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.