The Jaysmiths Hit Canada

Games and art

2011-05-05T22:53:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-02T16:04:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-01T00:02:00.000-07:00

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)

2011-03-29T23:09:00.001-07:00

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)

2011-03-28T17:44:00.000-07:00

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...

Much easier not to finish...

2009-09-28T04:48:00.000-07:00

Deadline: Sunday!

I wrote the lyrics for the last song in One Plus One: The Musical this afternoon. We have two songs to finish off, musically speaking, and then a whole bunch of editing and recording tasks, some of which we still haven't figured out (who to get to sing what, mostly). But even with a prolonged squint at the to-do list, I can't find more than 40 things to do, half of which are fairly trivial mechanical chores. It's entirely possible that we'll have at least something approaching the complete package ready for people to hear in New York, and almost certainly it'll be finished not long after we return.

To which all I can say is: phew. Well, not quite all. Just as anyone who doesn't start writing can spend their time saying "I want to be a writer", it's suspiciously easy to cower behind the shield of an unfinished work, even if it's really, really close to being finished, and explain that the work is still under development, there's still work to do on it - anything to stop other people hearing it.

Now it might seem unlikely (especially to certain people who've wound up without warning in the audience every time we premiere a song) that we would be feeling that way, but nevertheless: this is bloody scary. We are close to finishing a musical. An actual, complete, it's-a-musical musical. As opposed to the attempts we've made in the past to hawk our music ("Your songs sound so theatrical! You should write a musical!") this is going to be much easier, because it is a musical, and it has themes, a plot, characters, and a bunch of related songs with intentional musical cohesion and all that jazz. (Well actually not that much jazz, fortunately.)

And this is terrifying, because as opposed to when you write a single song, which could be for a laugh, on a bet, for a specific person's entertainment, or just to prove to yourself that you can do it... you do not write an entire musical for no reason other than to file it under "things you have proven you can do". If you are writing a musical for that sole purpose, you are a muppet.

So we are about to have a musical, and the only option, when you deliberately generate that kind of artistic artefact, is attempt to do something with it. This means reading it (a lot) for editing purposes, letting other people read it, having group readings, workshopping it, sending it to people for consideration, letting singers hear and comment on the songs... oh goddddd.

Scary. And avoidable. All we have to do is keep claiming it's not finished.

Well it's not "not finished". It's two bits of music and a quick pass over the script away from being finished, in the sense that further work on it would be prevarication rather than productive, and we now have to bite the bullet and hand in our homework for the last year.

I wasn't expecting it to be what it's turned out to be; that's great, as it's turned out better. There are songs we didn't plan for which have taken centre stage, and there are songs on the discard pile which I thought were destined for stardom. And the ending that's been in place for six months got somewhat revised and made five times better thanks to an idea I had yesterday.

However, now we have to cross our fingers, grit our teeth, put our hands on our sword hilts, and let other people offer commentary. The bastards. Anything could happen in the next month, including - but not limited to - our year's work being dismissed after closer inspection than our careful promotion of individual songs has previously allowed. Argh.

Fortunately I have great faith in Sarah's music, and my lyrics are, frankly, made of 99% win. (I allow myself room for growth.) But if this weren't the case, I'd be worried.

I should probably go to bed. But I am very happy, at least, that we are at the point where we can start to unveil the full work and roll it out from behind the shield of "under development". The next few months are going to be interesting, and probably bloody hard work, not just in terms of doing stuff, but because that stuff will be at the behest of other people, some of whom may, I grudgingly note, know better than us. My hope is that we can find those people, steal their ideas, surreptitiously bludgeon them to death, and proceed to the next checkpoint without losing faith in our collective genius. Well, we'll find out, won't we, what what?

This is One Plus One: The Musical's homepage, or there's this Facebook group, which has some of the songs.

Something / Anything

2009-09-26T23:17:00.000-07:00

As a late birthday present for Sarah we had a Day Of Doing Stuff. She met with Ashley for Broadway Chorus organization while I went for my walk on the Sun Run course. (Feet to legs: we hurt. Legs to feet: we hurt too. Feet & legs to brain: will you knock that the hell off?) Then we:

got a co-op car for the first time in months
raided Safeway
put the car back and sauntered along Robson
investigated options for new mobile phones
made a decision but couldn't implement it because of stock shortages
wandered further down to Hon's but it was sardines in there
walked back up to Red Chicken on Bute and had a very satisfying meal - chicken teriyaki for Sarah, an enormous plate of spicy BBQ chicken for me.

Brilliantly, they gave me disposable plastic gloves with which to eat the chicken. I ended up with clean hands but chicken-stained face / drink cup / plates / cutlery / table. Sarah only narrowly escaped chicken stains herself. I felt like a three-year-old at one of those Paint A Mug shops. But in a good way.

So that was nice, and the Giant Bleaky Monster has receded somewhat.

Now we are freshly clean after Hot Tub, and I'm considering writing the last song for 1+1. I'll let you know how that goes.

Awesome picture taken on Robson this evening, must remember to upload it next time we bother to plug the phone in.

31 Days Of Panda, to July 31

2009-08-01T03:23:00.000-07:00

Well.

It's 3:23am as I type this, and I think I can honestly say I have not discovered that I seriously lack for willpower. This is a joke, though, the punchline being that I already knew I seriously lack for willpower. What I have discovered is how amazingly difficult it is to do 31 days of anything, including being myself, or at least the myself I would rather be. Therefore, I propose another attempt...

What I did achieve during July:
- managed to stop biting my fingernails for about a week
- walking to and from work maybe half the days
- about three gym trips
- a spurt of very long walks, aborted by my sandals deciding to snap (while on a very short walk, fortunately)
- a little self-control, but again only for about a week or ten days
- getting One Plus One to about 90% complete
- an improved diet at work - for about half the month. But also, a lot of meals out...
- blogging on a reasonably regular basis

Hmmm. Well, it could've been worse. Of course my only valid defence is that I was worried a lot about Sarah. But fortunately, her health seems to be improving each day - she's still in pain, but painkillers are now actually working (first time for everything, especially in these last three months), and we're optimistic that she'll manage to get through "Rent" and reach the end of August without being, y'know, dead or anything like that. (Don't anyone read this back to me if it turns out we were wrong.)

So, 31 Days Of Panda restarts for August.

And I have a new X-Box 360. Tee! :)

31 Days Of Panda - er, covering up to day 27...

2009-07-28T00:30:00.000-07:00

... 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.

31 Days Of Panda, days 20-22 (FAIL)

2009-07-22T22:00:00.000-07:00

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:

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.

And amongst all that lot, I listened to one other album. But before I mention what it was... you might be asking yourself, "How the hell" - and maybe even "Why the hell" - "... does Gil listen to so much music and find himself unable to recall it mere hours later? Shouldn't he enjoy what he hears a bit more? Shouldn't he listen more carefully and then he'd be able to remember and tell us what happened on that album? Is he really telling us that Moby made an entire album and forgot to make it even remotely interesting?"

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.

31 Days Of Panda, day 19 (WIN)

2009-07-19T23:30:00.000-07:00

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.

31 Days Of Panda, day 18 (WIN)

2009-07-19T00:03:00.000-07:00

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.

31 Days Of Panda, days 16-17 (WIN?)

2009-07-18T14:29:00.000-07:00

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...

31 Days Of Panda, day 15 (HMMM)

2009-07-16T00:01:00.000-07:00

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.

31 Days Of Panda, days 13-14

2009-07-14T23:43:00.000-07:00

... and therefore...

31 Days Of Panda, day twelve (FAIL)

2009-07-13T02:35:00.001-07:00

Sarah back in hospital.

"Shittre!" as old Pere Ubu used to say.

31 Days Of Panda, day eleven (WIN)

2009-07-12T01:58:00.000-07:00

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.

31 Days Of Panda, day ten (MODERATE WIN)

2009-07-11T00:03:00.000-07:00

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.

31 Days Of Panda, day nine (FAIL)

2009-07-09T23:15:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-07-09T00:53:00.001-07:00

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.

31 Days Of Panda, day seven (WIN against considerable odds)

2009-07-07T22:33:00.000-07:00

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.

31 Days Of Panda, day six (WIN!)

2009-07-06T23:01:00.001-07:00

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 :)

31 Days Of Panda, day five (WIN?)

2009-07-05T22:37:00.000-07:00

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 :)

31 Days Of Panda, day four (WIN!)

2009-07-05T02:10:00.001-07:00

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...

31 Days Of Panda, day three (FAIL?) (WIN?)

2009-07-04T13:46:00.000-07:00

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...

31 Days Of Panda, day two (FAIL)

2009-07-03T11:52:00.000-07:00

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...

31 Days Of Panda, day one

2009-07-02T01:28:00.000-07:00

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:

"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.

Leading us to "13", which has exactly three recognizable songs on it, and everything else sounds suspiciously like they made it all up in the studio and then said, "Oh what the hell, master it, we're bored now." If you've ever wanted to hear what a band sounds like while wilfully poisoning its previous fans a million at a time with every track, boy, do you need this album.

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:

31 Days Of Panda, day zero

2009-07-01T00:32:00.000-07:00

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.

Stubby ears rotate...

2009-06-30T00:29:00.001-07:00

... and the panda rises from the dust once more to try to blog. Feh, I hear you say, and feh I say too. But I need to chill out on a daily basis in July and so I will attempt to make blogging a part of that chill-out process.

A brief summary of the year so far, for my own benefit (I forget entire months at a time):

January: I had a terrible bout of chickenpox and spent almost the whole month at home, contagious and grim-looking, while Sarah played piano for The Musical Of Musicals (The Musical) and fretted about leaving me alone so much. However, I wrote 30,000 words of a novel and got reasonably good at Guitar Hero III, so it's not like it was a total write-off of the time.
February: can't remember. See? Sarah was working at Cap College, playing piano for their musical theatre course, this much is true.
March: errrr... more of February, most likely.
April: ah, now this one I know. Sarah played piano for tick... tick... BOOM! for three weeks. Meanwhile we were rehearsing for Broadway Chorus's summer show.
May: supposedly Sarah's month off, and we were intending to relax together and be very creative regarding our in-progress musical One Plus One. Unfortunately - as if it would be fortunately, given what I'm about to describe - Sarah acquired some kind of abdominal pain, which might have been an ulcer, and is at this moment still there even if it's not an ulcer. Nine fairly-regularly-spaced trips to Emergency have proven necessary since May 1st. A big shout out to James for driving us there and back at all hours.
June: Broadway Chorus, which was fantastic fun, but also nearly crippled Sarah (a trip to Emergency from 1am till 5am Saturday morning, between the Friday night and Saturday night shows - James and I were a bit exhausted...). And now, we are enjoying an Attack Of The Twines for the next fortnight or so.

But despite all the good things, I's just a littul stresst, especially since May. So I decided today (after our most recent trip to Emergency, which was last night, and my consequent exhaustion and depression today) that I need to take action. A nice ego-loss and physio-psychic detox is called for. After all, it's the summer of my 39th year. I should make a bit of an effort to fix up some stuff. And a small (and probably therefore doable) part of that can be a commitment to blog. Je vais tryer, anyway.

So here is advance warning of some of the things I'm planning for myself:

Self-image: trivial, but also important. It's really time I stopped biting my fingernails. And for that matter, ripping at my toenails. I believe I have moisturizer; I should use it. And Sarah's just given me a very nice haircut; I should stay clean-shaven, otherwise I'm going to look like a hairy egg. Never good.
Physical fitness: inspired by the, er, inspiring (insane would also work) dedication of Kate Douglass, whose 30 days of yoga come to an end tomorrow, I'm going to try for 31 days of physical fitness. But going to the gym every day wouldn't be wise, as I understand it, so the plan is to walk to or from work every working day, and go to the gym three times a week for sure, four if I can manage it.
Self-control: I download a lot of crap, often just for the sake of downloading or because I optimistically predict I'll have time for it, or will make time for it. All this actually does is make me look at piles of crap and feel depressed, leading to more downloading. (For downloading, read also "buying stuff", "getting books from the library", "promising to read something interesting on the internet", "playing games"... procrastination-a-go-go.) So this month: none of that. I'll put, if not a massive dent, at least a small and perfectly formed dint in the mountain of stuff that forms my life. I already have my A-Z Of Musicals listening project to continue, but all this gym and exercise time should also mean I can listen to a lot more pop music.
Creativity: One Plus One is going well, but it already needs editing, not to mention 1/3 of the songs are still to be written. We have some plans for moving forward with it, but they need the script to be either finished or thoroughly blocked out. So, OK, that's the aim for the month: progress it to the point where someone could read the script and get the whole story, except where some genius-in-waiting lyrics happen to be missing (but at least there'll be a summary of what they'll say).
Relaxing: Sarah is in a lot of pain. But she's right: it's only pain. Fingers crossed, there's nothing wrong with her which the correct diagnosis and then hopefully a simple operation won't fix. And then she'll be better. So I'm going to smile. Through gritted teeth, sometimes, but I'm going to look at the mountains and the water and the skyscrapers and the people around me, and remember how amazing it is that we have a life (with bonus pain) in Vancouver, rather than in England. And instead of cursing the cyclist who tries to run me down, and scowling at the people who don't wait for me to get off the Skytrain, and fearing what I might not be able to get done at work today, I'm going to breathe slowly, meditate on our general good fortune and excellence, and take the road less travelled by pandas, namely the cheerful one.
Diet: pandas are notorious for having a bad diet. Show week also never helps... it all goes a bit Pete Tong, frankly. Add lack of sleep and the resulting "I gotta go now"-ness to the next day's life and meal-planning... hmmm. The Incredible Hercules who was the marvel of the stage a mere fortnight ago is potentially getting a little pudgy again, and exercise won't fix all of that. I'm reasonably good with the quality of my food at work (it's free, and you have to work quite hard to find unhealthy stuff) but it's easy to overdo the quantity. And then I come home, and am, frankly, a Bad Panda. So: no chocolate, less bread, something for breakfast every day, more fruit, and a Restrained Approach To Drinking With James.

This is a hefty assignment (and it's not complete, for privacy's sake) - and if I were coming to it completely cold, I would balk and indeed scoff at my chances of taking it on. But, I feel relatively optimistic, because I've done all the various parts of it at earlier times this year, either without a choice (while ill) or with great willpower (while dieting for the show in Feb/Mar). So, y'know, I stand something of a chance, I think.

We will see!

And one of the things we'll see is whether I can document it here. Vive le panda, and vive his willpower.

The Dust Settles

2008-08-20T00:15:00.000-07:00

Well, for those not monitoring my cryptic Facebook status or aware of the recent events in the games industry: I still have a job, but life has been somewhat stressful for the last month.

Vivendi (the French company which owned Radical and many other game studios) and Activision have been discussing a merger for a while. When the merger went through in July, Activision exercised their powers, as new owners of the Vivendi studios, to review the games under development and align the studios to Activision's market strategy.

This is business-speak. What actually happened in more readable terms was that Activision cancelled two of the four games Radical was working on, and Radical was told the number of people that it was allowed to still employ to work on the games we've got.

This was not unexpected. New owners like to sack a quarter of the staff just to show they're there. And there's a well-known adage: "If it's not your money, it's not your company." This is typical if you're a worker at a company, bad if your company is owned or relies upon another company, and worse if you are now a subsidiary of a publicly-traded company, because, while Radical's money was really usually Vivendi's money, the situation now is that it isn't Radical's money and it isn't even Activision's money, it's the stock market's. And the stock market is very definite about what it likes. It likes more money, now. The motive for the merger, in my view, was that Activision wanted to get its hands on Blizzard, the Vivendi-owned company which makes the Warcraft and World Of Warcraft games. (For those who don't know games: Blizzard is essentially a 24-hour printing press which prints free money for whoever owns it.) Activision merged with Vivendi to get Blizzard, and everything else which came with the deal was either gravy - or disposable.

So, Radical sent many people home (on pay) for a few weeks while they sorted out plans, and last Thursday they called us all in and let us know who was staying and who was going. The gannets were out in force almost immediately the takeover had completed; for example, in an act of utter cheekiness - and I use such a mild word only because my mother reads these blogs, otherwise I'd use another words beginning with 'c' - Rockstar Games spray-painted their logo on the sidewalk in front of our building the week before the jobs were cut. Radical has actually processed the cuts very well, organizing all sorts of outplacement options, and Vancouver still needs plenty of games people, so fewer people are unhappy than you'd think.

Personally I was petrified, for one reason only. The day that it became clear cuts would happen, I had nightmares of being laid off one day and of Immigration officials arriving at our apartment the next, ordering us onto a plane at our expense. Fortunately it transpired that even if I lost my job at Radical, my work visa is actually good for living here until it expires (next February), and in that time I could apply for another job and get a replacement work permit. And in any case, I didn't lose my job - Panda liiiiiives.

But it was nerve-wracking.

So after 18 months of working on a game, it's been cancelled from under me - the first time that's happened to me in games, although not in programming. And now I'm on something else. It's all very exciting, and super-secret-squirrel. But it looks like I still have a career at Radical if I want one. And I do.

Phew.

Being A Good Panda

2008-08-13T01:39:00.000-07:00

Sometimes virtue is its own reward. And sometimes there's potential you'll get a gig out of it. 'nuff said.

We were virtuous today in that we booked our medical exams (next week) and had photos taken for them. This is the next stage in our application for permanent residence in Canada. Important points here: Radical is sponsoring my application, it takes ages to go through, and it comprises numerous bits and pieces... one of which is a police check, one of which is a thorough medical.

The police check has given us some irritation. We both need a report from the UK police force, and Sarah also one from Ireland, to assert that we are basically Good People. The Irish one is free and requires just a form to be filled out. The English one costs $70 and requires, amongst other things, a photograph signed on the back by a professional who has known us for two years. Well, that's just great isn't it? Because that really facilitates an application for residence in Canada which has to be made before my two-year visa expires. And even though we can use people back in the UK, what is this, the 1800s? Oh, just get your family doctor to sign it, or your family solicitor - Miss Austen. God, when will this class-ridden claptrap go away? Anyway, onwards to the medical. At least Radical is paying for most of the (quite substantial) cost.

I keep being Facebooked by blasts from the past. A whole bunch of people from Sussex have tracked me down. It's all very friendly and, you know, I remember them and I chuckle at the references, but it's freaky. I never feel like I really lived through the past that I remember. Was I really there? Was that really me? Did I really do those things? I have a window of about twelve months within which I broadly believe I actually did stuff, but my emotional memory is poor, and that probably enables such a big disconnect. I'm uncertain whether I wish this was not the case. But it is almost certainly why I'm so bad at keeping in touch with people once I'm not within sight of them...

