. It must have been before 2001, when I was working at The Creative Assembly and using 'Stunt Panda' as my in-game nickname for our ferocious lunchtime sessions of Midtown Madness. In fact I think it was before 2000, as Sarah specified that I had to change my name before we got married, and she forebade me from changing it to 'Gil Panda'.

In case it sounds like she was just making demands on the fly, I should explain. 'Gil Jaysmith' isn't my birthname; I invented it, when I was around 20 years old, and I used it for pretty much everything except legal purposes until Sarah pointed out that it would be a pain in the ass for her to get married and become a Johnson-Smith and then have to change everything again to become Jaysmith. So I did the Deed Poll thing, and in early 2000, for I think exactly fifty quid, I obtained a document affirming that my legal name was now Gil Jaysmith.

But I was born Gil Johnson-Smith. It may have been my father's name but as a painter and decorator he went by George Smith to most people, giving me an unexpected early insight into how names really work. It's not just your name, you see, and on the far horizon of this argument, it's not your name at all; it's a combination of what your parents called you and how other people parse it. Accepting your name means accepting your history, and accepting that how it sounds to you and how it sounds to other people are entirely different things, and often bowing to the opinions of others. Johnson-Smith, you see, was not a good populist name for a house-painter and interior decorator (although don't read too much into that label; in the 1970s it just meant "also knows how to put up wallpaper"). So my father went by Smith. His ads in the local paper were emblazoned "G J S", mind you, but that all-important hyphen was missing. My mother claimed to me, on more than one occasion, that when they had set up their joint bank account, the bank manager ("the bank manager"... you can tell this story dates from the 50s) had asked them whether "Johnson Smith" was hyphenated, and she told him "Only if you have enough ink". My mother, the joker. She still hasn't given me a clear answer on why some coats button up on the right and others on the left, either.

At age ten, I got an Assisted Place at Exeter School. Assisted Places, long gone I expect, were a government way to enable access for poor families to elite higher education, like scholarships but funded by the local council rather than by the school itself. At Exeter School a double-barrelled name was nothing special; Damien Gardner-Thorpe was one fellow pupil. At a boys' school like that, your surname is your only name for seven years, even with plenty of your friends: Adams (Chris), Woodhouse (Anthony and Andrew), Griffiths (Tim). It's one reason why I sometimes default to using someone's surname; some people don't like it (Kim) and others just frown, wondering why I wouldn't use their first name when I know it. Yes, but there might be more than one of you in the room...

(I was unusual that I didn't have a middle name. Neither my sister, the equally tersely-named Jan - and no, neither Jan nor Gil are short for anything, they're just short - nor I have any extra names to put out there. I don't know why. It's possibly because we don't have a huge extended family... in fact, with the number of deaths we have, my family is now wackily small, just my mother, my sister, and three cousins left that I know of - plus maybe some second cousins and whatever, but my father rejected his entire Northern family as soon as he could and moved to London. Presumably this meant fewer people to please; I didn't find out that middle names are a tool for pleasing and placating relatives until only a few years ago. I thought they were just a backup plan in case you decided you liked the name 'John' so much that you gave it to all three of your songs, or whatever. In Ireland, you may not know this, but everyone has to please the Holy Mother, so all kids, even the boys, get 'Mary' as a middle name. Stupid fucking notion if you ask me, although I realize that's a cheap and safe shot, as the Virgin Mary is not known for throwing thunderbolts.)

Anyway, for my teenage years, Johnson-Smith was perforce my name. You haven't lived until you've been carrying something heavy for a teacher, you drop it, and he rounds on you with the announcement: "You prat, Johnson-Smith!" It's living the Harry Potter dream; J.K. Rowling is just continuing the long tradition of English school stories, which for girls include the epic Chalet School series and for boys could be said to have started with Kipling's fucking awesome "Stalky and co." Your first name is for your mother to use, and your siblings perhaps, but not for MEN; MEN use their surnames, just like they do at work ("Good work, Rice-Jones!") and as YOUNG MEN you will be trained to respond to your surname, your true name, your family name. Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir.