You, Sir, Are No Terry Pratchett

2008-08-11T00:58:00.000-07:00

So, sure, not everyone is Terry Pratchett. And 'comedic fantasy' is a tricksy thing. And Pratchett didn't invent it (see Fletcher Pratt, Gordon R. Dickson, and Poul Anderson for what, I presume, are just three predecessors). But there's this guy Robert Rankin whose books have jokey titles and Pratchett-esque summaries on the back. Sure, let's try to blame the marketeers for this: "Ooo! Pratchett-esque summaries sell Pratchett books! Let's try them out on this other guy who might not be at all similar!" And for all I know, Rankin's been writing for longer, but I have no particular journalistic cred to preserve so I amn't even going to check that.

But, dear god, I struggled through his "The Witches Of Chiswick" this last week, and I'm so glad it's over. I heartily anti-recommend it to fans of well-written and amusing fantasy. With a plot that looks like "The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen" and any steampunk book you've ever heard of were involved in a horrible high-speed car crash, and characters who literally leap back into the page at the slightest effort to understand them, this is awful, awful, awful.

And it reads like a lager lout wrote it. Whenever Rankin can't be bothered to think of something, he basically says so in as many words. Jokes about sloppy authors, footnotes highlighting poor jokes, characters alluding to the running gags being perpetrated in neighbouring paragraphs, attempts to appear unpretentious (or rather, attempts, to undercut any accusations of pretension and education)... Rankin reads like he's afraid his mates down the pub will accuse him of being gay if his books don't hold their attention and trigger their trivial senses of humour if opened to a random page in the split-seconds between mouthfuls of beer. This is probably why there's so many postmodernism-is-fun-for-drunk-people references to "Time Cop".

Actually, rereading that last bit makes it sound like I might be sympathising with Rankin for having to write down to his audience. So I should correct that view; without changing my opinion of his target audience, I think he's writing up to it. This is one of the worst books I've read, and I don't have to compare it to Terry Pratchett to say so. JMS once observed that it was difficult to create the future for "Babylon 5" when fans would retort with "But it's been proven that we'll have transporter beams and handheld communicators, haven't you seen Star Trek?" Sure, the subtext of this post may be to accuse myself of being unable to let go of Pratchett's view of comic fantasy. Except, I also like Jasper Fforde, and Bill Willingham's "Fables". So apparently there is room in my head for other ways to be funny and fantastic. Just not for Rankin's, because he is rubbish. Take that! Panda wins.

I'll probably find Jan loves them and thinks they're harmless unpretentious junk now ;-)

This was probably all because the book I read before this disaster was a Joe Haldeman short story collection, which is going to have prepped me for quality. Less grumpy service will be resumed shortly...

(Olympic Frogwatch: Frog didn't get to see any Olympics today because we were busy or out pretty much all afternoon and evening. Tump. He has silently zotted us both as a warning that this will not be an acceptable excuse twice.)

Sleeeeepy Paaaanda

2008-08-10T01:47:00.001-07:00

Chilli & Sage news: we wrote a new song today - or rather I wrote the lyrics for music Sarah wrote last week. But I can't say what it is yet because it's for extremely secret-squirrel purposes. In other C&S news, you'll see I added buttons at the side for you to click and become super fans of the best songwriting duo in... history? The multiverse? Who can say, although I can certainly bombast some more about it if you like. Anyway, click and listen, particularly if you're a Facebook user as it's all integrated, y'know.

Today: We went to Tara's for dinner. I played a little with their kids - Sophia (5) and Rowan (3) - and since we'd brought Pill the Panda with us, there was a certain amount of stuffed monochromatic fun. After dinner I sang "I Want To Be A Panda" for them. But I was very sleepy and we left at about nine. A little hot-tubbing slightly woke me up, although the 20 minutes of treadmill I did before that might have had something to do with it too. Exercising before getting into the pool and tub is disturbingly fun.

Frogwatch 2008: Frog fell off the chair just as we turned on the television; he explained that soon lots of athletes would be similarly falling off things, referring to it as "unsympathetic magic". He then managed to make one gymnast fall off the bars twice in one routine. When you consider that he's watching footage of athletes filmed fifteen hours ago (the time difference between Vancouver and Beijhing), you have to admit: he's good.

Why Frog Likes The Olympics (Friday August 8th)

2008-08-08T23:27:00.000-07:00

First and most important: Chilli & Sage news. We've been very virtuous for the last few weeks, writing new songs, adding exciting new instruments to existing songs, and this week, entering lots of competitions and performing at an open mic - the Cottage Bistro on Main and 29th. This was okay, but as usual people kinda glazed over at the songs with lots of words, and only perked up for "I Want To Be A Panda". But our crusade to convert people to songs with more words will continue... and YOU can help! Tell people to listen to our songs at Chilli and Sage at iLike.com - a site which seems to (a) work and (b) not have limits on songs.

And now for the usual assortment of oddities. Starting with Frog. You may not have met Frog. Frog is about six inches square and an inch high when splayed out in stealth mode, and exists in two shades of green for additional camouflage. We found Frog in the Bristol County Show not long after Sarah moved in with me. And the only other thing you need to know about Frog is that he's... a little violent...

Frog has reached his current level of anarchy by degrees. Some years ago he sent Sarah an email from his Hotmail account (godfrog@hotmail.com, naturally) while she was upstairs, reading "Come downstairs and hug me or I will zot you". A while later she only just stopped him from sending an email to Sky News telling them that they were boring peons and he was going to zot them.

A few years ago Frog discovered that he had my father's talent for predicting the mishaps of Formula One drivers and jockeys, and since then he's mostly externalised his violent streak by zotting innocent athletes from his comfortable position on the arm of Sarah's big leather recliner. So you can imagine how happy he is that the Olympics have started. He's already done a considerable amount of damage to the gymnasts, and when the track and field events start he'll come into his own. If you see any epic fails going on in the pole vault or relay, that was Frog... sorry.

I should mention at this point that we got cable connected last week, after only eighteen months in Canada. This was largely so Sarah could watch the Olympics. It's on right now. Cycling, gymnastics, and ads every ten minutes, most of which are distressingly patriotic ("Pontiac - official car of the Canadian Olympic team"... "Chrysler... official car of the Canadian Olympic team"... er, hold on...), some of them laughably so ("The Canadian Olympic team... working together for victory... just like Brake & Tyre of 4th Avenue"). Of course now we face the prospect of hearing the Canadian team being hyped up as the ultimate contender... which is, at least, more plausible than the equivalent BBC commentary. ("And the British contestant comes in a valiant last, only twenty-nine seconds behind the winner in this 100m sprint, that's a full two seconds faster than at the 1992 Olympics isn't it Brendan?") We (or rather "we") might even win medals. Coo. Go Canada, etc.

I've tried watching some television and oh god, I can't do it anymore, it all looks so rubbish. My attention span may have something to do with it. As someone generally so disinterested in the past that I have trouble remembering to hang my swimming trunks up on the showerhead to dry properly five seconds after getting out of the bathtub, it's increasingly difficult to care enough about books or television for the hour or two that they take to deliver their fun. Give me mono mono gluto gluto, as Chiun used to say... I want it all now, compressed and cut and chopped up for super-fast digestion.

We went to see the fireworks on Saturday. The HSBC Festival Of Light is this annual suite of various national firework displays fired off from a barge in English Bay over the course of several nights, followed by a closing ceremony with excerpts from each show. This year, it being the 150th anniversary of British Columbia (proper old, that is), we also got an eight-minute firework display illustrating the history of the province. Yes, illustrating. I can tell you the next time I do a presentation at work I'll be intercutting it with interpretative pyrotechnics. It added so much to what was essentially a mission statement for the west coast of Canada to see random spontaneous explosions of colour in the sky... ah well. At least the displays were good... er, well, the Canadian one was excellent, with a theme of "sea monster invasion" and some excellent synchronization of spectacular fireworks with some great modern-classical music from various sources including the Godzilla movies. The American one... eh, not so good... bombastic, pompous (my, fireworks can express so many emotions), and set to various well-known American singers and bands, such as Josh Groban and U2. And the Chinese display was okay, but perhaps suffered from the apparent refusal of China to send more than one expert to supervise it - as if Chinese fireworks experts had anything better to be doing right now.

So the fireworks were nice, but the one dark side of Vancouver is that, just as civilization may only be three meals away from chaos, this town is generally only one big event from drunken debauchery. James and I nearly got gaybashed on the bus on the Friday night before the Pride festival weekend, apparently because we prefer to sit with our legs crossed and are therefore clearly gay... and the fireworks brought out the noisiest, scummiest behaviour in a whole load of people. At least when I get drunk I just come home and bore Sarah by repeating everything twice before sleeping on the couch. I don't go out on the street, throw stuff everywhere, call out rudely to other people and act all defensive (and probably also, immediately thereafter, aggressive) if it isn't to their taste. It's annoying as hell because this is spoiling the dreamlike vision of Vancouver which Sarah and I have enjoyed since (before) moving here. Okay, so nowhere on Earth is likely to be truly idyllic. But Vancouver gets it right in so many ways that it's even more shocking and frustrating when it all goes south. Grrrrr.

But I'll finish on an upbeat note, which is that for various reasons I've had most of last week and this week off work. Hopefully more exact news on this will follow soon, but nothing to worry about, anyway.

Kisses and salutations to you all for now :-)

FUN With Your New HEAD (25 July, 2008)

2008-07-25T18:22:00.001-07:00

(I wrote this at work earlier in the week but forgot to post it. Thus its TARDIS-like disregard for the fact that I just posted something else. I could edit it, but... bah. You won't notice.)

... don’t you think time is speeding up? It’s only yesterday evening you were reading the entry for May 1^st, and now look at the calendar. You’re getting old, you know, when you don’t notice time scuttling past like a plague of chronologically-fascinated scorpions.

I thought today I would start talking about our attempts to have “fun”. There’s a famous Thomas M. Disch story called “FUN with your new HEAD” which you can find online in various places, e.g. here (http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/head.html). Similarly, although in an unrelated way, we have recently attempted to do slightly less and enjoy life a little more, after several hectic months of no fun. So what can we report?

Well, our Nintendo Wii is a hoot. And has potential for being great FUN at parties – although we only have two controllers for it at present, and only one plausible party game. The principle of the Wii, you see, is that while the X-Box 360 and the PlayStation 3 have gone for expensive power, the Wii has gone for involvement and a distinctive selling-point: its controllers are motion-sensitive, and games can detect how you’re holding, tilting, and moving them. You’re then supposed to act out the actions which normally would happen on screen at the touch of a button. This might sound like hard work, but it means that for the first time, playing a computer game of tennis actually means serving and playing shots kinda like you would in a real game. It’s not quite the same, and you can cheat and make much smaller moves (and you don’t have to run around, it does that for you) – but Sarah and I have suffered minor cases of tennis elbow from playing too much in one session, which is a change from getting RSI from bending your fingers over a strangely-shaped controller for two hours at a time. Anyway, the Wii isn’t hugely more powerful than the last generation of consoles, but it does have a bunch of fun games. The Twines already have a Wii, so I foresee plenty of tennis when they come over next month. People here have liked it in various measures: James got to grips with it quite quickly, while Kim was lunging so far forward to play some shots that I feared for the TV. But everything and everyone survived, so ‘tis good. Our FUN HEAD factor for the Wii: 8 fun heads out of 10.

More fun. We’re watching the Tom Baker Doctor Who stories, all of them in order. Or at least we’re going to. So far we’ve managed to watch the first one: “Robot”. If you ever wanted a demonstration of J. Michael Straczynski’s comment that UK TV sci-fi had cardboard sets and three-dimensional performances while American TV had the reverse, this is it. Amidst wobbly sets, confronted by a comical robot that looks like Bertie Bassett the lollipop man gone metal, and watching, at one point, a 3” plastic tank being disintegrated in a chromakeyed sequence which looks like it cost all of tuppence-ha’penny to film… nevertheless, the actors are pretty much all delivering committed performances, taking their characters seriously, and carving out strongly-defined roles in the plot. The extras are a bit gormless – all on day release from Rent-A-UNIT-Soldier Ltd – but there’s the Doctor, Sarah Jane, Harry, the Brigadier, Sergeant Benton, Miss Winters, Professor Kettlewell, Jellicoe, and the guy inside the robot. That’s nine lead roles. And there’s time to *breathe*. Four episodes at twenty-two minutes apiece gives you enough space for some essential downtime, and because this considerably predates the New Who with its well-done-but-sometimes-slightly-portentous atmosphere of supreme power and supreme loneliness, the Doctor is, while confused after his regeneration, still intrinsically having fun at all times. Sure, he isn’t up against a universe-challenging foe, just a little matter of a stolen disintegrator gun (Earth tech varies up and down considerably in this show) and then against a neo-Nazi cabal of science-fanatics who have obtained the launch codes for the world’s nuclear weapons from a cabinet minister’s safe because, after all, what country except Britain could be trusted to possess such important info? Slightly ropey plotting, sure, but fun. And of course there’s Tom Baker. Born to play the Doctor, never matched except in occasional flashes from David Tennant. It’s interesting that at the time they cast him, they weren’t sure how he would play the role and whether he’d be into performing stunts, so they wrote in Harry Sullivan to be the clean-cut square-jawed action hero. Within a series they’d clocked that Tom Baker was quite action-packed enough to carry it himself, so Harry got written out (“Think I’ll stick to British Rail from now on, Doctor”). You have to admire the power of reincarnation, though. To carry a show through cast changes as a way of life… wow. So anyway, roll on the rest of Tom Baker’s first series – the impeccably-connected sequence continues on from “Robot” with “The Ark In Space”, “The Sontaran Experiment”, “Genesis Of The Daleks”, and “Revenge Of The Cybermen” – is it any wonder that this is the first series that stands out in my childhood memory as being The One Thing That Made Me Afraid Of Being Sent To Jail, Because They Would Have No Televisions And I Would Miss Doctor Who? Our FUN HEAD factor: 9.5 fun heads out of 10.

Posse Guests! (25 July 2008)

2008-07-25T17:14:00.000-07:00

We had an absolute Posse in town in July! The Twines came over for two weeks and then the Burges (TM) - OK, Neil and his girlfriend Ginny, who are therefore not technically "Burges" - joined them for a couple of days and stuck around for over a week afterwards. Jaysmith Apartment Absolutely Infected With Visitors From The Old World!

Of course Jax and Twiney have been here before, but Phil saw the place for the first time, and collectively they love it. They arrived on June 30 (I think) and performed Much Sightseeing... Sarah fulfilled most of the tour guide duties as I was at work most days. But I did book a long weekend and we went to Whistler, stayed in a holiday home, went up a 6,000-foot mountain, saw a brown bear (cute! but endangered so go away now), ate lots of very nice food, went on a downhill luge (which was a bit terrifying), watched Twiney go on a zipline (which looked like fun, in the end), and took lots of photos, some of which may be included somewhere along the line. Phil went fishing for two days and impressed his guide with his knowledge. The drive up the Sea-To-Sky highway was gorgeous. And even Jax's 3am medical emergency didn't affect the good time had by all (except Jax while she was ill ;-).

Neil and Ginny arrived on July 8 and the Twines left on the 11th. Burge spent a lot of time playing Super Paper Mario on my Wii, and we also had two games of Lord Of The Rings - scarily, two years to the day since we last played it, in England. We and Burge know this game well, so first Ginny was introduced to it, and then a few nights later, James joined us at Kalypso for dinner and came back to be the fifth hobbit in a session where we tried out the expansion pack that Neil and Ginny bought for us as a thank-you present. It was quite epic and I think James' head visibly exploded several times...

You also should have seen the games of Jenga we had. Ginny nearly fainted from the suspense. Neil and I invented some groovy new moves, which you'd think wouldn't really be possible in a game like Jenga. Also, I was right: there are YouTube movies demonstrating 'mad Jenga skillz', e.g. this one.

But now everyone has gone home and we are all alone again... and, although we love the Posse... we were exhausted! There's been a lot of singing... we've started the summer singing alternative, which appears to have acquired the name "The Strongbow Chorus"... four sessions, every other Monday... we had eighteen people here for the first one, and out of it we got very acceptable-sounding versions of "The Ballad Of Sweeney Todd" and Rutter's "Sing A Song Of Sixpence"... we had Kim and Forsey over for singing... we had two Raves At The Jaysmiths', which were mildly epic affairs, and included me and Neil singing some tenor duets, one of which blew out everyone's ears because we weren't subtle with our dynamics! It was also lovely to reconstitute a chunk of The Incredible Posse Singers - only Justine was missing from our majority lineup. We sang Orpheus and Sounds Of Silence. Very uplifting, and only a couple of moments where our unrehearsed-in-eighteen-months sound wasn't bang on the money. The Posse Rules! Anyway, where was I... oh, more singing... Neil and Ginny learned the ultra-high A New World and we sang that for a couple of people, nearly ripping out our throats in the process (Burge has to sing As, I have to sing off the top of the scale)... and we just generally nebbished around the piano at the slightest opportunity. Result: we've done a lot of singing.

But: all this has been putting a huge dent in our Chilli & Sage time, so over the summer the rule is now: Our Stuff Comes First. We don't have High Spirits or Broadway Chorus until September, so we'll be spending evenings and weekends for the next two months (a) working on our music, (b) relaxing with the thought that we don't have to do anything else, (c) doing other things.

You'll be pleased to hear on our behalf that we are now logged in the US Copyright Office. Look!

CHILLI & SAGE VOLUME ONE.

Type of Work:	Sound Recording and Music
Registration Number / Date:	SRu000865667 / 2007-08-16
Application Title:	CHILLI & SAGE VOLUME ONE.
Title:	CHILLI & SAGE VOLUME ONE.
Description:	Compact disc.
Copyright Claimant:	GIL *JAYSMITH*, 1970- . Address: 1060 ALBERNI STREET, #2003, VANCOUVER BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA V6E 4K2
	SARAH ELIZABETH *JAYSMITH*. Address: 1060 ALBERNI STREET, #2003, VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA V6E 4K2,
Date of Creation:	2007
Authorship on Application:	GIL *JAYSMITH*, 1970- ; Domicile: Canada. Authorship: MUSIC, WORDS, AND SOUND RECORDING.
	SARAH ELIZABETH *JAYSMITH*, 1974- ; Domicile: Canada. Authorship: MUSIC, WORDS, AND SOUND RECORDING.
Contents:	1. I WANT TO BE A PANDA 2. TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE, TOO BAD 3. I GOTTA GET ME ONE OF THOSE GIRLS 4. VELVET 5. THE SIX WIVES OF HENRY VIII 6 FIREFLIES 7. IF LOVE IS 8. THE NIGHT TRAIN 9. THE JOURNEY 10. ALL YOU HAVE TO SAY 11. WHEN YOU SMILE 12. LOVE, DANCE & SING 13. I’LL RESCUE YOU 14. 24 DAYS 15. AIR CONDITIONING.

Names:	*JAYSMITH*, GIL, 1970-
	*JAYSMITH*, SARAH ELIZABETH, 1974-

It's us! Do not steal our music, we have Copyright on our side! Tee hee.

It's hard to focus on what else might have been going on lately, but we've been watching Doctor Who (epic!) and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (a bit epic! and Sarah's aunt Jane is in T4, exciting huh?), and playing the customary range of Games Which Will Work On Laptops.

We finally went to a dentist - with the promising name of Dr Chris Hacker! The Canadian attitude to dentistry appears to be "hygiene, hygiene, hygiene", leading to an expensive but covered-by-insurance bout of cleaning which has left our teeth both spotless and unusually white. On a less enticing health front, I confessed a while back to Sarah that the soles of my feet hurt a lot, particularly in the mornings. I had assumed this was just me getting old (at 38). She researched and then sent me to the GP who referred me to a specialist. Turns out to be fallen arches, or Plantar Fasciisti or something like that... a recurrence, expected at this age, of what I had when I was 15 and had to go to a torture specialist in Teignmouth for various electrical treatments and arch supports in my shoes. So here I am, with new, expensive, custom-made arch supports ("orthotics" is apparently the word for this), and my feet still hurt, but less than they did. Still: tump, I'm getting old and creaky!

More oldness and creakiness next time, including photos if I find out from Sarah where they are. Mwah.

Safe Area

2008-05-02T00:48:00.000-07:00

Welcome back, take your seats, here are your complimentary peanuts, can I get you a drink?

I'm not making any promises, but I do feel guilty about what turns out to be a four-month lapse of service, so once more unto the blog-breach, dear friends (assuming you haven't died of impatience), and once again shall the Jaysmiths Hit Canada.

So, 2008 edition. Well, I sense a Blog TARDIS or two - or four, or eight - will be required to cover major events up till April, so we'll move forward with current affairs.

ITEM! Gil's work proceeds apace. The game I'm working on will hopefully be announced soon and then I won't have to pretend no-one can guess what it might be. Work itself has varied from mildly to extremely stressful, but a great stonking wodge of the stress was relieved last month, when I received a great stonking wodge of money in the form of a pay rise plus a superstar-sized bonus, which I suppose I must have been advised would occur every year based on performance, but frankly I'd forgotten all about it, and my understanding of most game-related bonuses is that they are literally game-related; Radical apparently just pays out bonuses regardless. The advantages of being owned by an evil multinational corporation, I don't doubt.
Anyway, this was just what our bank account needed; we cleared the credit card, cleared the bills for sorting out our house in Littlehampton, bought some treats, and had a few meals out. We had both been worrying our asses off about money, it turns out, and moments before our heads spontaneously exploded in unwitting synchronization, the problem solved itself. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, or in this case the chequebook.

ITEM! Sarah has been keeping herself busy with various things, including a play, plenty of music, some voiceover work and the role of Musical Director at Broadway Chorus.

ITEM! We bought a Wii! Definitely a Blog TARDIS entry to cover this.

ITEM! Gil turned 38 in March. I've decided to deal with this by focusing on the important part of that age, namely '3'. So I regard myself as being 3.8 of the new 'large' years, and I can stay like that for another couple of years, and even then I'll only be '4'.

ITEM! We're attending a songwriting course on Thursday evenings... i.e. that's where we've been tonight. This was the second week. It's somewhat scary. Actually, it's very scary. There were ten of us last week including the two instructors... tonight, eight... next week, in theory, ten again thanks to some replacements. So far it's been useful in terms of supplying tools for creativity. The results when it comes to writing lyrics have so far been (at best) poetry, but on the other hand I've been analyzing how poetry is used as a choral text in some of the songs we sing at High Spirits Choir, and I can see how poetic lyrical ideas (which probably don't rhyme) can be a source for a condensed, considerably treated, and hopefully rhyming lyric. As for the music, well, I still lack heavy music theory, it's all aural with me, but as Sarah has observed, I've listened to a whole lot more pop and rock music than her, and I have a better grasp of what works outside of the classical domain, even if she can write better chords than me (let alone the ability to write any chords at all). Anyway, the exercises are kinda interesting, and I might go into details about them sometime.

ITEM! The building's swimming pool and hot tub, out of action for over six months, have finally been repaired, repainted, and refilled with water... and then drained again, apparently. We may have found this apartment in an excellent location for a bargain rent, and we may not have particular grounds for complaint, but: we've missed our swimming pool and hot tub! And so the thought that they're so close to becoming available once more is driving us nuts. Grrrrr! Sarah scrabbles the responsible people with her bunny-claws. Perhaps next week, we hear on the sour-grapevine.

ITEM! We've been watching the absolutely dreadful remake of The Bionic Woman. Dear God. This is one of the worst TV shows imaginable. I could spend all night listing its flaws. Suffice to say, when you wish the villainess would show up and are deeply unhappy about any episode when she doesn't, you know you've got a miscast heroine. The script is often atrocious - we've adopted "just merely" as a catchphrase thanks to a line from an early episode. The continuity is often completely missing - a town's inhabitants all died three days ago, but the wheels on a fallen bicycle are still spinning and a girl is in a basement cleaning her teeth and wondering where her granny is? An important character seen in jail in the first episode is reported in the second episode as having escaped - off-camera? Oh god. Make it stop. It's so much fun to mock it, though. Plus, it was filmed in Vancouver, so we've been spotting locations. Jan will be pleased to hear that it features the Morgans (of Space: Above And Beyond) as executive producers and consultants. I can't help but think that these people are a danger to TV SF...

ITEM! Vancouver is still an adorable place to live. The view as we cross the bridges into town, the greenery, the breeze on Alberni Street on a Sunday, the shining water, the protective mountains... "the sparkling streams, the bracing air, the therapeutic salt"... it feels very much like home. On which note, we've started the process, through Radical, of applying for permanent residence here. They pay for all of my fees and half of Sarah's, and it takes months to accomplish, but thereafter I will be free to stay in Canada even if I leave Radical... although (a) there's still nearly a year to go before I could leave without having to repay Radical our relocation expenses, and (b) I should emphasise this in case anyone at Radical is reading: I don't actually want to leave (yet ;-).

ITEM! The Twines are coming to visit in July, and so are Burge and his girlfriend Ginny. And their visits overlap by three days! It's a Posse rave! Absolute Vancouverage for the Posse! This will be so much fun.

ITEM! I think that's enough for tonight. See? We do still love you. 'night all.

Bang-Up-To-The-Minute Film Reviews Of 2008, #1: The Bourne Identity

2008-01-03T23:13:00.001-08:00

Yes, friends, it's time we told you what the best films of 2002 are going to be. And I can confidently predict that The Bourne Identity won't be one of them. From its thickset and in fact generally thick hero (who, sad to say, doesn't say "Matt Damon! MATT DAMON!" even once), to its ineffectual and drugged-up "oh, did someone just try to kill us? oh well, hee hee, in German" heroine / love interest, to its plodding pace, its lack of scale, its meaningless plot, the most amateurish secret agency ever, and its complete misuse of Julia Stiles, this is just woeful. The end song - with a chorus approximating "Oh man, then everything just fell apart" - was more welcome than usual in cases like this. Seriously, this has to tank like a big big tank of tanking things...

... what? It was successful and kicked off a three-movie franchise? God, the world has no standards. Tune in again sometime soon when we watch the second instalment and see how 2004's audiences will be amazed and awestruck by its effervescent genius.

(I'm sorry to report that I saw the third one first. It was formulaic crap with even less from Julia Stiles than the first one.)

"Resolve THIS..."

2008-01-02T01:26:00.000-08:00

We did our obligatory new year planning today. And already have forty things to do in January. About fifteen of them are "attend High Spirits or Broadway Chorus rehearsal / concert", which won't tax us too greatly.

Tonight we watched Hoodwinked, a very strange CGI movie which combines the retelling-a-story approach of Rashomon with, er, Little Red Riding Hood. It's very funny. One imagines it doesn't sell itself to children though. Rebecca took Jake to see it when it came out a couple of years ago and reported it wasn't what she'd expected. Very funny though. Amongst other things it spoofs xXx. (Of which I once remarked: "You know, I could be ****ing a dead chicken rather than watching this film". Sarah pointed out that a dead chicken wasn't the best option.)

There's also a bunny. Sarah was unimpressed with the plot developments concerning the bunny, but its ears ruled.

I didn't think it would be Sarah's thing so I watched Shoot Em Up on my own. This is a daft violent movie in which Clive Owen goes around munching on carrots and shooting dead approximately three hundred bad guys while sliding under cars on his stomach, running up fallen objects, jumping over things, screwing his prostitute girlfriend, carrying a baby, abseiling, skydiving, driving... it's utterly ridiculous, and thus fantastic. It's the first Western equivalent to something like Hard Boiled (which is odd considering John Woo's been in Hollywood for years and this isn't by him). I loved it and could quite happily watch it again. Recommended, particularly for guys.

You'll remember last year I was playing a lot of hidden-object games, specifically the Mystery Case Files series. Well, this is now up to its fourth entry, Madame Fate, and while the end-of-level minigames and puzzles are still impressive-but-irrelevant-and-a-little-annoying, the object-hiding is still mostly unsurpassed. Coming up on the rails, though, is the Agatha Christie series (I know! licensed casual game in any-good shock). I accidentally played the second one, Peril At End House, first, and so for my miscreancy I'm now lumbered with playing the first, Murder On The Nile, and suffering through the lack of polish here and there which will affect you if yo play games out of order. But the pictures are gorgeous, and the object-hiding is reasonably fair - although why does bloody everyone insist on hiding butterflies, and pretzels in these games?

Sarah has been churning through casual games herself, with the most recent being Farm Frenzy (I think). I don't know what happens in the game itself, but sound effects suggest cows being tormented by something, and if you try to quit the game, it asks you to confirm your decision, and the "YES" button moves away from the mouse pointer for a while, while a cow face sobs in distress at your attempts to abandon it.

Oh! The new Sam And Max season started in November and I immediately bought the first episode and didn't play it until last week. It was, as usual, hysterical. Buying these games should be required by law.

Think it's bedtime now. Sarah is playing some bizarre platformer with an entire family being chased around in caverns, through the air, in a supermarket, etc (whatever the hell "etc" means with a list like that). I think she may be channelling her tumpiness about what happened with the bunny in Hoodwinked...

Oh! again... I added up the numbers for Take December Off, and we wound up with a grand total of 1,074 views for the video across all the sites (YouTube, Veoh, MySpace, DailyMotion, GoogleVideo, Guba). Not bad, not bad, not bad. This year will be the year of I Want To Be A Panda. One of my Christmas presents was the electric panda I've been demanding for about eight years... surely this is fate at work!

Pictures! (Blog TARDIS, July 2007)

2008-01-01T19:20:00.001-08:00

I just found a folder of pictures from, er, July. Oops. So this is some of what we were up to then...

Fireworks over English Bay as part of a big music-with-lightshow thing.

(I can be even less specific if you like.)

Apparently, a Chinese food stall. But I have no idea why Sarah took this picture!

The phone company, using the best possible promotion - "use our phones and cute bunnies will, somehow, be involved in the process".

Buy PANDA shoes now, or face the consequences.

Because you would buy that.

Never too fat to give a thumbs-up to the camera. Note approved Radical tee-shirt.

English Bay in late Fall: sunny and, by Vancouver standards, crowded.

I eat pitta bread stuffed with chilli because they're funny.

Sarah, on the other hand, still refuses to eat carrots, despite messages like this scattered around Vancouver supermarkets.

Dotey polar-bear table! I'm sensing we're into the pictures we took when we were furniture-shopping with Susan. And yes, look...

It's La Braverman herself, demonstrating where the Army is at with its revolutionary and fashionable chameleon-technology-enabled summer dresses.

I expect this was funny because of something written on those pieces of paper. As it is, it just looks like a grumpy couch watching television on its own.

This, while admittedly not the greatest ever lake and park, is nevertheless a random fixture in the middle of the Nainamo suburbs. Quite nice. This picture dates from when we went to a "harmonic overtones" class. In what later became the rainstorm of the year, caused when Bear, asked to conceal the sun which was shining in Sarah's eyes, decided to move it out of position and cause Flash Gordon-scale flooding and disaster across the entire world. If you didn't notice it, that's just because Bear moves very quickly to repair his mistakes. Sometimes.

Who could fail to love Grumpy Bunny: All Year Long?

This bunny kills fascists.

After you walk beyond Coal Harbour, on the way to English Bay, there's a lake, featuring wild geese and ducks, none of which have the faintest idea about pavement protocol.

Along the Stanley Park sea wall there's a set of rock sculptures - piles of stones apparently balanced amidst the waves. Unsettling when you first see them. A moment after we took this picture, a jogger came along (posing by running along the elevated section of the wall) and double-taked almost hard enough to fall into the water as he noticed what he was running past.

This reminds me of the painting which hung in our lounge for years in Teignmouth.

2007 In Retrospect Part Two: We Live In Vancouver!

2008-01-01T14:39:00.000-08:00

We've been here eleven months. Blimey. It feels like a year. It feels like forever. It feels like we were having our goodbye party a week ago.

What do we miss about England? The people. Or more accurately, our friends who we left in Littlehampton and the collateral damage zone surrounding it, and our families (which in Sarah's case doesn't even mean 'in England'). When we went back in September it was mostly unpleasant but for them. Grimy, dark, bad air, no smiles, and to quote an Alan Moore CD, the moral atmosphere of the week before last. Yuk. Everyone we like should come out here as soon as possible. It's like being sluiced.

Other things I miss: alcohol on sale pretty much everywhere; the singing and the parties, although we're trying to train them up... so many people here are responsible adults, which SUCKS... it may be the apartment-living that does this... it can be difficult to have a rave at 2am when there are neighbours in five directions; long skirts... fashion here is a little on the woeful side; young people... there don't seem to be any downtown, or in the choirs, or in the community theatre... they have separate Young People's Choirs and Theatre groups, perhaps to avoid any hint of impropriety or dubiety; everything being within walking distance (although most things are, and pretty much everything else is in range of mass transit); our rabbits.

That might not be a complete list, as I thought of it while I was typing. But on the other hand, it might be a complete list, in which case, my god, are we better off here.

What do I like about Vancouver? Almost everything. It's wonderful to live in a city. The variety of the architecture... the surprising spaces between, above, and under the buildings... the randomness of two-storey old-style houses jammed between skyscrapers... the immensity of the Shangri-La apartment complex they're putting up across from us... the convenience of having two dozen of anything to choose from within ten minutes' walk... the unparalleled transit system which for $80 a month lets me travel pretty much anywhere at any time on bus, SkyTrain, and even the ferry... the quality of the shows and music... the freshness of the air... the view from the bridges as we head back into downtown in the evening... the way life here is vertical and not horizontal... and peeking between the buildings in almost every direction, mountains like we're on an Orbital. Vancouver is just awesome. And although the overuse of the word awesome is a big strike against Canadians, it's appropriate here. You look at this city and you think, god, it's big and it's beautiful and it's amazing. Hurrah for Vancouver!

It's been a hell of a year for our music. We've written about thirty songs since April and performed in a bunch of random pubs and cafes - Sarah's stage nerves appear to have gone, even if they actually haven't - we've joined two choirs and a theatre group and done shows for them all, we've done some Christmas quartet singing, and we've even collaborated... erk... loss of control... does not compute...

Next year - this year - our resolutions are: make more time for ourselves, figure out our long-term plan for Canada and our lives, and make the ultimate step in music - getting other people to do our stuff, as often as possible.

(And, er, post to this blog more often...)

What are your plans? And HAPPY NEW YEAR!

2007 In Retrospect, Part 1: Next Time We Take December Off!

2007-12-30T00:34:00.000-08:00

We've been busy.

No, really busy.

Our activity sheet for this month:

December 1: recorded an alternative version of 12 Days Of Christmas for a corporate event. Then did a two-hour gig at the Richmond bicycle club's Christmas dinner.
December 2: did a lunchtime gig at the over-40s ski club in Dunbar. In the evening, Sleeping Beauty singthrough.
December 3: Chroma gospel choir rehearsal in the evening.
December 4: Broadway Chorus rehearsal.
December 5: High Spirits choir rehearsal.
December 6: retirement home gig with My Lady's Chamber.
December 7: FREE!
December 8: Saw Seussical: The Musical at the Waterfront Theatre.
December 9: Sarah went to see Beauty And The Beast: The Musical with Kim.
December 10: Broadway Chorus singing rehearsal.
December 11: Broadway Chorus dress rehearsal.
December 12: Broadway Chorus tech and dress rehearsal at the theatre.
December 13: Broadway Chorus show: Anne Murray Of Green Gables, opening night.
December 14: Broadway Chorus show, second night.
December 15: Singing carols on a street corner in aid of a women's shelter. Then Broadway Chorus show.
December 16: Sarah to a cast get-together for The Vagina Monologues. Then open mic in the evening at Urban Rush Cafe.
December 17: Chroma concert.
December 18: carlyle.4 singing at VanDusen Garden.
December 19: High Spirits Christmas singalong with carlyle.4 guest spot.
December 20: carlyle.4 singing at VanDusen Garden.
December 21: FREE!
December 22: carlyle.4 (or .3 as it turned out) singing at the Oppenheimer Park homeless benefit. Then singing at a private Christmas party.
December 23 onwards: FREE!

This list is largely a public reminder to me that we do too much. So: next year we're scaling back...

We've left Chroma, at least for now (we might return, who knows)
We're going to rely on Susan to manage us as Chilli & Sage; she'll make sure we get paid a sensible rate for our singing gigs, which, while not necessarily reducing our workload, will mean we feel better about devoting time to it.
Broadway Chorus's summer show sounds like it'll be fun, and Kim / Susan / James might join up for it, which will be fun, but we'll try to skip the Christmas show.
High Spirits is pretty much bulletproof because we like drinking with them so much, and the music is good and varied.

That list doesn't include two things which stretched over several days:

1) The presence in our apartment for seven days of Jacqui and Alexis Twine, on a super-short-notice trip to Vancouver. It was like having kids, listening to the sounds of Ambient Twineage in the spare room. We showed them the sights, took them to Kalypso, introduced them to the mob here, got them into Anne Murray Of Green Gables, and waved goodbye very unhappily after an extremely packed week. It was a thoroughly excellent time.

2) Filming the Take December Off video. I'd had the mad idea that we could do this in the last week of November, but we got swamped, and it dragged into the second week of December, and then took several days to edit (only a few hours of actual editing time, but it was finding those hours...) and so the video debuted on YouTube about the 16th. We've put it on several other sites as well, and across all of them, it's collected over a thousand views. Of course this isn't many compared to the stuff on the front page of YouTube, and, hope springing eternal in my breast, it's less than I'd kinda hoped for, but I'm not grumbling, as it's far, far more than we've ever achieved with anything else we've done, and we've learned plenty from that one experience which will inform our videos next year. Yes, more videos! Panda and Henry need videos! And we have plans, oh yes, many plans...

Shock apartment update: we have new furniture! And we're tidy! Slightly grumpy over being constantly referred to as bohemian, and aware that we had to redeem our second room for the Twines to use, we performed a mammoth act of springcleaning, and have kept the place somewhat neat since they left. We then went to IKEA on the 27th and bought two side tables, a bookcase, a TV stand, and a desk unit. I then spent most of the 27th and 28th building these things, with help from Sarah on drawers, and we now have lots of surfaces and places to hide things. And fewer boxes standing in as tables. And the place is still tidy! We're hosting a flatwarming party tomorrow night (because, er, we didn't have it ten months ago, because we didn't know anyone then), and we'll see how the unforewarned jaws drop at the sight.