It wasn't until I went to university that I followed the audacious strategy of shortening that family name. At university, you see, there are Hippies, Foreigners, and other nefarious types, including GIRLS, who don't play by the rules, and who use first names, or who have such epic names, sometimes written in funny directions, that the regal-sounding "Johnson-Smith" suddenly seems tremendously out of touch. Insufficiently 'street', mate. A bit snooty if you ask me. What the fuck's up with that hyphen, squire, too much ink in the pen? Breezed in here on four A's from a private school did we? (Although as it happens I can cheerfully report that my academic prowess took a distinct hit as I passed age 16, and I ended up getting three Bs and a C for my A-levels. Probably something to do with glandular fever and writing computer games when I should've been studying.) So I invented 'Jaysmith' as a shorter version, not with any great credo in mind, simply as camouflage. It's not like I'm actually upper-class; in fact if you look at my family's income, they barely earned enough money to pay tax since the year before I was born. But they had been high-earners in the 1950s, and in England everyone desperately wanted to look higher-class than they were, because that's where the money was, stupid; in being accepted, in escaping whatever shit you were born in. In running away from your Northern family and learning how to speak Received Pronunciation, BBC English, rather than sounding like a stupid Geordie who knows the words to "When The Boat Comes In". In watching the BBC rather than ITV, because ITV is for people who live in council houses. (The imported scifi shows I missed because of this rule... sigh.) In pleasing authority, because authority is watching your life and your career with interest.

Undercover as Gil Jaysmith, I watched the peasants and peons and the politically-informed and the drunks and the well-read and the honest and the weird with interest, and slowly became them; it's what your college life is supposed to do, to make you into a better human being. But it wasn't until I filled out a random survey about 'attitudes to your name' that it all fell into place.

Your name is what other people call you. It's what you call yourself. It's your identity; using the maths meaning of that word, it is the same as you. How would you respond if you had a different name? What would you change your name to, if you could? How would you react if people called you by a different name?

Jan had already experimented with this, actually, in her mildly rebellious teenage years. She announced to the world - in our house - that from this point on she would be known as Laura. She signed her stories by that name, she persuaded some of her friends to start using the name, and then she fell down a slope and injured her foot and my father called her Laura Limping for a week and that pretty much destroyed the credibility of 'Laura'. Looking back on that, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that he took the official change to 'Jaysmith' a bit badly, but by that point he was dying and I wasn't talking to them enough so I never really knew. Kids, always make sure there's a responsible adult in the room before trying this shit.

As for how you would react if people called you by a different name, everyone knows this already, but no-one admits to the pain. It's what happens in the playground, for starters; there are websites which will suggest the playground names your kid will endure, given the name you type in. In adult life, until recently, it was also entirely up to the environment you entered, and not you. "Oh, we already have two Junes here, we'll call you Junie," they told my mother in school. In the office, she was Miss Foy. To my father she was "Trot!" because of the sound of her heels. Who knows what else she was called? She does. And could you correct what people called you, back then, if you were a woman? Perhaps not as easily as you can now. It's verbal bullying, plain and simple; it's the imposition of another's reality on your own, and it hurts. "Political correctness gone mad" has for the most part enabled a world where you're asked what your name is, and how you would like to be called, and this is respected.

(Really, I've never seen a situation of political correctness genuinely "gone mad". Arguably the only real case of it was when Caligula appointed his horse as a Consul, and that was a long time ago, and he only did it the once.)

And yet, name-fuckery still happens. One of the main practical reasons you'd want to change your name from "Gil Johnson-Smith" is that anyone asking for your surname, and told "Johnson-Smith", will parse it as "first name Johnson, yes, thank you, stupid, I just asked for your surname, which is Smith, great" - writes down Smith. So now, very fucking helpfully, they write first name JAY last name Smith, unless we take the cunning method Sarah stole from Sarah Agarwal at work and spell the surname (pausing after the 'm' for added certainty). Well, that solved everything then.

For a long time, and almost entirely in England I have to say, I had the hassle of explaining that 'Gil' only had one 'l', and that no, just because someone else had written it with two 'l's, that didn't mean I was female. They've gotten that straight much quicker in Canada, presumably because the more multicultural your population, the more carefully you're encouraged to listen to and respect people's names. Suggestive, certainly, considering how culturally linear England was for so long, and how repressed so many of us turn out to be. (England has a long history of nodding politely at foreign names and pronouncing them as it pleases. It wasn't long ago that I found out that 'Genevieve' isn't pronounced 'Jen-Eh-Veave'. Although, I did meet a Niamh in primary school, and I bet most of you don't know how to pronounce that. I can only imagine the levels of reverse-schadenfreude - "Oh, you think YOU had problems?" - in any article she, or a dozen friends I know now, might write in response to this...)

What would you call yourself, if you could cut the apron strings? If you looked at the name your parents had chosen for you, and at the surname which history had slowly formed from the profession your male ancestors followed centuries ago? If you threw it off as a slave name, and created your own future? If your name reflected who you are, and not a sound your parents happened to like, or a fat and ugly relative who had paid for the trousseau? How does it feel to be called after an actress who made a popular movie that year, or named as a joke, or by parents on drugs? If your name is stupid, are you stupid?