Culture update: Seussical The Musical was brilliant - I was in tears for most of it because it was so satisfyingly innocent and ineffably bouncy and fun. They'd cut it a little as it's the child-friendly version - a little annoying, as it means The Military has gone - which includes Green Eggs And Ham played as a platoon-marching tune - but it was still excellent - one of the best things we've seen in our year here.

Further culture update: we finally got round to watching some TV and movies. The Bionic Woman was dreadful from the first episode, and no wonder it's been cancelled during the writers' strike. Fantastic Four 2 was utterly lamentable (as were we for watching it). I watched Irreversible, an uplifting French film about violence and rape (... OK, not really uplifting). We watched Mr & Mrs Smith, which we thoroughly enjoyed although it was a bit random. And I finally got Sarah to watch The Sting, but unfortunately the history of caper movies since then has rendered it somewhat predictable - I hadn't seen it in, like, twenty-five years, and I was occasionally wincing at the pace, but it's still very stylish. In a very, very slow-paced way. Point is, though, we've finally succeeded in making time for ourselves if we think we have time to watch TV and movies.

And today we finished off three new songs, because as Sarah said to Kim on the phone earlier, "We've got a party tomorrow and we suddenly realized we didn't have anything new to perform. Disaster!" We hadn't written anything since Take December Off a month ago, so three new songs feels about right. And, for once, these have mostly come from our 'song graveyard' document, rather than being conceived and written on the spot. Of course we've had a dozen new ideas which have gone into the graveyard in the meantime, so as with all true graveyards, this one is expanding.

My musical challenge for the New Year is to write an ironic hard-rock musical accompaniment for the depraved lyrics I've written under the title I Wanna Be Your Lawyer, Baby - a very raunchy big-hair-rock spoof about a lawyer who goes too far in appreciating a female client. Sarah's eyes nearly popped out as she read the lyrics. Muhahahahaha.

Tomorrow, more end-of-year rounding-up type stuff.

Triumph Of A Bunny

2007-12-03T01:21:00.000-08:00

Let us talk of the Triumph Of The Day: Sarah's musical, Sleeping Beauty, which got its first ever readthrough/singthrough this evening at Ieva's house. After handpicking a cast from the members of High Spirits, Sarah has been drilling them over the past few weeks, and tonight we gathered to spend a couple of hours trying it all on for size.

And it was an absolute blast. Sarah is still bouncing (well, almost bouncing, what with her hopped-out ankle).

A little background: Sarah wrote the first version of this musical as part of her music degree, thirteen years ago. It's the fairy tale rejigged for a feisty, independent princess who dismisses the Prince as the prat he is and ends up agreeing to go out with his servant who performs the actual rescue / rescuscitation. Along the way we meet a nutjob barbarian who gives up his bloodthirsty day job in favour of horticulture, a concerned fairy (renamed and rebranded as Wish Order Fulfilment Agents, or WOFAs), several unconcerned WOFAs, and a villainess with an even more villainous henchman. Add about twenty of Sarah's most gorgeous songs, and there you are: Sleeping Beauty.

She's kicked this around a bit over the years, fiddling with it, tweaking it, and letting me work on it a bit with her, but we never got around to doing much with it in England... we performed a couple of the songs with the Posse, and sneaked one of them into the Aladdin pantomine she MD'ed for LMCS in 2005, but aside from that... nuffin. But earlier this year, she performed one of the songs, Look, in a solo spot at a choir concert, and people fell in love with it - her take on love songs is always spectacularly offbeat and involving. After numerous questions and a lot of cheerleading from some particularly keen friends, she agreed to organize a readthrough... and here we are.

It's difficult to single people out for their performances tonight as everyone rose to the occasion with stellar focus and clearly a lot of hard work beforehand. So I'll list the cast:

Ieva - the Queen
Martin - the King
Susan - Ruby the evil WOFA
James - Prince Conceitus, and Conan the Barbarian / Agrarian
Barney - Burch the henchman
Catherine - Princess Frederica
Heather - Sapphire the WOFA
Kim - Opal the WOFA
Patti - Diamond the WOFA, and Narrator
Tara - Emerald the WOFA (and our flautist!)
Sara - Harriet the good WOFA
Me - Justin the servant

And candidly, we were all legends, although I think everyone would agree that particular mention must be given to James's incredibly camp Elmer-Fudd-a-like Conan, Barney's perfect overacting, and Sara's outraged Harriet.

But it was SO MUCH FUN!

Now we have to schedule a repeat performance, but this time with some VIPs in attendance, as there's clearly possibilities here.

In other news: Take December Off moves to its second day, and we've sold a copy of the song online! We've made $0.74! We're rich! Our first sale-by-download! We've been very naughty and asked friends and family to spam everyone with the link. Next task: a video, even if it's just of me sitting there pretending to be on the phone to my hypothetical gullible boss. Videos can go places where simple songs can't.

We also decided today was the day to go digital for our album sales. So look, here is how you can buy our singles:

And here is how you can buy our album:

Thrilling isn't it? So go buy something now.

That's us for the night - checkin' out. Much love.

Take December Off is go!

2007-12-01T23:35:00.000-08:00

Our Christmas song of great luxury and relaxation, Take December Off, is now all systems go. We have a daily blog, the opportunity to listen to and buy the song itself, and other goodies lined up for inclusion at, wait for it, wait for it...

The Take December Off Experience

So go now there and click things and buy things. Because you can. Because we're worth it. And it'll be updated every day, so keep going there. Make it part of your morning routine. But clean your teeth first. Actually, no, go to that site first, and clean your teeth while listening to the song.

Also tell all your friends, because if we make enough money from this to take not just December but the rest of our lives off (hope springs eternal) then you're bound to be invited to our Vancouver mansion at some point, for your part in helping us out. Go on. Be a devil. Forward the link to everyone you know. We know you hate doing that normally, but just for us, be a sport.

In other news, last night we had great fun at a benefit for a local charity called PAWS which helps dogs and children all at once - so having a song called I'll Rescue You which was originally written for a dog rescue charity in England was kinda convenient - and we tried out Other People's Business - the anteater / anti-Bush protest song - which got plenty of applause. Which was nice. Needless to say, I Want To Be A Panda went down a storm. Sarah also sang as part of My Lady's Chamber for the night owing to a localised alto shortage. We couldn't stay too late because of the whirlwind weekend we had lined up, but it was fun. Some nice poetry, some of which Sue Turner had set to music. And Artie (drummer / guitarist whom we met at Sorrento) was there too, doing an amusing song about having an Extreme Sports Christmas up at Whistler Mountain.

And tonight we performed at an over-40s Bicycle Club in Richmond. This was a bit of a trek, and it's been snowing all day, so while Bunny was happy at the concept of snow on December 1st (it swirls upwards while you're watching it from the twentieth floor, which is tremendously cool) she was also stressed at the thought of trogging that far on the buses with our keyboard, and worse, she nearly fell over while hopping gleefully around in the snow, so she's now hopping all the time, on a slightly twisted ankle. Pauvre lapin! And her pedal foot, at that. However, the gig went well, we performed for about an hour and a half, and they appreciated it a lot. And it's a bit of money in the bank. More tomorrow as we provide background for the Christmas lunch of a skiing club on 37th Street.

We also now have a manager! Susan has despaired of our incompetence and is taking pity on us and will organise our career. We love you, Susan, for we are rubbish!

JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!

2007-11-29T15:13:00.000-08:00

JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!

Jacqui's bringing Alexis with her!!!!!!

JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!
JAX AND TWINEY ARE COMING TO VANCOUVER!

JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!! (November 28)

2007-11-29T01:13:00.001-08:00

JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!

Jacqui Twine is coming to visit us in Vancouver for a week in December!!!

JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!
JAX IS COMING TO VANCOUVER!!!

The trouble with women (November 27)

2007-11-28T00:51:00.000-08:00

Wotcher. News from Tuesday:

Rehearsals for One Million Things Happening In December proceed apace. I'll put up a list for your awed admiration once I can bear to look at it. It's going to be a Very Busy Month. Last night we were rehearsing for the gospel choir, chroma (which owing to time considerations, viz. we have none, is going to be the main casualty when we hit the new year and clean house a bit). Tonight we were polishing and then running the Broadway Chorus show, Anne Murray Of Green Gables.

It turns out that Dani from Broadway Chorus, who plays my hapless starcrossed lover Jenny, works in video game law and is one of the authors of the Video Game Law Blog. Quite the coinkidink.

Adam from BC pointed us at the world's most boring game, Desert Bus. LOL.

In fantastic news, Mystery Case Files: Madame Fate is brilliant: I've completed it once and am now trogging through it a second time. I haven't even looked at the new Sam And Max despite buying it the instant it went live. Might get a chance to play it this weekend.

I didn't get any sleep Sunday night but as a result at four thirty in the morning I wrote lyrics for a gorgeous piece of music which Sarah had likewise composed in a time of insomnia. The result is something quite unusual for us, far more poetic than I normally try for, and hopefully nice.

For Chilli & Sage fans, there's new music at our MySpace page.

We've also set up the blog page for Take December Off, which is our latest cunning project. We had intended to have fun making a video for I Want To Be A Panda - and indeed we will, early next year - but instead we're going to push our seasonal song, Take December Off, which is, as the title might suggest, a comedy song about getting the whole of the month off work. We were hoping to make a quick video in time for December 1st, but we're so swamped that we're going to have to settle for a sound file and a comedy blog and photos, with a video to come after a few days. The upshot is, remember that link and take a look at it on December 1st, and then send it to all your friends. It's how to skive off work for 31 days, set to a samba beat. You want it.

We go now to collapse...

CAVE People Get Jobs! (November 15)

2007-11-16T01:10:00.000-08:00

Tonight's subject line is taken from an ad on the SkyTrain wall. It depicts a group of people who all look extremely Indian. I feel that whichever organization has this acronym CAVE (I can't remember what else the poster said), they were perhaps ill-advised to word their slogan like that. Or, I'm racist and so the racist interpretation sprang to mind faster than it might to a nice person's. Either way, amusing in the way that those Western Union ads back in England are amusing. (If you've never seen them, they basically say: "Don't trust a member of your family to take money back to Pakistan to give to your poor needy mother! Send it via Western Union instead!" Because, that's right, if you're from Pakistan you can't trust your own family! Why, they're practically niggers! ... *sigh*)

Some more random highlights of the past couple of months which we've dredged from our "schmoozing" diary...

We helped Kim write a song for her father's 60th birthday. It had started off sounding suspiciously like Billy Joel's Piano Man, but Sarah fixed that. I helped with a couple of lyrics, then Kim recorded it, I mixed it, and she put together a Powerpoint slideshow. Apparently it went down a treat and we were heroes. Hurrah!
We've sold about $160 of our CDs, mostly at $10 a pop, occasionally cheaper where our nerve faltered or we were part-exchanging for another CD. Not bad. But still legally a hobby, defined as something you do where you don't make as much as you spend.
James' ensemble, My Lady's Chamber, has not only worked on Sarah's choral piece The Blackbird Of Derrycairn, but has taken on our surreal jazz piece Air Conditioning. We joined them in performing it at the party the weekend before last and it was an absolute hoot to hear it with nearly a dozen voices powering it. As for Blackbird, Sarah is extremely pleased. It's been thirteen years since she composed it, and this is the first she's heard it performed (by anyone outside of a slightly incompetent panda multitracking his voice as a Christmas present a few years ago).
And on the subject of things Sarah wrote thirteen years ago... Sleeping Beauty: The Musical is finally moving forward! This version of the traditional story is decidedly untraditional - the princess is a feminist and the prince is a prat, as one lyric observes - and after a couple of years of teasing people with songs taken from it, Sarah was at last persuaded to take the plunge and organize a singthrough/readthrough. People from High Spirits have leapt at the chance to take part, and no doubt (he says enthusiastically) you'll hear something about how it went on here at the start of December.
We've bought some art! Two pictures from a great shop called Kimprint down in Gastown. One is from a series of scenes from Alice In Wonderland... the artist has a great command of perspective and the series is pretty striking, so we may slowly accumulate it. The other is a small but equally striking long-range picture of a fantasy city. Buying art made us feel grown-up. All this art plus my Medieval gold CD and our A New Brain framed poster on the walls... the apartment is starting to look like we live, rather than squat, here...

We went to the open mic at the Myles Of Beans cafe in Burnaby again tonight, but it was the least appreciative audience yet... no-one applauded much for anything by anyone. Feh. On the plus side, I sat behind the drums for an hour and drummed along in numerous jams. Sarah says I looked very cute, particularly when I looked sheepish whenever I tried something adventurous and it didn't quite work. But I did enjoy it.

Getting up to date!

2007-11-13T23:29:00.000-08:00

Look, only one month behind in the TARDIS! I felt smug as I posted that. And then, it occurred to me that even as the Blog TARDIS whirls around in the wake of the timestream, I could... post something else! Covering today!

So: today I had physio. I have a trapped nerve in my back, which is causing neck pain and occasional streaks of unpleasantness down my left arm. I had my first session last Tuesday and this one was at the same time: 7:10am! Argh! Ultrasound, electrical pulses, and neck-stretching in a machine which looked suspiciously like a James Bond villain might reprogramme it to rip my head off at any moment - and all happening two hours before I normally even consider waking up. Argh argh! This will also be our first experience of claiming on medical insurance. (Hopefully. It won't be very nice if it turns out to be our first experience of failing to claim on medical insurance.)

Sarah spent today doing Voiceprint and working on the music for our new Christmas song, Take December Off. This is a bonkers samba-themed Christmas rave based on the idea of encouraging an overly-politically-correct (and uninformed) boss to give you plenty of days off for cultural reasons. At the moment it clocks in at something like eight minutes. But I don't want to edit it because it's all very funny, so the plan is to switch the drum rhythm and do something else exciting to make the verses stay fresh. We still haven't sorted out samples of the new songs, but these will crop up soon, my pretties, soon...

Tonight, we had Broadway Chorus. Have I mentioned this before? Their website is here. They call it community theatre over here; it's basically like English amateur theatre, but this specific company is interesting in that they perform what are essentially revue shows with a plot, and the chorus has a lot to do. The musical selection is pretty up-to-date too; the last show had Sailing from A New Brain and some stuff from The Light In The Piazza, and this time round it's clear the director has just seen The Drowsy Chaperone. He also enjoys ridiculing pretentious songs; I get to sing the dismal I Believe My Heart (from The Woman In White) in a yokel accent, with the chorus adding overly-hysterical backing vocals.
It's a bit of a hoot, all told. We've been going there for a couple of months, and the new show, Anne Murray Of Green Gables is four weeks away.

If I haven't been posting regular entries here then that means I haven't had a chance to complain about our self-inflicted schedule of death. You could ignore my pleas for sympathy on the basis that this is all our own fault. But please don't, as you're supposed to be our friends, you bastards ;)

Mondays: "chroma", Brian Tate's gospel choir
Tuesdays: Broadway Chorus
Wednesdays: Sarah's had another acting course, and I've had High Spirits choir, but as of tomorrow Sarah will be back at High Spirits too
Thursdays: open mic at Myles Of Beans every other week, alternating with a songwriting night
Fridays: "carlyle.4", our extremely pretentiously-named quartet (it's the only way to fly!), currently rehearsing stuff
Saturdays: often free, but then we see shows in the evenings
Sundays: often free in the daytime, with an open mic at Urban Rush Cafe every other week

We both look just a bit tired these days...

What else can I tell you? On Monday we discovered a brand of chocolate called Toffifee, for people who can't stop spelling toffee. We also discovered yet another destination which we can reach on the 22 bus. That bus goes everywhere! (And soon we'll have a song to prove it...)

And there's a new Mystery Case Files game!

And a new season of Sam And Max!

Life is good!

Blog TARDIS: "Everything's Better With Monkeys" (September 2007)

2007-11-13T23:15:00.000-08:00

We came back from Swing Jazz Camp all energised and enthused with the spirit of music... particularly ours. Sarah wrote the music and most of the lyrics for our slow-dance song, Just A Moment. We played some gigs, gave CDs to various people, and sent MP3s to people. Sarah continued to do voiceover work for VoicePrint, reading the news and magazine articles on Canadian radio (here's an example of her in action). On August 25th we had a High Spirits performance party, and Panda became a singalong!

It's worth mentioning one of our best songs up to this point: If We'd Never Met. This is the uplifting and fun-packed tale of a young woman widowed by a drunk driver. I know exactly whence the idea for this came, strange as the story may sound; I was in my bathroom, brushing my teeth and looking in the mirror, knowing Sarah was in her bathroom doing the same thing, and I thought, "I wonder how I would feel if I went into the main room and there was no Sarah." A couple of hours later we had the song, and we were very pleased with it. (There's a sample of it here if you'd like to listen, and it's also on our album (merciless plug)).

At Swing Jazz camp Sarah took this song to her vocal masterclass, where a couple of professional singers were commenting on people's delivery and performance of a chosen song. She reported afterward that she sang through the first verses and chorus, stopped, and waited for comments. The response was: "Oh! We were listening to the song because it's so good. Er, can you do it again and we'll pay attention to your technique this time." So she did it again. Response: "Yessss... and what needs improving about how you sing this? Anything else?" "Well," quoth Sarah, "I often get a break in my voice when I'm trying to sing high." "Oh! Well we can listen to that. Do some scales." Sarah does some scales, which are pretty much perfect because of the amount of singing she's been doing through the week. "... yesssss... that sounds fine. Anything else? No? Oh well." I was very pleased for her because so often she feels that she's not the 'singer' of the two of us, because she prefers me to sing the songs (even though on the album I think she has more vocals than me, tee hee). And to get such praise from a couple of pros must have been very satisfying. I'll take credit for the song lyrics being gripping, mind you...

Looking at our song list, I see that September produced three songs:
- Other People's Business, a comedy song which frankly I'm still not completely sure about... we've performed it once, but it didn't feel right while I was singing it, and I'm not sure I can get behind the anti-Bush message which emerged in the third verse. Not because I'm pro-Bush, more because I want it to be less specific.
- Get Out Of My Sky, a guitar song - written largely because I thought it would be an interesting experiment to write a "singer-songwriter" song. (Most singer-songwriters who show up at open mic nights have a guitar slung on their back and a bunch of overly-personal songs about breakups and so forth, and I detest them, so to prove to myself that it can be done right, I wrote some lyrics about a breakup, using a James Blish novel title which I've been wanting to use in a song for years, and handed them to Sarah with the instruction "On guitar, please".)
- Everything's Better With Monkeys, another comedy song, which we wrote for Alexis.

And that brings me to talking about our brief return to England in mid-September. Sarah had already gone back to Ireland for a week when I caught the plane to England and met her at Gatwick.

Did we enjoy seeing everyone? Oh, god, yes. It was a Posse rave. In fact, it was several of them. It was groovy to see everyone, to catch up, to spend so much time with Phil, Jacqui, and Alexis, and to get in some hardcore gatherage both at restaurants and in the form of All Back To The Twines.

But England still sucks. We'd forgotten just how we don't like Perfidious Albion. The air quality was atrocious: Sarah's asthma deteriorated to the point that she had to go back on all her drugs for a month when we came back to Vancouver. The crowds were rough, especially in London - they complain about the number of people here on Robson Street, but it's nothing compared to the raw fury of Oxford Street. I lost my temper at the toilet attendant at Victoria Station because they charge 20p for access to the loo. It occurred to me almost immediately that I was Verbally Abusing British Rail Staff, which could be construed as a crime, and Sarah wasn't getting any happier about my making a scene so I calmed down after a while, but sheesh. It all feels so small-minded and petty over there. It's not ideal here, but we didn't feel anything to make us want to come home.

Still: Posse!

And because Alexis used to spend a lot of time announcing "Aww, monkeys!" whenever she banged her elbow off a table or suchlike, we had written a song for her called Everything's Better With Monkeys. In fact we wrote it on the train back from London on the Wednesday after we'd been up there to see Parade (he cut Big News! the cad!) and our attempts to sing it quietly for practice purposes were obviously confusing the woman sitting opposite us. We unveiled it for Twiney that evening and it's proven a big hit with people over here since our return... most recently Kim, who almost stopped breathing from laughing at it so much. Exactly the effect we want, really. (Nothing personal, Kim!)

When we left England in January - ten months ago - we were sad, scared, nervous, and committed. Since then we've learned a lot and blossomed a lot. Leaving England again was easy. We'll go back, because England is where our friends and my family are. But that's the only reason.

Blog TARDIS: "Can you, just, like, not come in right at the start?" (August 2007)

2007-11-04T13:17:00.001-08:00

Don't mention the war. Don't mention how Barb Wire is a remake of Casablanca. And particularly don't mention anything to the effect of "who the hell are you and didn't you used to write a blog?" Clear?

So: VWORP, VWORP, VWORP, and the Blog TARDIS lands splat in the middle of three months ago. Let's step out to discover what the Jaysmith timeline was up to at that point...

... and it appears they were just getting ready to go to Sorrento, which is about five hours' drive north-east-ish of Vancouver. Susan from choir took us in her van. I had two Red Bulls in swift succession so I was just a leetle hyper. A running commentary on the excellence of the scenery was soon followed by nonstop mockery of the ludicrously small city of Merritt - Canada's Country Music Capital, I'll have you know - but it was as well that Susan and Sarah didn't give me the bullhorn I demanded, or let me roll down the windows to mock the citizens of Merritt at high volume, because one of the van tyres turned out to be flat and we had to stop off at a garage for a quick fix. Brilliantly, Merritt advertises itself on the highways with big signs saying (across the top) Tourist attractions (and then underneath on the left) The Walk Of Stars! (and then underneath on the right) Reserved for future tourist attraction. Yes, folks, Merritt will be twice as interesting - sometime real soon. For now it looks like a mile-tall child threw a bunch of buildings at a mountainside in a tumpy fit after being told to put his village away. Let's go back there!

But wait! Why were we going to Sorrento? The presence of Susan is a clue. Any guesses? Bah, can't hear you, so I'll just tell you - Ieva (who runs High Spirits choir) had gone on non-stop about the Swing Jazz Camp run at Sorrento every summer, and eventually she'd persuaded us to come along. The idea is you immerse yourself in music for a week; there's convenient accommodation on-site and you wander around taking various courses and linking up with your fellow musicians for fun and jamming. The course tutors are professional musicians, songwriters, choir leaders, or what-have-you. So OK, Ieva by her own admission wasn't going to shut up about it, so we figured it would be interesting, and the networking potential would help with our overarching goal of hitting Canada hard, so let's do it. We booked a shared cabana with Ieva, Susan, and Callum (also from choir) to cut costs a bit, and off we went.

The good things about Swing Jazz Camp:
- the quality of some of the pro tutors. Sarah signed up for a daily jazz piano course run by Michael Creber, and I signed up for daily drumming with Phil Belanger, and we both joined a choir class run by Brian Tate (remember that name).
- Band Lab - a daily experiment in random band formation... each day those interested would assemble in the hall and the organisers would make six or eight bands out of us, assign us one of the two songs of the day, give us an hour to figure out an arrangement, and then recall us for a concert
- nightly concerts and dances - two chances to be singers in front of a 40-piece big band (with some very good soloists), a chance to perform our own material (I Want To Be A Panda went down a storm, and the five of us did a blistering version of Sing Sing Sing from last term's High Spirits repertoire)
- generally, we learned a lot about how jazz music works. Well, I say jazz, these are still normal songs, often in 4/4 or 3/4, not so wildly experimental jazz... more, it's that they're frameworks for singers and musicians to stretch themselves, improvise, and generally try things out with the support of other musicians

The big bad thing about Swing Jazz Camp:
... it turns out I don't like jazz or musicians ;)

That might sound like a sweeping statement, so I'll be more specific. And first I should stipulate that the professionals there, and the band, were very good, and when performing on their own they had plenty of understanding of what was necessary to make the music sound good, or at least listenable. However:

A lot of this music has two aims which are somewhat in opposition to what we think about music, with our show tunes background and specifically with my liking for pop. This music is (1) for people to dance to, (2) all about the musicians rather than the song (I feel).

There you are on the dance floor, most likely with your "baby" in your arms. You hear a song start. Ah, how you love this song. You hear the singer singing it once through; the lyrics are usually short, maybe 12 or 16 lines total. You dance a lot as the entire song is repeated several times with various soloists taking the place of the singer. Then you hear the singer again, repeating the entire song form one last time. This is your warning that the song is about to end. They play the tag a few times - e.g. the last couple of lines, or whatever - and then they finish. Lovely. A song one minute and thirty seconds long (at a pinch) has been made to last seven minutes, given the musicians several chances to show off their improvisational skills, and crucially, you've been able to dance in the same style for seven lovely minutes.

But suppose you're not on the dance floor? The kindest way I can put it is: it takes a certain frame of mind to appreciate the typical jazz jam, and I either don't have, or more likely refuse to spontaneously operate in, that frame of mind. If you're just sitting there listening to a song going on for seven minutes, including five repeats, even with different soloists, it's really boring, unless the improvising players are really good. And even then, there's a limit to how many such songs you can listen to before they start to sound the same. Most of the songs sound the same by design anyway; while I might admire them as pioneering and/or skilfully done in their way, they're all a bit old and they aren't really very adventurous lyrically or musically. (Sarah's chord sequences are much more interesting than the average old-school swing-jazz song.) Also, I'm strongly lyric-oriented, so it bugs me that the lyric is short, often quite abstract, more often horribly dated, and is overwhelmed by the song being treated as an instrumental for 80% of its duration.

The problem with jazz musicians jamming is this: they won't stop playing. For me good music is all about when instruments aren't playing. It's the arrangement, the decisions of who will be creating emotional effects, the space left for the singer... it's all about the planning, about making sure that the right sounds are reaching the audience. It's a special kind of audience indeed which will appreciate technical virtuosity for itself, rather than in the service of a creative or emotional goal. If a random band is jamming, I think that's the start of the creative process which ends with a good song, and the results might be worth listening to in order to review which bits worked really well, and if you were one of the musicians contributing to that process then at least you'd have something to do during it. But as a listener? No! I don't want to hear hours of monotonous comping turfed out by everyone playing at the same time. I want to hear the results of a creative director selecting what's best for the listener. I want to hear a finished song, and finished songs do not sound like this, and I am not interested in hearing the intermediate stages.

During Band Lab this was particularly painful. (Ever wanted to hear two songs played five times each by amateur musicians with an hour's rehearsal? Then come along next year, when I will be bringing my earplugs.) A couple of times when we were contributing to the arrangement process, we tried to persuade apparently competent, intelligent musicians that they should not play at certain moments, for effect. I swear, they looked at us like we were speaking a foreign language. "Trust me, come in later, it'll sound cool." "What? What is this 'come in later'?"

So a lot of the time I felt quite frustrated, because as a singer I can't actually do a whole lot in the part (the very long part) of a song when I'm not singing. I could scat-sing, but this is basically taking a solo, so that's still only maybe one-sixth of the instrumental section covered. The rest of the time I'm standing there as bored as the audience should be. (Except of course in a jazz camp setting like this the audience, all musicians too, is watching carefully to see how they can learn to play as professionally boringly as the musicians currently on stage.)

There was a joke quoted at the camp: "A rock musician plays three chords to an audience of a thousand people, while a jazz musician plays a thousand chords for an audience of three people." And why is that joke funny? Because usually you're not in the audience of three. When you are, it becomes a matter of not gnawing through the body of the person in the next seat in order to escape after twenty minutes.

Our own songs, even the ones with jazz chords, are not "jazz songs" in this sense, and I feel kinda pleased about that, and I think that that's why people like them. Maybe jazz musicians wouldn't like our songs because there's no room for soloing; we've mostly locked down the song structure in the service of the emotional effect of the song, which is driven by the song motifs and lyrics, and more importantly the need to make our point and not be boring. Maybe we aren't mature songwriters who understand the value of leaving space for musicianship, but my mature and considered response to that is "Feh."

In the student concert, what got the biggest responses, and not just from me? I Want To Be A Panda, because it's funny, it's been crafted very carefully for maximum amusement value, and we stick to the script. Sing Sing Sing, bursting with energy channelled into a really tight arrangement. The gospel choir, again all to do with energy and doing the song right, having rehearsed it every day that week. And a couple of songs written by their performers which had good lyrics and/or excellent and well-rehearsed arrangements. The elephant in the room is that even jazz musicians don't really like jazz!

Rant over. And if anyone from Sorrento is reading this, well, there were exceptions to the above, but statistics say that you were probably not one of them. Unless you were one of the people we made an effort to talk to, in which case we probably did that for a reason.

What else can I tell you about Sorrento? Well, despite the above fulminations, we did kinda like it. It was educational - in positive and negative ways! - and inspiring - we got a song out of it, Just A Moment - and I bought some brushes and have been doing very light drumming-along to songs, and Sarah has experimented with improvisation, although she still prefers planning her improvisations out in advance. We met some interesting people, and we certainly met some excellent professionals, even if in Sarah's case the benefits she might have gotten out of studying with Michael Creber were somewhat limited by his having to deal with other people in his jazz piano class who just weren't up to it. Finally, Brian Tate, who used to run the Universal Gospel Choir (which is apparently really big here but of course we'd never heard of it) has now set up a new choir for Monday nights in downtown Vancouver which we've joined. More on that in a later Blog TARDIS.

I'll leave you with some photos from that week - all taken by Guy Smith, the photographer on site - and next time we'll catch up on what we did in September. Enjoy.

The piano class, including Sarah.

The drum class, including me.

The dance class, including Ieva (top row, third from left), Callum (top row, far right), and Susan (seated, second left).

Michael Creber (left) and Brian Tate (right) performing.

The three professional jazz singers (Jennifer Scott, Karin Plato, and Kate Hammett-Vaughan).

Drum tutor Phil Belanger.

Brian Tate leading the choir class - Sarah and Susan taking full advantage of the "seated" option.

The choir class in full effect outside the refectory, singing something noisy no doubt. Susan and Sarah in the front row in shades, Panda lurking at the back.

And lurking no longer!

What a cool bunny :)

An exhuberant Susan...

I Want To Be A Panda, of course!

The gospel choir's contribution to the Thursday night student concert. Susan and I had solo lines.

Susan in action during her solo.

... and me during mine.

Sing Sing Sing

Band Lab - Sarah and Callum on vocals.

"You used me as confessor and as cash machine..." (Tuesday 7 August 2007)

2007-08-07T22:24:00.000-07:00

You remember us. You don't remember us? Well we remember you. The absence of clamouring emails demanding further blogs from the intrepid Jaysmiths has been noted, let me tell you. And now, up to one month later than expected, may we present the continuance of the Vancouver-hitting...

Almost everything we've done this month has been music-related, which is good. It might get tedious for you in the details, but frankly, you'd read this if it was the phone book, that's what friends do. So:

Area 52 Designs, 48, Querns Rd, Cirencester, Gloucestershire GL7 1RP, Tel: 07866 970651
AVENUES VETERINARY CLINIC, 22, Garston Lane, Watford, Hertfordshire WD25 9QJ, Tel: 01923 894274
Dan Perkins Nissan Ruislip, 313, Field End Rd, Eastcote, Ruislip, Middlesex HA4 9NT, Tel: 0845 811 0395
Hyundai Bishop Auckland SG Petch, West Auckland Road, Tindale Crescent, Bishop Auckland, Co. Durham DL14 9TW, Tel: 0845 112 5004

... see, you're still reading, ain't'cha? Astonishingly, those are the first four matches for 'panda' at the Yellow Pages website. I'm not totally impressed. And now, back to the music.

When last we deigned to address ye, the adoring masses, we had just performed a 45-minute 'set' (as we pros term the affair) at The Wired Monk in Kitsilano. We were booked not long after that to come back and do it again, and that's where we should have been last night, but David the organiser called us over the weekend to confess that he'd organised it without realising the cafe was closed that day. So we've been rebooked for August 20th.

Meanwhile, these S.M.A.R.T. goals. This is a technique designed to ensure that your to-do lists don't become vague and unanalytical compilations of "wouldn't it be nice if..." / "I should do something like..." / "RULE THE WORLD! (but, er, how?)" and suchlike. Each goal needs to be Specific: "I will do X"... Measurable: "I can tell whether or not I have achieved X"... Achievable: "I have the power to do X"... Realistic: "I can do X quickly, easily, or at least with the application of existing skills and knowledge"... and Timely: "Doing X is a good thing to do now." So, whereas we'd had very vague plans - and yes, they did include "RULE THE WORLD!", but I would make a very benevolent dictator-panda - we switched to having a concrete to-do list on a fortnightly cycle.

And we still slightly goofed it up! But it's worked mostly to our advantage.

The first major goal was: make a good-enough recording of all the songs we've written up to now. This was so we could make CDs to send to the Copyright Office and our friends, and have something to hand out (or sell) at concerts. Fantastic - mission accomplished by July 18th.

Except... up till then we'd been recording in our cupboard, using my laptop, one of our performance mics, and software called GoldWave and Reason. And, while it sounded not-too-bad for something recorded at home, we were a little disappointed that it needed so much work. Sarah can play piano parts directly from her keyboard through a MIDI cable into Reason, which can replay it with a surprisingly authentic piano sample, but the vocal lines had to be recorded into GoldWave (as Reason doesn't deal too well with vocals, being primarily designed for sample-driven music such as techno and ambient) and then I had to mess around with them to get rid of the considerable background hiss and hum. Early MP3s which we sent to a few people still had the twinkling tinkerbell-like effect of my hamfisted workarounds for this irritant. Eventually Sarah found a genius way of removing the hum and the tinkerbell effect all in one, but it cost us some of the richness of our tone, and added a slightly mechanical, razory sound to the vocals. Which was also irritating, but what can you do?

Answer, quite a lot. We had pretty much committed to using the tinkerbell takes, mixed with my slightly rubbish Reason skills to within an inch of their lives, on the basis that, well, we're recording at home, so how good can you really get? The idea was to make recordings we could send to people to sell them on our songs, not necessarily on our performances or our production skills. On July 22nd we dropped into Tom Lee, the big music store on Granville, and asked one of the staff about it.

We came out with a $250 external audio interface and condenser microphone, went home, discovered it wasn't compatible with Windows Vista (my laptop), grumbled and plugged it into Sarah's laptop - and, dear god, the difference! First off, our vocal mike was picking up too much outside noise - the condenser mike somehow, magically, picks up only the sound from a space directly in front of it about the size of your cupped hands. Sarah was standing next to me talking during one of our tests, and she barely shows up in the recording. Then, having an external audio interface plugged into the laptop via USB, with the mike plugged into it, means that we don't get interference from the laptop power supply and other circuitry. Finally, the external interface contains a microphone pre-amp, which laptop soundcards lack, so the microphone doesn't have to be turned up to the max to squeeze a signal into the soundcard.

Result: sounds damn good. Except now we have to rerecord all our songs. Grrrrr...

Oh, in the meantime we went to a new venue, Myles Of Beans, a cool coffee house in Burnaby. This was on, hmm, the evening of Thursday July 19th. We performed Panda, Fireflies, and Henry VIII. (Scurry, scurvy brigands, to our MySpace page, where you can hear some or all of these, depending on when you read this.) That was fun, and we certainly got their attention. They were initially a bit bemused by Henry, but that's hardly surprising, as you'll find out when you hear it, and by the end they were roaring. It's very satisfying to get applause before you've finished a song... it shows not just that the audience appreciates it, but that you've structured it so that they can tell they're hearing the end and they know they can start applauding now, rather than waiting.

So, yes, we had to rerecord everything. This was a bind, but by the cringe, it's produced far better versions of everything, and I haven't had to apply ninja mixing skills to get something listenable out of Reason for each song.

And for the record (ahem) this is what's on our album, which will be arriving with you at whatever date the Post Office or our personal appearance on your doorstep happens to facilitate:

1. I Want To Be A Panda
2. Too Little, Too Late, Too Bad
3. I Gotta Get Me One Of Those Girls
4. Velvet
5. The Six Wives Of Henry VIII
6. Fireflies
7. If Love Is
8. The Night Train
9. The Journey
10. All You Have To Say
11. When You Smile
12. Love, Dance & Sing
13. I'll Rescue You
14. 24 Days
15. Air Conditioning

Not bad! But wait, there's more! While we were rerecording, we were still writing. We decided to stick with those fifteen songs for the CD, but in the meantime songs sixteen, seventeen and eighteen have crept out from the Jaysmith Hit Factory:

16. Titanic
17. Waiting For The Sandman
18. If We'd Never Met

We road-tested Sandman at our second trip to Myles Of Beans last Thursday, but more satisfyingly, Sarah's performance of Too Little, a fierce feminist rebuttal of a man's attempts to get back in with his girlfriend, got positive whoops of delight from the girls in the crowd. Very satisfying!

Producing songs carries a heavy ancillary cost, most of which is, I'm ashamed to say, borne by Sarah. Usually my work is pretty much done once we're settled on the lyrics, although I kibitz the music a bit, and obviously if I have to sing it then I have to sing it. I also do the mix. But Sarah has to compose the piano accompaniment (which she does superlatively, considering how she claims to hate it), play it into Reason, fix it up as necessary, sing it if it's a female vocal, and then produce the sheet music in Finale, which often means playing it again, this time to a click track, and then more fixups. It's a lot of work and we've been forging ahead so fast with compositions and performance that the backlog has almost exhausted her. However, as of tonight we have sheet music for everything except the two newest songs and a couple of the old ones. Amongst other things, this means we can send them to Alexis :)

Thinking about it, that may be all on the music front for now. Which means I can tell you some other stuff.