What happened to Gil Johnson-Smith at the moment he changed his name, and when was that moment? When he started his own journey, when he first thought of that name, when he signed the deed poll... or when he effectively abandoned that name too, and started going by 'Panda'? Is it only real once you break away from it? Is Gil Johnson-Smith only alive in the minds of people I knew at primary and secondary school? I wonder how many people haven't been able to track me down because of that little jink.

There are so many battles we win just by waiting. At age 41 I'm Gil Jaysmith, legally and to basically everyone who knows me, and I don't have to sit and wince in silence if someone screws it up. But I still do, and sometimes I don't correct them, because yes, the whole point is that you have the right to be called what you want... but now I've accessed the cheeky karmic attitude that if they screw it up despite being told, it's their problem. Or so I tell myself. But really it's still me wincing inside, twenty-five years down the line from being bullied and renamed and relabelled, from being an Assisted Place pupil, from raising my head out of the gutter and daring to sit with the rich folks' kids. ("How many cars do you have in your family, Johnson-Smith?" "None, sir.")

Happily, I only really think about this shit when I'm writing a philosophical preamble to the real news of the day, which is that on Saturday March 26th 2011, we went to San Diego Zoo and I finally saw real live pandas, not in theory, not in pictures, not on a webcam, but right there twenty-five feet in front of me. And it was a wonderful, wonderful moment. Of course, in a shock development, the bigger of the two pandas in their enclosure was asleep. The smaller was padding around in the heat, occasionally standing in the shallow pool. Pacing is a negative behaviour for pandas, so I hoped that he was just circling the enclosure to cool off, rather than because he was unhappy. But later on we went past on the tour bus and the two of them were cheerfully chomping on enough bamboo to... well, to shut a panda up for a few minutes anyway, before you have to get him more.

I still get called 'Gill' at work, sometimes. Or, lately, a couple of people have concluded that my first name is Jay, maybe because there's someone else at work whose first name is Jay. But, through constant references to pandas and through signing myself this way in numerous emails, I have slowly persuaded some if not all of them to acknowledge my Panda label - or is it my Panda essence? I don't know, because although I call myself Panda, and Sarah usually calls me Panda, and everyone around me has indulged and endorsed this behaviour for a long time now... c'mon, I'm not an actual panda, am I? Notwithstanding my perfect emulation of their lifestyle - "eat for fourteen hours straight and sleep the rest away" as the famous song goes. I'm just another human male, known to the grid by various long numerical ids according to what skill sets or facilities I'm trying to access at that time. But if you believe in spiritual essences, maybe I really am a panda, and so I have the right name, after all this time. Of course, I'm just as trapped by the name 'Panda' as I would be by any other name. To break away from it, I would have to make an impressive effort. But for the most part, I like being Panda. It suggests large, cute, fluffy, and endangered, while also authorizing the claws which many people don't know about.

And I'm okay with that, for now.

The Jaysmiths Hit California (part two)

Thursday 24th and Friday 25th...

The schedule on Thursday calls for us to head up to Santa Barbara, where Sarah's aunt Jane has friends called Em and Walt, whom we met last time we were in New York and who generously if randomly offered to put us up in their guest house if we were ever in the area. Sarah tentatively sounded them out on this, and here we go for two nights with them. The GPS takes us along the Interstate, but Sarah isn't having it; our camera, a ten-year veteran and then some, has been a battery-addled failure for a good chunk of that time, and she wants a new one. Today. Now, in fact. So we try the Thousand Oaks Mall, and after a detour for Panda Personal Shopping Services to help her out in Torrid, we ransack the place looking for cameras. None. None at all. Guest Services directs us up the road to Best Buy. Nuh. Really? OK. Fortunately honour is satisfied in the Best of Buys, as you might hope from its name, and we come out with a camera, a small and cheap Kodak (Sarah is so Kodak) yet so futuristic that this freaky little thing can spot faces and will then auto-tag them in the future. WTF. It's smaller than my hand. Not that my hand can do that... although I suppose it would have to learn to, if I was blind... but just rewind to that WTF for a moment, and add this camera to the list of fabulous stuff which is now everyday, and not just some gimmick from "Tomorrow's World". So casually ubiquitous... but not, as we saw on a hoarding advertising a new car, "Unbiquitous", which is one of those portmanteau words which sure makes me want to port someone's manteau...