Sarah has been on the radio! She was taking acting classes on Monday and Wednesday nights in deepest darkest South Granville, and at the end of the course, the organiser, the excellently-named Jay Hamburger, recruited the entire class to assist in his 'drama hour' which goes out on co-op radio (essentially, public access) every week. So Sarah played one of the tailors in George Orwell's adaptation of The Emperor's New Clothes, and also wrote a three-minute scene for two of the other actors to take on. So she's an actress and a playwright! Boom!

We finally got around to eating at the pasta place on Davie which so intrigued us last September. It looks like a snazzy hotel and indeed the interior is reasonably decadent, but after some confusion (caused by a deaf panda whose name shall remain mine) we got seats on the lawn and proceeded to scoff some very nice food. I had meatballs and spaghetti in meat sauce, couldn't finish it, got it boxed up, and finished it just now. Delicious. Straight back there for more next week. It's got some way to go before it displaces Sarah's favourite, the Kalypso greek restaurant - who amongst you would have thought that Sarah Elizabeth Jaysmith would be seen eating hummus? - but it has a chance of dragging us away now and then.

For anyone we haven't told: we've booked our flights back to the UK for mid-September. Sarah is coming over on September 8th to Gatwick and then immediately flying on to Ireland to see everyone there. (Well, I say everyone, I mean a subset of everyone she knows, she's only got a week.) She then flies back to Gatwick and meets me, inbound, on the 15th. We spend that week in England, and fly back to Canada on the 23rd. No doubt we will be exhausted, but at least we'll have seen you all, and, most importantly, we'll have given you our CDs ;-)

Culture report: we went to see Julius Caesar as part of the Bard On The Beach festival in Kits. It was good, with the drawbacks of a small cast leading to numerous cases of "wasn't he called something else earlier? Oh, it's a different character..." and the collective Jaysmith decision that this is not an ambiguous play about whether Brutus and Cassius were right, it's a tragedy about Brutus and Cassius being wrong. (For those who don't know the story: Cassius is the sledge.)

Non-culture report: we finally bought a television. And lumped it back from Futureshop to here at great personal physical cost to Sarah! We finally caved in and bought insurance for an electrical good, too. I was extremely tumpy about this in the shop, but the hell with it. It looks good and is very flat. And it's meant we've finally started watching series three of Doctor Who.

Culture report again: we went to see Bobby McFerrin Friday before last, with some of High Spirits. Now this was interesting. I thought I liked Bobby McFerrin. And some of you will know I banged on about his Circlesongs album when I was in Littlehampton. Which is fair enough, because it's a work of genius. However, when eagerly wanting to book tickets for the show, I'd neglected to recall that when I've listened to the other two albums I own by him, I've felt kind of overloaded... and in fact, bored. His vocal technique is remarkable, but it don't half get samey after a while unless he has other people involved. And sure enough, while his interactions with the audience and his scratch choir and dance partners were amusing, entertaining, and sometimes breathtaking... every time he returned to the stage alone, I got bored again. Oh well.

Finally, for those interested in rather late news about small babies: Sarah is once again an aunt, thanks to Rebecca emitting her second child in mid-June. His name is Hugh Thomas Canning, and rest assured, if I have any say in it, his first words will include 'panda'.

They might be giants, baby. Much love, Gil & Sarah.

Shameless self-promotion... or bust!!! (Friday 13 July 2007)

2007-07-14T01:30:00.000-07:00

This link here ->>> http://www.myspace.com/chilliandsage <<<- yes that one. Click on it now. And listen to music. And become one of our elite (i.e. low) number of friends. You know you want to. I know we want you to, and that means more people want it, and you believe in democracy, right? Anyway, just go there. We have four of our songs on the player, and will cycle them maybe every month or so.

Our news this week mostly just involves our Monday performance - twelve songs in 45 minutes, all originals - which in turn could be best summarised as "Excellent, but a bit of an anticlimax". Many thanks to the people who came along to cheer. However, it was a case of being on first and thus getting a smaller share of the floating coffee-cafe audience - although we sure held their attention with what we did. Nothing much is likely to come of it; we'll have to go back several times to build up a reputation and get put on later in the evening. Which is fair enough.

We wrote another song, Too Little, Too Late, Too Bad, over the weekend and Sarah performed it as part of our set. And our Big Plan For World Domination has now been broken down into a number of S.M.A.R.T. goals... you know about this don't you? Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely... Sarah has a most amusing story about my forgetting the exact acronym here.

Much love, Panda.

The Empty Orchestra At Lindisfarne (Saturday 7 July 2007)

2007-07-04T20:45:00.000-07:00

That sounds like a novel title doesn't it? All will be revealed. And a big welcome to Justine, who's reading the blog for the first time in ages, apparently. You slacker!

I now summon Mnemosyne, the muse of memory, in all her fashionable glory, who will remind me what we've done since June 19th. My suspicion is that we've done a lot, and are consequently exhausted. I shall just consult Mnemosyne's PDA to see what appointments she made for us...

Thursday June 19th: along to support Kim as she performed in Ceili Idol. Yes, I know. Even worse, it was in an unarguably Oirish Pub, Ceili's on Smithe. I can't honestly say we held our tongues; some of Kim's friends were in stitches at our various expressions of disgust. Among the many highlights of their menu was the Fighting Irish Steak Sandwich. For God's sake. Or the County Cork Calamari - because Cork is justly world-famous for its squid farms. I'm sure if I went to visit Cork I'd be asking to see them. (What is it about Ireland that everyone wants to be Irish? I hope Kim isn't too offended if she reads this, she is by no means the first person we've met who's in this boat, Abby being a prime example - but - if you're going to be attuned to, sympathetic with, devoted to, or otherwise expressing an interest in Ireland, wouldn't it be good to know (a) where it is? (b) that it's two countries, only one of which belongs to the United Kingdom? (c) why that is? (d) that pubs in Ireland aren't going to call themselves 'The Irish '? Et cetera.) Anyway, the place was horrible, so after entertaining the table with our precision decor-abuse, we gave up and concentrated on the music. There isn't too much to say about that. There were ten contestants, Kim went seventh and acquitted herself well, but events like this are all about getting the crowd going and bringing your friends, so the winning three were (1) the most talented person there, (2) a talentless freak with a bunch of friends, (3) a pigtailed blonde with a tight top and a pert attitude. Eh.

Friday June 20th: meal out with James & Susan. We meant to go to Kam's on Davie but it shuts at 9:30pm. So instead we went to a Greek place up the road whose name I forget. Everyone else seems to kinda detest it; it was okay for me. Back at midnight, all of us very sleepy, and we hadn't gotten around to any singing, so we just gave up by tacit mutual agreement, and so to bed.

Saturday June 23rd: (I think) - couch shopping with Susan. She drove us out to Grandview Highway and we tested about a hundred couches in three shops before making our selection. There was a couch entirely covered in blue denim! Sexy! We ended up with a very comfy dark-green couch, which to their credit arrived at our apartment less than two weeks later, and I'm sitting on it right now. Because it's my couch.

Sunday June 24th: have I mentioned that my mother's bear controls the weather? Well he does. His name is Bear and he can change traffic lights and weather patterns in your favour. Sarah didn't believe this until one day she was walking home in Littlehampton and she asked Bear to sort out the mild rain she was experiencing. As she wasn't on 'the list', Bear promptly made it snow on her. A very unhappy Sarah got me to put her on 'the list' and now Bear is very considerate. Possibly too considerate. What does this have to do with our activities on Sunday? We went to a 'Harmonic Overtones Singing Workshop' in Nanaimo, five blocks down from the Skytrain station. And it was a bit sunny on the way there, and the Skytrain is going East-ish at that point, so Sarah, who had forgotten her sunglasses, was a bit dazzled. So - as you would - she asked Bear if he could make it a little less sunny. Bear, obviously distracted by the thought of bedtime in the UK, moved some clouds around but this wasn't quite enough. He therefore offered to move the sun. How we laughed at this amusing deal.

Little did we know.

The workshop itself, well, I hesitate to comment on it lest Sarah, proofing this in my immediate future, is forced to recall all the horrible details, and turns on me to rend me flesh from bone. Suffice to say that the idea is you made a sound in your throat, and then with your tongue moving up and down the roof of your mouth, you change the shape of your throat to create a different vowel sound, which adds a second tone which you can control to create specific intervals.

It's all very interesting, technically, but it has no particular use outside of its own specific kind of singing. You won't be singing two lines in a choral piece, for example. Add to this that the teacher, while stunning in demonstrating the technique, was pretty rubbish at teaching it, and you have a recipe for an extremely irritating three hours.

By the end of which time, there was a rainstorm lashing the area like something out of the opening scenes of Flash Gordon. Seriously, more rain coming down harder than we've ever seen. And in our heads, there was the very apologetic voice of a small brown bear saying: "I'm sorry! I've put it back! I've put it back!"

Bear: do NOT. EVER. EVER! Move the sun again! Got it? Thank you!

Sarah growled all the way back up the hill to the Skytrain station. What a tumpy bunny!

I don't think anything much happened the next week. Which brings us to this week...

Monday July 2nd: we have evolved a Big Plan to do with our music. It's this: we want to be rich. It's that simple. We have songs and we have skills, we just keep giving them away, and giving our time away too. Not gonna get rich that way. So, the Big Plan is to start performing, songwriting, schmoozing, and generally making an effort in order to get ourselves profitable careers in music. This is a long-term plan with many stages, but the first one seemed pretty clear: go and find places to perform. The obvious candidates, considering that we want to show off our own songs, are the many open-mic nights held all around Vancouver. There's a list here: http://www.openmicvancouver.com. I investigated them as best I could online, and we chose the Backstage Lounge on Granville Island as a starting point.

We got to the venue at about 8:15pm and signed ourselves up on the list to perform fourth. Just as well we did, as when we returned for the starting time of 10pm after a meal and a chill-out, we found the list was now full down to 13th place. It didn't quite start on time, but we were up there by sometime past 11pm. They had a very nice grand piano, and we performed Love, Dance & Sing and I Want To Be A Panda - to an audience of about ten, none of whom were really listening. The event was a bit of an audience-free zone, really, with the corresponding lack of feedback. Mildly disheartening if taken that way, but as Sarah pointed out, you can't expect everything to be wonderful.

However, on the plus side, two people there invited us to subsequent open-mic nights, one of which was on...

Tuesday July 3rd: ... at the Wired Monk cafe on 4th and Trafalgar. This meant a slightly inconvenient bus-trip with a keyboard and stand under our arms, since the guy, David, advised us that there was no piano or keyboard in situ. But we trogged there, we had a snack, and we went on second, playing I'll Rescue You, Fireflies, and I Want To Be A Panda to an audience of about twenty. This went down much more like it, with definite whoops and sincere applause. (It's fun but a little weird to sing I'll Rescue You as really it's Alexis's song. You should go buy a copy from Alexis's website.)

Generally the music at the Wired Monk was much better than at the Backstage Lounge, and several people said nice things, including a singer/guitarist called Tony with whom we had an excellent long chat. The best part was as we left, though. I went over to thank David and he invited us back to perform on the following Monday night, which is the Wired Monk's 'best of open mic' evening - and we've been asked to do a 45-minute set! Erk! So this weekend we're doing a lot of thinking and rehearsing! I probably ought not even to be taking time out of it to write this...!

And that's almost everything except for Friday July 6th, last night, when we went out for a meal with James & Susan (and this time managed to reach Kam's before it closed) and then spent three hours back here singing. In that time we showed off the new song The Six Wives Of Henry The Eighth and the four of us put in some serious effort on Sarah's SATB arrangement of Air Conditioning, which already sounds not half bad. And is, naturally, sheer genius in its every particular.

So today we're feeling a bit peaky but we have only slightly over 48 hours to prepare for certainly our longest just-us performance and who knows, maybe an important one. The word has gone out to High Spirits and at Radical for people to come along. A report to follow after the event.

Wish us luck!

PS I forgot to explain the title but you're smart folks and I'm sure it all makes sense in retrospect.

"I hate cars! Cars should be destroyed!" (Tuesday 19 June 2007)

2007-06-19T21:01:00.000-07:00

Well, we had an action-packed weekend...

I'll get the rest of last week out of the way first: nothing much happened until Friday. We had a very tasty meal at Checkers on Davie, and there was the final High Spirits outreach concert on Wednesday, which was mildly fun. There, who said I suck at summaries? And now...

Friday. Off to Granville Island to see the Broadway Chorus perform a revue show called Misplaced, a spoof of Lost in the form of a revue show with a plot connecting the songs. Kind of like a pantomime, but with good music. They even had Sailing - although recast as a chorus number and sung for laughs, thanks to where it appeared in the plot. Plenty of songs from obscure musicals, and from bang-up-to-date musicals too which was more impressive - The Light In The Piazza and Seussical, plus For Good from Wicked. The chorus was basically very good, and certainly very enthusiastic. They don't have much in the way of choreography, which is good, and being an adults-only group there's no sensation of jailbait being thrown onto the front of the stage in skimpy outfits to please the audiences, specifically the two-thirds of the audience who are the parents of the jailbait in question. Not that we know any theatre groups where that used to happen, no sir! Some slightly flaky voices, but nothing dreadful. The biggest problem was the length: 21 songs in the first half, 14 in the second. Only maybe 20% of them were poor enough to be cuttable, but if they'd done that, we wouldn't have been somewhat exhausted in the second act and waiting for the show to end, which never reflects well upon the songs you're hearing.

So I might go and audition for them, as they rehearse on Tuesday nights, which are currently free, and they're a little short of men!

Saturday. We ran around doing things during the day, mostly trying to get our impromptu "recording studio" set up and working so that we could make a CD. The occasion? Ieva's 60th birthday party. We got to the venue for about 5:15pm and had just about enough time to rehearse the ensemble and solo stuff we were performing, and then people started arriving. By the time the party was in full flow, there were well over 100 people - Ieva has a big family and three choirs who all love her! Marvin (Regier, of the choir and singing workshops some weeks back) was Master of Ceremonies, and first we sat through some toasts and roasts, and then there were half a dozen musical tributes. A group from High Spirits sang May You Always, an Andrews Sisters song, and James's group My Lady's Chamber sang three songs including the hacked-about What Shall We Do With The Drunken Ieva? - which was a hoot.

And then on came Noisy Panda with his faithful lop-eared accompanist. I announced that we had been asked to write a song for the occasion, "or at least I hope we were asked, as we've written one anyway." (Looking back on it, we're genuinely not sure, but too late now.) And I sat happily on the edge of the stage to start singing it. Someone reported to me later that Marvin had offered me back the microphone I'd used for my introduction when he realised I was going to sing, but I'm not sure I noticed, or if I did I just pushed it away...

And then I woke up.

I've probably mentioned before how I have this alarming tendency to wake up while performing; I mean by that that I find myself fully understanding that I'm on the stage performing. This is alarming in that until then I've clearly been doing all the right things, because I haven't had to think about it; the song lyrics are stored in my throat, I'm acting the song out by rote and according to plan... it's all good. When I wake up, this is a problem: I may now enjoy it more, being totally aware and in the moment, but I'm also now 100% responsible for everything I do. Nerves! Crisis! Autopilot is much more relaxing.

So having clarified that, let me now tell you that I sang this entire damn song 'in the moment', which made for a very nerve-wracking four minutes as I had only just learned the lyrics, and was still having to think very hard about the shape of a couple of the lines. Plus performance in front of 120 people. Plus, it was an important occasion. I didn't want to screw up (a) our song, (b) in front of Ieva, to whom it was dedicated and by whom it had been inspired, or (c) in front of a crowd of 120 of her family and friends, many of whom had heard 'all about us' from her or by our scarily-spreading reputation.

I was mightily relieved when we got to the end. But I was also mightily pleased, because after passing the last point in the song where I was concerned about the lyrics, I took a moment to look around the room, and I heard and felt that incredible emphasised silence which tells you that right now, as far as your audience is concerned, you are the only thing in the world worth focusing on. And that is a hugely satisfying feeling - I ought also to say humbling, but bah! Ego trip all the way, baby. We finished the song and there was a standing ovation. Hurrah for Gil and Sarah. Very excellent, worthy of the occasion, and general proof that we are Musical Geniuses Wot Write Songs Wot Are Not 'Alf Bad.

And boy, did we do a lot of schmoozing over the course of that party. More on that should anything transpire as a result.

Sunday. Argh! Owing to a slight error of timing, I ended up on at least provincial and possibly national TV, gleefully declaiming a rant (including the title of this post). This came about because Veronica from High Spirits was organising and appearing in a band playing at the Car-Free Day on Commercial Drive, and she'd invited us to come along to listen and generally soak up the ambience. Commercial Drive, at least this section of it between First and Venables, has a very Brightonian vibe, and in a car-free state it was like the North Lanes, albeit with much more street entertainment. We ambled around, listened to Veronica's band Toot-A-Loot, bought some stuff, and went home. But along the way, we were ambushed by a camera crew, who wanted to know how we'd gotten there - SkyTrain - and what we thought of the car-free concept. Gil, never short of a word or ten on the subject of "cars, and the evil that they do", launched into a prizewinning torrent of abuse of cars and drivers, praise for Vancouver's transit infrastructure, approval of London's congestion charge, political conspiracy-theorising about how the rich people get out of paying it, and so forth. Sarah stood faithfully next to me and nodded and chipped in with agreement about Vancouver's farsightedness (rather than, for example, saying, "But I like having a car"). As we departed the scene Sarah heard the interviewer saying something about "that was a perfect..." But we weren't aware of just what a "perfect..." it was until Monday morning when Josh at work informed me that he'd seen me on the news. Argh! Argh!

After a certain amount of searching we found the video online: if you have an FLV player, this is the link to it; failng that, I downloaded it and if I manage to convert it I'll post it up somewhere...

Sarah quizzed me on my panic yesterday evening. "What did you expect might happen if a TV news crew interviewed you on camera?" Well, clearly not this. Canada, consider yourself 'hit' again.

And now the weather. Or to be more truthful, some photos:

James working on our mirrors last weekend, with Gil looking on from a safe distance:

The view down Alberni Street.

A better view, showing the construction happening diagonally across from us. And yes, Podge was feeling very brave, poking his nose out of the window like that.

A picture of extremely happy bathing pigs, taken in the restaurant where we supped on Sunday after the High Spirits concert.

A very happy pig statue:

James and Susan (who are now together)

Wot Holidays?!

This is 'The Qube', an apartment building on West Georgia, the road down from us. Yes, it's being held up by straps. No, this is not safe. Next question.

A rather large water feature outside another building on West Georgia, its scale brought into focus by the presence of a small bunny. (She's actual size but she seems much bigger to me, as They Might Be Giants used to sing.)

Another, much smaller and prettier, water feature a little further down the street.

An odd tree trunk thingy outside a building. You may not be able to see pinecones squirming all around the base like living things. It was creepy.