Some of Santa Barbara's hillside habs put even Hollywood to shame. These people are money. It turn outs that some of these places were swept away in the fires a couple of years ago; they're already rebuilt. $20m houses are bought and demolished so replacement $30m houses can be erected. Architects build places for themselves here - then get divorced and have to move out. A former chairman of Sprint lives here. Downtown, there's an estate next to the Santa Barbara zoo which looks to be about the same size and is owned but not occupied by an English centenarian who they're trying to persuade to sell to the town. There are homeless people here too, mind you, but as Em puts it, "if you're homeless, why not do it here, where the weather's nice?" (In a bizarre progressive measure amidst all this money, the homeless people who sleep under a giant tree in town are allowed to use it as a mailing address, bypassing at a stroke the biggest problem for anyone trying to escape homelessness - no deliverable address.)

Fifteen or even ten years ago I would have had big philosophical problems with this neighbourhood, but these days, whatever. Life is now officially too short for me to protest rich people having money, as long as they pay their taxes and act responsibly with it. I was pleased to read Joanne Rowling ranting in the Guardian about how she wouldn't leave England and would pay her taxes like a good citizen because she had benefited from the NHS when she was broke and she believed her good fortune should be taxed just like anyone else's. Hurrah for her. I have no idea about Walt and Em's taxation position; I'm going to assume the best. I will say the roads are better in Santa Barbara than they are in Hollywood, and we didn't see any private roads. But there are some dangerous ones: Walt and Em live way up the side of the hill, on a road which hairpins in numerous places and which offers more than one opportunity to drive into a three-hundred-foot gully. Jhwalee! However, gully drive-ins were avoided. Just about.

We relaxed for the rest of Thursday and then had a long... a v long... guided tour of Santa Barbara with Em on Friday. Did you know Father Junipero Serra instigated a trail of twenty-one missions along the Californian coast nearly 250 years ago to bring some much-needed Catholicism to the savage Native Americans of the province? Well now you do. The place has been demolished by earthquake before now, but religious stuff always gets rebuilt better than ever in the end. There's a museum distributed through the Mission with time-worn relics, including musical instruments (Native Americans can be taught basic instrument-playing and four-part harmony, Deo Gratia) and some rather nice statuary in the church. It all looks a bit Potemkin, mind you; it doesn't reek history, rather it looks like Zorro will strike at any moment, and then someone will holler "Cut!"

It was impossibly sunny, that day, against expectations (my mother's weather-controlling Bear strikes again) and after seeing the Mission we saw the downtown courthouse, which has impeccable views across the whole of the town. Really strange: the town clearly has plenty of beautification ordnances, because the tallest building in town is a matter of four or five storeys, and almost all roofing is the same tiling in terra-cotta, and the buildings themselves seem to be slouched in a haze of greenery, sharks in the jungle, red jostling red in the green. Trees here are fucking tall when they want to be; right in front of the south view there are two brands of tree which cheerfully match the courthouse and appear quite ready to keep pace if they try building anything else. Most cities look strange when you look down on them because you can see all the rooftop heterogeny they try to conceal behind carefully-regulated and matched-up two-storey facades; Santa Barbara looks downright weird in its coherency, like a carefully-edited novel, showing no signs of having been agonized over for anything longer than perhaps a day. You could almost imagine the place was a pop-up book which came into being like "Dark City" but in broad daylight. It's impressive. But the dreamtown is at risk; according to Em, some long-time privately-owned shops are dying off, to be replaced by American Apparel, British and Irish pubs (never good; always means the ex-pats have arrived) and other indicators of the end of civilization, like Betsey. If all else fails the locals can always set another fire.

The Jaysmiths Hit California (part one of N)

Hello! Remember me? Because I remember you. You're that hypothetical reading person I write blog entries for, and you're about to read another one, again, hypothetically. And that was all the intro you get, so c'mon, start reading.

I'm actually less than two years behind on blogging, which is better than I'd thought, and well under the national average, but I'll cover some of that stuff going forward. For now, Sarah suggested that for various reasons - creativity, sanity, permanent record, can't say "fuck" as often using only the medium of photographs - I should write up how we're enjoying our holiday in Southern California. So that's what this is, and since we got here on the 23rd, I have six days to cover.

Wednesday 23rd...