I bet we've posted this before but it's just brilliant.

While waiting for the delayed Kim on Saturday afternoon. Mr Jaysmith's t-shirt by Monstrance.

Same location twenty seconds later.

At the car-free festival, much activism centred around a proposed new port extension and highway. Apparently 'marmots' will be threatened. (We spent quite some time estimating just what the hell this was before finding a sign saying it was a marmot.) But if they're this size, I foresee them having no trouble whatsoever in fending off construction crews.

Community drumming, led by our favourite star drummer Pepe! He's everywhere!

Birds of New York. (We're in a Blog TARDIS now; this is back to Sarah's trip to the east coast a couple of weeks ago.)

The world's dotiest piano?

Company is setting New York on fire. Lots of Tony awards. Sarah dug it.

Charlton Heston with a bunny. A rather large bunny. Proof that they get everywhere, and are secretly running the country.

And on the subject of 'getting everywhere':

Who was that blue-garbed superstar?

Oops, back to Vancouver. This giant (and nonfunctional) abacus sculpture stands outside the gate to an apartment complex in Chinatown. Wouldn't it be more fun if the access code for the gate had to be physically set on the abacus?

And back to the concept of superstars. An action shot, hopelessly (and hammily) posed while we were recording Love, Dance And Sing. Is there no stopping this panda?

Right, I think I deserve a rest after that. Cheerio, squires and squirrels... more next time. xxxxxx from Gil and Sarah.

"Don't Die" (Tuesday 12 June 2007 )

2007-06-13T00:11:00.000-07:00

What's new chez nous? This week's stream of consciousness:

We got two mirrors from Sarah's voice tutor, Sonia. James The God helpfully provided transport - these monster panes were 6' by 4' and 7' by 2'6" - but unfortunately Gil The Mong bounced one of them off the ground while we were carrying them down to the van, with the result that an enormous crescent snapped out of the long side. Fortunately - this is just like a game off I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue - James is an artist in glass, and he took us and the injured mirrors to his workshop at UBC, where he performed several dangerous cutting-and-snapping operations. Now I'm not often impressed by people in their professions. I don't expect you to be impressed by what I do in my job, because it's my job; it's what I spend, and have spent, the bulk of my life doing, and if I were no good at it, I'd be doing something else. And likewise this is your job, and I expect you to do it well even if I know nothing about it. But James? His work is something else. His motto when working with enormous chunks of glass is "Don't die", and ten minutes of helping him carry and operate on these mirrors convinced me of the ghastly ease with which you could kill yourself at a moment's notice in this line of work. This is no namby-pamby artistry with a palette and easel; this is hardcore stuff worthy of an Irving Stone novel, with someone hauling his own granite from the quarry and generally getting extremely physical with his materials, with the consequent risks of them getting physical right back at him. So my respect for him is now at an all-time high for any man I know; all this and he sings too! And, although they no longer possess the measurements given above, we now have two mirrors leaning against walls in our apartment, and they look good.

Even better, because they're leaning against rather than being fixed to the walls, they make us look good. Or better, anyway, as our weight loss continues to spread.

The High Spirits concert happened on Sunday 10th, with a dress rehearsal on the Saturday. Venue: the Unity Church on Oak and 40th. Nice place, nearly 400 seats, and not a bad stab at filling it, although bear in mind this is a choir with 50 members and a reasonably active community of former members, so I expect there's a certain amount of familial arm-twisting in the LMCS style. Sing Sing Sing went with a bang and my scatting was pretty good. Grumble Too Much, the song dissing women in general and whoever we pick on from the soprano and alto sections in particular, was a hoot - James and I launched into an impromptu dance. We are very silly in that song; it's the only way to play it. The full programme ran to eighteen songs, which is a Posse-ish number, and was acceptably diverse. I don't have the list to hand but I'll run it next time. I do appreciate the way Ieva puts together a real potpourri of stuff, with nothing too long or dull. (Although Barter comes close, but fortunately James and I can leave the skirts to sing that.)

The one thing that's always bugged me about amateur shows, and I accept we indulged ourselves in this when we did our farewell-to-Burge rendition of With A Little Help From My Friends in East Preston (1), is when the show ends - except there's a presentation of flowers - and a speech or two - and much love is shown in all directions - and all in front of the audience. As a professional concert-goer this stuff bores me. I'm not exactly enthralled by it while I'm on stage. But I accept that an amateur concert with an indigenous audience has an excuse for it. I just prefer to see something which starts strongly and ends without petering out, and that's what 'showing the love' feels like to me. But I also know from Posse experience that talking to the audience afterwards is, if self-indulgent, very rewarding, and they like it too. As usual I'm two people on this topic and at least one of them is a hypocrite.

What else, I ask myself, seeing as how it's midnight-thirty and we're trying for an early night for the umpteenth time? Panda Swimming continues apace - I still haven't managed a second breath, but I'm working on it. Still immensely proud of that. We wrote a song for Ieva's 60th birthday party, coming up this Saturday. James' ensemble is working on Sarah's The Blackbird Of Derrycairn and loving it. We might get our relocation expenses back from Radical sometime soon. It's been too hot here, and then it rained lots at the weekend. Podge the polar bear has taken to hanging out of the bedroom window - at an altitude of about 180 feet. Tenpence is trying casually to push him all the way out.

And Sarah had her first voiceover audition, although it's for unpaid work and she won't know the outcome until July. But the feedback was very positive and the work is professionally recognised and would be good experience anyway.

Visuals later in the week - now, beddybyes. Much love to all.

1. And after all our efforts, Burge kept coming back! I imagine myself singing Empty Chairs At Empty Tables at his funeral and he'd come busting up out of the coffin to add a harmony line. Never dead!

There Are Pandas In The Sky (4 June 2007)

2007-06-05T00:26:00.000-07:00

So I expect everyone is paralysed by the need to know: did I survive without Sarah, while she stayed with Jane & Ed in New York?

In brief, no, or at least I did but only for five days, which was unfortunate, as she was away for seven.

I did get up to some drinking hi-jinks (hi-drinks?) on Friday and Saturday night, which kept me happy - and surprisingly chirpy the morning after - but I crashed and burned in terms of things to actually do on Sunday and Monday.

Tuesday night I went to see Into The Woods with Kim from High Spirits. Kim loves this show and sang a very creditable version of Giants In The Sky at the performance party last month. I've heard the soundtrack once, but nothing really stuck out. It's a Sondheim show: the first half is a bunch of fairy tales working themselves out, and the second half is a kind of examination of what happens when you get what you wish for, plus a mass murder of cast members the like of which I haven't seen outside of And Then There Were None or a teen slash movie. Nothing to complain about there, although I strongly suspect the first half is deliberately long so that the principals who get wasted in Act Two don't feel like they're only being given half a role. So I sat there at the back, watching this, and I thought: this is incredibly dull and only slightly funny, and (although technically I had forgotten the details of the Rapunzel story) this show is just telling me a bunch of fairytales which I already know. No dramatic tension, even in the little story of the baker and his wife trying to steal an important fairytale object from each of the plotlines so as to persuade a witch to lift a curse of infertility on their house. In other words: blah.

Now Act Two is much better. Radically better, and the only problem is, although it needs Act One in order to function dramatically, Act One is so goddamn dull that you have to wonder if this was the only way Sondheim could find to tell the story. Because, had I not been operating on instructions from Sarah to watch and report, I would have left at the interval. Calling it the halfway point would be an extreme stretch of fractions... 1/2 is not equal to 2/3 even for a value of 1/2 as large as this. And it's not like the music improves in Act Two; it's somewhat simplistic throughout, and there's only a couple of actual tunes in the whole show. But, under orders, I stuck around, and was rewarded by the aforementioned random killing spree at the hands (or rather feet) of an irate giantess, and by a couple of good-ish emotional songs, and by at least an attempt to explore an interesting theory of how to live life.

Unfortunately, here's where my several upscale criticisms come in. The point of the show is (sort of) that you should live your life as best you can, grab the amazing moments and cherish them, because your life might be cut short without warning at any moment. Now that's a laudable point, and there are some great stories to be told around it. But it doesn't help that the characters in this one are nominally from fairytales. I found it very difficult to think of them as real people. Telling a symbolic story with symbolic characters isn't as effective as telling a symbolic story with real ones. Wicked, and other such fairytale retellings grounded more thoroughly in a realistic or semi-realistic history, only work for me because of those details and that grounding.

(Magic is always a problem; you need to spend an awful lot of time investigating and defining the rules, or people will say "Well, it's just magic isn't it? Why don't you just magic them back to life or whatever?" And indeed, considering that the story featured numerous people being killed in a very final manner, it didn't help that in the first-half closer, the witch character brings a cow back to life with no obvious side-effects - no "Buffy's mom" issues, or see also the excellent joke "What would Beethoven say if he was alive today? Let me out of this coffin!")

Another problem, and it's somewhat unfair of me to level this accusation at a show written in 1987, but I'm going to do it anyway: if you want to see a show about how death can strike at any moment and you should make the most of your life, well, there's a better one, and I've been in it. After A New Brain, everything else is, well, a bit downhill. I don't just say this because I've been in it, mind you; I just think it's a better show. It's more compact, it has more tunes, it's funnier; it's just generally better. It has real people in it and if anything it creates a modern fairytale, like the Mr Men. I appreciate that Into The Woods came first, and that if I'd seen it in 1987 I might have been as dumbstruck by its genius and its metaphorical content as I was a few years ago by A New Brain. But I didn't, I wasn't, and I ain't; sorry, Stephen.

And still more unfortunately, thinking it through a bit later, I realised that the theme of the show, to be explored in detail in Act Two, is mentioned very casually and then dismissed in a song in Act One, which for me made the lengthy exploration of it a bit moot. "Yes, you said that earlier", etc.

I think it was at best an interesting failure - which is better than a dull failure, but obviously less actual fun to watch than many kinds of success. I should say the cast - most of whom were professionals working for free, in a two-night concert performance in aid of preservation efforts in Stanley Park - were pretty damn good. Which I expect when I go to see a show, but it's nice when it actually happens. And Agony is a very funny male duet (with an equally funny reprise) which would be cool for Burge and I to do sometime. Somehow. So the upshot is, I can't blame the cast for my not rating the show. They did a bang-up job; I just didn't like the material.

And I got to say 'moot', so it's not all bad.

Moot!

Sarah's flight arrived at YVR (Vancouver Airport - at least try to look cosmopolitan will you?) at 1:40am on Wednesday. A dutiful, although somewhat tired, Panda was awaiting her in the arrivals lounge. I stood by the glass and stared at the visible end of the travelator, mentally admonishing each passing traveller for Failing To Be A Bunny, until finally - she was there! WHEEEE! I bounced up and down a lot and grabbed her the moment she came into reach, even though there was a big railing in the way. I missed her awfully.

New York was, in summary, fantastic and beautiful and emotional, and I'm glad she got to go. Sometime soon I'll join her on a trip. (I might try to persuade her to write about it, although I suspect the best you'll get is me taking rough dictation.) Excellently, she found me a couple of James Agate books. James Agate was an English theatre critic whom I discovered thanks to a Radio 4 programme years ago. He was arrogant, opinionated, verbose, and utterly dedicated to quality in theatre, and his diaries and reviews make for fascinating reading. The period and literary references alone take me ages to track down. But I can't get enough of it. We've slowly pieced together a semi-collection of Agate's books - his diaries, Ego, run to nine volumes of which I think I have six, plus some samplers, and I have some of his criticism as well. It's a collection I'm expecting will take years to complete, and that suits me, because everything I have thusfar by him stands up to rereading like nothing else on Earth. Quite remarkable. And Sarah spotted these two collections on a top shelf in a random bookshop where she had a ten-minute time limit. Wotta goil!

And now the Jaysmith Music Update. LA!

You'll remember (at least I think I've said before) that Ieva runs three choirs: High Spirits (which we both belong to), Afternoon Delights (Sarah only), and Simple Gifts (neither of us here). High Spirits performed this season's first Outreach concert - a snazzy term for playing in an old people's home, like Princess Marina House - this Wednesday. We survived it rather than excelling, although most of it didn't sound too bad. I still can't be having with songs in foreign languages, but the audience likes the sound so who can complain? You know what I'm like before, during, and after a performance: buzzing! I did approach one song near the end with a feeling like a student who knows he hasn't revised, but fortunately, as happens oftimes, my throat knew what was expected of it even if my conscious brain was a bit trepidatious.

On Saturday we had an extra, somewhat epic, rehearsal, the high point of which was the addition of drums and bass to some of the songs. Now I and several other lucky members of the choir (including James The God) can hear drums anyway while we're singing, but having real ones is always good. Songs like Sing Sing Sing positively blistered along. Result! So the full concert (on Sunday) should sound legendary. And Panda has to scat! Twice! This actually makes me feel very nervous. I should definitely do what Marvin recommended at the workshop, which had occurred to me as a good plan anyway: learn a couple of excellent-sounding scats, and make it look like I'm improvising them on the spot.

On Sunday, Simple Gifts performed their big church concert for the season. And, to our surprise, Ieva invited Sarah and I to perform as guests! We thought about what to do for a while, and then decided, on about Thursday, that we should write a couple of new songs. To perform on Sunday afternoon. Are we nuts? Well, a bit. I don't know that we really convinced ourselves that this was a workable idea until Friday night, but the upshot was, we came to the concert armed with As Yet Unnamed Song About Travelling, a folky Sarah solo, I Gotta Get Me One Of Those Girls, an enthusiastic Rat Pack blast for me, and All You Have To Say, the wedding song we wrote a few weeks back. We sang with microphones, which worked a treat - I think we're both still a bit nervous with them owing to our much greater experience not using them, but their power is clear to behold, especially the radio mic I had! - and the songs went down a bit of a storm.

And today Sarah wrote the music for some lyrics I wrote a few weeks ago, for a song called Fireflies. At this rate we'll have an entire album in a couple of weeks' time. Family & Posse members will receive copies of this as soon as possible :)

It's been really far too hot here for the past fortnight or so, even with the new bedroom fan we bought before Sarah went away, and which in her absence I promptly forgot we owned, leading to seven nights of sweltering in my stupidity. So we've had the balcony door open all night, and it's just about cool enough to consider going to bed. So, take care, pay your taxes, and in Justine's case, watch out for the world's funniest birthday card, arriving soon. Of course it might just be us who think it's funny... tee hee! Much love to all; Panda zonk now.

Panda swam!

2007-05-21T23:38:00.000-07:00

The title says it all, really. Tonight we went down to the pool on the third floor, I put on a pair of goggles, and I swam. Six or seven times. I took a deep breath, kicked forward, and did a very enthusiastic freestyle stroke for about twenty feet on that breath, before either righting myself or pointing upwards with extreme urgency, the signal to Sarah to come get me.

I even managed to keep my eyes open behind the goggles, most times. Didn't manage to figure out how to take a breath, so there was a limit to how far I could go, and I tried front crawl once and got nowhere, but: I swam! I SWAM!!!

And I can't wait to do it again.

In other news:

ITEM! Susan from High Spirits came round this afternoon and we demonstrated our music collection and sang a bit. Fun! I burned a CD of modern musicals for her - the Falsettos crusade continues - she couldn't believe there's a song called 4 Jews In A Room Bitching. Well, it's unique...

ITEM! Sarah goes to New York tomorrow. How will I survive without her for over a week? Hookers! Er, I mean, fortunately we have pre-arranged various evening events to occupy my time: a tenor section rehearsal on Tuesday, High Spirits on Wednesday, possibly acquiring a couple of mirrors on Thursday, maybe a meal out on Friday, a pub crawl with James The God on Saturday, and recovering from a pub crawl with James The God on Sunday...

ITEM! We built our third bookcase tonight and unpacked a further six boxes of stuff. We're down to about twenty-five boxes now, but it's getting tough to figure out what to do with them as these are the densely-packed boxes of books and 'stuff which goes in sideboards' and suchlike, and currently we're all out of bookshelves and we have no (and want no) sideboard. If we get a desk then I can probably set up the computer, which will account for another three or four boxes, and the PlayStation is occupying another box but is useless without a television and another power adapter. So, we still look like we've only just moved in, but at least all our visitors are wowed by the place. Eavesdropping on conversations at work, I've established that we are indeed paying a lot for rent compared to most people, but most people live in the sticks, and we're two minutes from the Vancouver equivalent of Oxford Street, in a swanky building with a pool and hot tub. Worth it for the year, therefore.

ITEM! We're figuring out how to record music so it doesn't sound awful. With a piece of software called Reason we can record MIDI from Sarah's new keyboard pretty faithfully - this means we can then fix up individual notes, adjust their volume, add in extra notes, multi-track it, and make it sound like a grand piano or indeed like a Hammond organ should we wish... plus, we can add drum tracks and a bassline. The biggest problem is the single thing we have to record live with a microphone: our voices. We made initial recordings of our two new 'big' songs, All You Have To Say and When You Smile, and by the time I've processed them for volume and de-hissing, they sound very mechanical and the piano accompaniment is somewhat blurry, so we won't be posting them! (Burge got to hear them and agreed that they sound robotic with all that noise reduction; plus he misses the detail in the piano line!) On the other hand, a quick test revealed that recording a vocal line while listening to the piano playback should give us a much nicer sound. I'm getting really into EQs and frequency analysis. It's truly impressive (and a little scary) how you can alter the tone of a recording by adjusting the frequency curve. The upshot is that, although it's too late to do much now before Sarah goes away, we'll spend some time the weekend after next on this, and then we should have something for people to hear.

ITEM! After being introduced to meat souvlaki skewers at the post-choir drinking sessions at The Main, and then eating them so often at Kalypso round the corner on Robson, we experimented with buying frozen souvlaki and cooking it ourselves. Sarah quite likes chicken souvlaki; I'm considering this a definite win in terms of finding a new foodstuff which she can tolerate, let alone enjoy.