6:20am flight, with a 4am taxi. So naturally we stayed up till about two; Sarah's sleep cycle is unrecognizable these days, and I left it too late to make a definite decision, with the unpromising result that I was very sleepy in the cab and on the plane. But on the plus side, there tends to be a maximum time I can sleep on flights, and this flight was only a little longer than that time, so I barely noticed it. Which is good, as I hate travelling by air, it's not a compatible and congenial environment for pandas to absorb anything, and its only advantage is that it covers the distance quickly. I'm sure the main reason I don't really like going back to England is the thought of the flight, eating basically two solid days from the vacation time. But LA is in the same time zone, so this was more like a long day than exhausting biorhythm terrorism.

So to collect the rental car, with added GPS. Oh my god, GPS. This wasn't in the initial plan, but James' advice from his recent LA trip was "get one", and I can only imagine the adventures we'd have been on without it. "Where's my fucking jetpack?" goes the common refrain, which I'm even going to use in a song soon... well, "where's our fucking destination?" would have been a far more common utterance this week but for this little sweetheart. These are the days of miracle and wonder, and our GPS -although occasionally in need of forgiveness for its brash confusion about car parks and its insistence on "recalculating" when you're going straight down the very road it stipulated five seconds earlier - is a miracle and a wonder all in one. What we need now is GPS for rabbits...

First we trundled down to Venice Beach, seeing as how we had an urgent need for food. Venice Beach, mmmmm. Biiiig beach... lotsa skateboarders, plenty of surfers, cyclists rowdily barracking a clump of peds to get out of their lane, a big blue mural on the side of a high building a couple of blocks inland, and the Sidewalk Cafe, paired with a bookshop and offering tolerable nosh. I've never really been to an American beach town... or at least, not to the beach part; when I was with Abby we went around Jensen Beach a bit, but I only clearly remember the boardwalk at Saturn, which wasn't like this at all. This was like "John From Cincinatti", with hordes of bike and surf shops, and sunny dropouts teaching six-year-olds how to flip their skateboards. All very non-Jaysmith, really, so we finished our food and retreated, but not before Sarah had found a very impressive breakwater which produced enormous serial splashes every thirty seconds or so. So, happy bunny there, although I had to forbid her to climb it and strike a "Titanic" pose moments before being saturated.

Inland, and seeing as how we're here with a car, a GPS (tee!) and time to kill before the hotel will take us, we decide to go see the HOLLYWOOD sign. It turns out that this is up a terribly damaged road on which there are dire apartment blocks as well as the most extravagant six-storey blank-walled glass-topped mountainside-crawlers you can imagine. Jesus. Spend a few bucks on your fucking road, will you. No doubt this is intended to dispel sightseers like us - well it won't work, rich people! And sure enough, there was the sign... visible from the bottom of the hill, it's far enough away that it doesn't really get too much bigger by the time you get to the cafe and the designated viewing point. I'm finally looking at the famous HOLLYWOOD sign. And do you know the weird thing? It's just a sign, kinda in the middle of nowhere, but it's laden with value and meaning for an English kid... and yet... it really is just a sign, in the middle of nowhere... and you know what else? All that glamour and money looks real faded... a currency no-one spends anymore, half those houses probably empty, the real people living in those crappy-looking apartments which could have been anywhere in the world but which happen to have a view up the hill to the Sign Of Movie Dreams. Huh. Still, now, been there done that.

We can probably head to the hotel now, as Sarah is flagging a bit, so off we go through more downtown LA... and as the GPS delivers us, we find that the exact block containing our hotel has been cordoned off. A little phone exploration determines that there was a fatal crash earlier. We park in the Home Depot opposite, then find we can cross from there into the hotel car park, cunningly avoiding and possibly annoying all the cops. But whatever. Here we are in LA, in our hotel, and we have a nap, because boy, do we need one. So our heads hit the pillows, and we're sleeping... on, wait for it, Sunset Boulevard. HA! Like I wouldn't want a hotel with that address. But see previous paragraph for just how impressive Sunset Boulevard actually is in 2011. It has a few touches of Pender or Hastings, and plenty of general decrepitude. People walking past have that "I live in Aldershot" brittle shell to them, as though teasing them about the former glories of their hometown will get you either stabbed or sobbed on... or possibly a third option, simple rejection of whatever some romantic white boy thinks of LA. This part of town isn't film country, despite its label. These are all the people who are actually waiters and bank tellers, not actors pretending.

And, later that night: Panda Express! Which is not some kind of sex thing. In fact there is a chain of fast-ish food joints by that name, serving extremely acceptable trays of rice and meat, two of which are nommed in due course - after we've been up and down on foot for a few blocks to establish there's nothing else we can eat. Panda Express may prove to be a reliable discovery...

To be continued...