ITEM! God, how could I have forgotten this? Or rather, I'm not surprised I've suppressed the memory of this so quickly. And I was only ranting about it to Susan earlier this afternoon. What am I talking about, you ask? We went to see the fourth in the Black Box series of dance shows at the Shadbolt Centre on Saturday night. And, god, it was the worst thing ever. I'll have to try to not swear while I describe it. The first half was thirty minutes long and featured almost exactly one minute of actual dance. What we were presented with was a pretentious poem intoned over the speakers while people rippled three sheets of silk on the stage floor, followed by (and I wish I could say 'in swift succession') a woman coming in and lying under one of the sheets, rolling around under the sheet, standing up, looking around, deciding it wasn't for her and lying under the sheet again, gathering up the sheet, walking offstage, leaving the stage empty for ten minutes while an incomprehensible set of images flickered on the screen at the back, coming back on, glaring at us all, and then performing some very slow dance steps in imitation of a horse on the movie screen before banging her head against the floor several times (we sympathised) and then making some random movements for thirty seconds before the lights went down. I had been thinking "God, this is rubbish, I hope the interval is soon", but to my horror, the interval was now - that was the piece in its entirety. She got scattered applause from the audience, and I actually said out loud, "That was it?" which got me some looks from people all around. There was a fifteen-minute interval, which I suppose might have been necessary to reset the lighting and movie projector, but I'm pretty sure it was actually so that the woman, who was also dancing in the second piece, had plenty of time to go backstage and laugh hysterically for as long as she needed at how gullible her audience was to have paid money for this tripe. During the interval I had a good look around for someone from the Shadbolt with whom I could make a deal: "Look, give us our money back and I promise we won't tell anyone how dreadful it is." Sadly for their reputation, no-one was available to take me up on this offer, so here I am, telling you all about it. And so to the second half, which did actually feature some dance steps, but not really very many: there were several routines which recurred, with occasional amusing semi-serendipitious intersections with the spoken text, which dealt with these two dancers and how they knew one another and how their lives had coincided. But it wasn't really very good, nor very interesting. We feel that when we go to see a dance show we expect to see dancing, not listen to words. If it isn't necessarily a very intellectual show with great meaning to the dancing, at least let it be very energetic: dancing is the one art form where genius really is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. If you can't be bothered to sweat: the hell with you. So in conclusion: if you ever have the chance to see a show by Andrea Nann or Sarah Chase, don't bother. And now I will end the paragraph and you can breeeeeeeeeathe.

ITEM! To end on an uplifting note (I don't like ranting, it means the world is not good enough, and that's bad) - Sarah's choral piece The Blackbird Of Derrycairn is being rehearsed for performance by My Lady's Chamber, the twelve-voice ensemble organised by James The God. It's an excellent piece of music which she's only ever heard performed by me, when I learned all four parts and overdubbed them for a CD I made for her Christmas present in 2004. She's recently been in touch with the rightsholder of the original poem which she set to music, which is why she's finally been able to give it to a group to perform, and they seem to be enjoying it. I'm very pleased for her and hopefully sometime we'll have a recording for people to hear.

ITEM! Bedtime! Bye for now.

Photo TARDIS, April 2007 (or: "If a picture ever paints a thousand words, I'll run a mile")

2007-05-17T00:14:00.000-07:00

Random photography from the past month. Try to keep up!

First, random rabbit-driven advertisement:

The road up to Squamish:

Just south of Squamish is Shannon Falls. Which looks like this. Quite something:

At Squamish is a railway museum. They have a dozen or so restored carriages from the age of steam, including this Post Office coach in which very hard-working people sorted the mail while the train was on the move, using a filing system that looked like this. Remember they're travelling at seventy miles an hour on rickety wooden tracks while doing this job.

And here are the mailbags ready to receive the sorted mail:

Bunny inna train:

Now this is a snowplough!

Panda the traindriver!

They also had a restored 'executive's carriage'. This is literally a mobile office where a railroad executive would conduct business on the move. It was like a hotel suite on wheels. The woodwork was exquisite. Curvy corridors. Private servant with his own room. Private chef and kitchen. Private bedroom. How the other half lived...

Onwards to Squamish:

And here we are. You might remember in the blog for that weekend I mentioned how bizarre it is to be in a place which looks exactly like a typical American main-street town except that it's completely surrounded by mountains. Well, hell, take a look:

And then we drove home. The southbound lane is closer to the precipice so the sea view on the return trip is better. Feast your eyes on this:

Did you know the sun actually produces lens flare even without a camera involved? Check out this massive corona. That's what it looked like to our naked eyes:

A brief pause to show you this. Can't remember if I posted this at the time (April 4th, according to the camera):

And now we'll take you to the outside of Vancouver Art Gallery.

Some 'art cars' are parked outside. What's an 'art car', you ask? Thank you, that's my cue:

No photography inside the art gallery, of course. To compensate for your loss, how about I show you some photos of unlikely Canadian pharmaceutical products?

I remain terrified of scary mannequins. Sears (the big Boots), take a bow:

Another panda-sponsored restaurant, can't be bad:

No matter how you try to hide it in massive tarpaulins, everyone's still gonna know it's a skyscraper:

Spotted on the way home from the cinema where we watched the Oscar-nominated shorts. Clearly the posterboard design was potentially too complex for the focus group of somewhat-drunk pedestrians, so they stamped BEER across it to make absolutely sure you'd know you were standing outside a liquor store:

This is Susan, she's in the choir. She moonlights as a tenor and therefore counts as a goddess. This was taken at the mad dance on Granville Island in middling-late April when I danced for about six hours straight and then walked home several miles in the rain with only a meatball sub for company. Great night!

We went for a walk around North Vancouver and found a nice little floating pier. It was a sunny day and we were very happy. This is us: Gil and Sarah Jaysmith. If you're reading this in England: we wish you were here.

Hurts So Ba-a-a-a-a-a-a-d

2007-05-14T01:26:00.000-07:00

The paper here ran a story about a man who had abducted a total of 77 sheep and lived with them in his house. "I couldn't help it," he told police, as he was charged with 40 counts of animal cruelty. Note: 40 counts. Not 77. So, what, 37 of the sheep refused to press charges?

I Want To Be A Noisy Panda

2007-05-14T00:54:00.000-07:00

Saturday May 12: the day High Spirits found out how loud I can sing!

We left the apartment at 9:15am and got back home at about 1:30am on Sunday morning. Kim (an alto from the High Spirits and Afternoon Delights choirs, who has been very kindly lifting us to the pub and then homewards on Wednesday nights) collected us and took us to Ieva's house, where Marvin Regier was giving a singing masterclass. There were about fourteen singers in total, and we each got 15 minutes of his attention while everyone else listened carefully. The guy knows his stuff. I was interested because although I'm pretty confident with what I do, I don't necessarily know how to solve technical problems while singing; I rely on what works in front of an audience, and I try a song over and over until I hit upon its particular recipe. This is all very well when it works, of course, but I don't really have much of a technical toolkit, just a whole bunch of past cases where I've gotten it right or mostly right. I figured this is what 'exercises' are for, to give you a toolbox of singing techniques redux; can't sing this note right, or reach that note? Try this exercise, achieve the result out of context, then put it into context. So, that was what I eventually got to ask him, and indeed that was the answer... and using such subtle tricks, I managed to sing the end of Grand Hotel's epic song Love Can't Happen, which has hitherto eluded me. So I was happy. I was particularly happy because Marvin said some nice things about my voice and also took away a DVD and programme for A New Brain. Sarah was also very happy because she, asking him for tips on maintaining her tone while singing higher, got a bundle of tips and a big compliment. External validation: very useful, because despite our cocky appearance - well, my cocky appearance and Sarah's occasional lapse into self-confidence - we are ever so shy and uncertain! This is why performing regularly is so good for you; it's the one true measurement of whether you rock. Theory and practice, whatever; get out there and sing!

Which leads me to the High Spirits performance party which started at 6pm and ran for seven hours. The performance party is, depending on who you are, dear reader, either (1) an enthusiastic musical free-for-all in which members of the choir get to perform songs of their choice in front of a warm and appreciative audience, or (2) Not Quite A Posse Party, But Nice Try. Kim sang Giants In The Sky but other than that there was nothing from musicals. Nothing! Dearie me. We fixed that pretty sharpish. We sang our own All You Have To Say and I Want To Be A Panda in our first slot, then All The Wasted Time and Big News in the second. Sarah played piano for a three-part instrumental piece by Tara, and accompanied Kim's song and a couple of others. Then, once the scheduled entertainment was over, we stole up to the piano and did a bunch more stuff, including Bring Him Home, The Song That Goes Like This, and some other songs from musicals - which people didn't know! Oh, the shame. Try singing One Day More in Littlehampton without instantly attracting twenty people who equally instantly pick out parts for themselves. We may have to poison everyone's mind with musicals. And we didn't even do Four Jews In A Room Bitching. Maybe next time. In short, we had a ball and Kim awarded us the Rookie Of The Party award. Boom! This is what it means to Hit Vancouver!

Good party in general though. One in the morning is not a humiliatingly early time to stop drinking. I was on Southern Comfort for the night. Man, did I have a headache this morning! But well worth it. And now we have to write some more songs...

Today (Sunday May 13th) was less than action-packed, except for a horribly early start: Sarah had been roped into playing piano for an hour at an arts exhibition down on Denman... you can imagine how happy she was about that... and I sat there dutifully turning pages. We were interrupted near the end by a guy who thought we would know where he could buy guitar tablature with fingering positions, which immediately put a big smile on my face as I recalled the French & Saunders sketch featuring the guitarists... "And now with the book?" Very tiring day as a result. We ate out - must be about the eighth time we've had skewers at Kalypso's - and otherwise stayed in.

We still haven't gotten around to downloading photos. Still, reading is good for you. It's not all about the visuals, you know. Much love to all, and tune in next time.

Blog TARDIS: Oscarette (sometime in early April)

2007-05-14T00:24:00.000-07:00

We caught the Oscar nominations for short movies, animated and otherwise, a couple of weeks ago. Forgot to mention it until now. Worth recapping.

Amongst the highlights of the animated programme: The Danish Poet, a very sweet telling of how the animator's parents met... No Time For Nuts, a skit featuring Scrat from Ice Age... A Gentleman's Duel, an amusing English-French steampunk-styled duel over a noblewoman's hand... Guide Dog, an amusingly sick tale of an over-eager guide dog who gets all his charges killed... Maestro, an impeccably-presented piece of CGI, with just one joke but perfectly delivered... and One Rat Short, a superbly-animated but utterly gutting tale of a street rat accidentally swept up into a science lab where other rats are being experimented upon. Sarah and I decided instantly to expunge that one from our memory, but it bears mentioning. It was very good. Just very sad. Like We3 come to life. Which reminds me, actually, there's a script for We3 and reports suggest it will make the best movie ever. Hurrah for Grant Morrison!

Amongst the highlights of the live-action shorts: Binta And The Great Idea, a complex story about life viewed from Africa which carried quite a lot of emotional punch and also looked great... The Saviour, a slightly disturbing story about a door-to-door missionary having an affair, notable for featuring Nicholas Hammond (TV's original Spider-Man) as a nutjob preacher... and the winner, West Bank Story, a sublime retelling of West Side Story Bollywood-style with Arabs and Jews opening neighbouring fast-food restaurants. Quite insane.

You can get both collections on DVD, I believe, so give it a shot. Much better than watching one long movie and finding you don't like it; if you don't like a short, just tap your foot for fifteen minutes and another one will be along.

We watched them at the VanCity Theatre. This is a very nice theatre. They aren't kidding about having luxurious seats. It's a fifteen-minute walk from our apartment, so very handy. Like living near the Duke Of York's again!

Like a drumming spider...

2007-05-11T00:17:00.000-07:00

I sense the Blog TARDIS may cartwheel into view next time. My grip on sequential time is a bit blurred. While I can focus on yesterday and today, though:

The evening of Wednesday May 9th: we went down to 16th Street to see Bill Bruford hosting a drumming clinic. Bruford drummed with King Crimson and Yes, took over the drums for Genesis on tour, and has run his own band, Bill Bruford's Earthworks. His technique is remarkable; his drums are flat, he has the snare, hi-hat and bass drum pretty much lined up in front of him with his toms alternating down to each side, and he's completely centred; he looks almost like a spider, moving just his wrists and ankles, rotating his entire upper body at the waist rather than bend anywhere else. Always upright. It looks remarkable. Sarah, never one for anguished musical self-expression in herself or others, admired his zen-like economy of movement. For $8 apiece, a very entertaining two hours. Then we casually sauntered down to the pub to meet the rest of High Spirits who'd been busily rehearsing while we were skiving, and I scandalised Kim with comments about goats.

Thursday May 10th: Sarah's next concert with Afternoon Delights. She felt much happier about this one than last Thursday's, which saw a somewhat fraught evening of bunny repair work to remind her that she was not in fact rubbish at all aspects of music. Then she hung out with Kim a bit, it seems. No doubt much female discussion of my genius was to be heard. Sarah is declining to issue me with full details. Actually she claims they talked about other things a lot of the time but I refuse to believe it.

In the evening... erm... well. Fans of Gil's Strongly-Held Opinions may be aware that I have very little time for old musicals. Because they suck. Whether this is a question of not dating well, or because they were intrinsically bad even then - who cares? It's 2007. They suck. Almost every musical written before, I dunno, call it 1978, is rubbish. Sure, pick out your favourite musical from 1977 or earlier, and tell me how wonderful it is. You're wrong. It's rubbish. Old-school big-production-value Broadway musicals, salt of the earth, yadda yadda yadda. They're all rubbish. The songs are rubbish. The dancing girls are pointless. The spectacle, the jazz hands, the ninety-second songs with hardly anything interesting in the music and with utterly generic lyrics, all these things are just elements of why these shows suck giant dusty Martian rocks.

And here in the Vancouver Public Library to demonstrate the verity of my claim, presenting a retrospective on the careers of lyric-writing partners Betty Comden and Adolph Green, I give you the APPLAUSE! Musicals Society, with seven of their singers showcasing twenty-odd songs from the team's fourteen musicals.

OK, look, they wrote On The Town. I'll give 'em that. Bernstein music, good story (but adapted from a play, I note) and OK songs, and it had Dan Dailey in the movie and that's always going to be alright by me since he looked like Daddy. But that's it. That's all they did that was any good. For the following fifty-something years they somehow made a career out of a perma-downward slope of movies and musicals which just weren't any good. The singers were significantly underrehearsed, and the accompanist was pretty grim, but out of twenty songs from a supposedly successful team I'd expect to hear a better hit ratio than two good, three OK, five listenable and ten awful. The presenter tried to make light of the fact that their shows often flopped (which is not of itself proof that they were talentless hacks) and that shows which featured their book but not their song lyrics often did well (which I'm afraid is stronger evidence). But towards the end it was just shameful. These people were, frankly, losers. They even worked on the movie of Singin' In The Rain and contributed just one song... Moses Supposes. Wonderful. Thank you. Now go get some talent and write something good.

The presentation was nominally part of this society's "Musicals 101" series of related lectures, but it was also a massive attempted plug for Do Re Mi, their forthcoming show with lyrics by, you guessed it, Comden and Green. Now we did appreciate their semi-staged The Mystery Of Edwin Drood a few weeks ago. In fact, did I write about that? Perhaps I should do that in a moment. But look, there's a reason why a lot of stuff almost dies out and is kept alive only through the diligent efforts of a few hardworking volunteers. It's because it's old, irrelevant crap, and only the volunteers like it, and it should be allowed to die out to make room for the new stuff, which is the crap-to-be for the next generation but which right now is what we ought to be listening to. Those who remember the past this intensely, and particularly those who excavate it with such dedication - and half of the singers in APPLAUSE! weren't old enough to have seen a Comden and Green show themselves - well, they're doomed to repeat it, and they'll sit there convinced that this is the way it should be, and that all this modern new-fangled tuneless claptrap is just a fad, probably something to do with homosexuality, and it will pass soon, and then once more we can rejoice in the presence of good old-fashioned red-blooded shows with lots of dancing girls and songs about love, moon, June, spoon, croon. NO! It makes me nauseous. Let the past die out, let the future reign, and for god's sake let no-one ever be forced to sing crap songs from crap 1940s and 1950s musicals ever again. Argh!

Side note: never ask me what I think of Oliver! unless you want your ears damaged at a molecular level.

News of almost complete immateriality: we've found cheap tasty bread. Sarah is picky about bread; I'm more picky about it being brown, and preferably seedy. I don't know what the story is with farm products here. Groceries are surprisingly expensive in general, but bread - 65p for a no-label loaf is the cheapest we've found in regular shops, and you can get bread that costs three pounds a loaf. Three quid! For sixteen slices of bread! Milk is also somewhat more expensive... even comparing it to Cravendale, which was pretty much all we drank for the last few years in England. "2% milk", i.e. semi-skimmed, is easily 50% more expensive than in England. It all points to British farmers being able to keep prices down thanks to subsidies. Although, my understanding was that in America the subsidies are almost worse, or at least that farmers had powerful lobbyists to help them out. Maybe that doesn't work up here. Eh. I don't care enough to research it - even the thought of opening another browser window to Google for "farm subsidies Canada" almost physically revolts me with its implicit and unendurable endorsement of intellectual inquisitiveness - but, well, food is expensive. Tump.

Tonight we tripped off to London Drug to get sleeping tablets for Sarah. Let's hope SleepMD does the job. Nano-diffusers (TM) are on the job, apparently. Will she sleep tonight? The drama continues! Could have been worse, though. The product on the next shelf was called Zim's Crack Cream - new extra creamy formula, it proudly proclaimed. And we have pictures if you don't believe me, once we can be bothered to wire up the phone.

This kinda worked, didn't it? Perhaps I can convince myself not to accidentally abandon you all for another fortnight like last time... goodnight for now, though.

"HER husband wrote 'dum de dum de dum dum'..."

2007-05-02T00:10:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy time at High-Rise Casa Jaysmith, and thus is accounted for the fact that I completely forgot to blog last week. This week I didn't forget so much as deliberately not do it because I was shattered.

The short version is that this weekend we rented a car and spent Saturday shopping, mostly at Ikea, and then Sunday driving up the coastal road to Squamish. Squamish is a weird, weird place... a small town on a waterside plain, completely surrounded by mountains. If I thought life in Vancouver was like moving to Halo (or Ringworld, for you oldies, or an Orbital for us Banks fans) then Squamish is like life inside a Dyson Sphere. It must mess with people's heads, being born there. But we survived our daytrip. Sarah is very happy after spending 24 hours with a car. I must admit we did get a nicer view of whatever we were driving towards than we'd have had on a bus.

We now have, courtesy of Ikea, three sets of shelving units, which are my next building project. As usual their delivery options were incredibly inconvenient (even more inconvenient than Bosco's Inconvenience Store). I still don't see why you have to select the items you want (bulky as these may be) and take them to the checkout before you can ask for home delivery - which they can only schedule within the immediately following 48 hours because they don't have much room to store the items you've picked out. Why can't you hand over a pick list at the checkout and have them pick out the items the day before you want the stuff delivered? Imagine if Ikea Delivery was actually helpful, in other words.

The other big reason we're exhausted is because we've been being creative. Ever so creative! Sarah was offered a solo spot in the Afternoon Delights concert coming up next Thursday. And Ieva (the conductor) suggested that, on account of Sarah being a composer - she knew this because I talk Sarah up to everyone at every opportunity - she should sing one of her own compositions. Sarah squeaked at the prospect but cautiously suggested to me that we should write a new song very quickly, suitable for singing in an old people's home... so nothing about "dancing in the shadow of death" or "we've had a great life but it's nearly over", for example. So last Thursday night we knocked around some ideas for a while. I have a tendency to try to figure out "high concepts" for songs, whereas Sarah thinks of titles - mostly because all my suggestions for titles are disgusting! So eventually we ended up with When You Smile as a title, and we proceeded from there.

Our working method seems to be that we discuss what we want to say and how we want it to be said, and then I work out a verse and chorus, for which Sarah duly composes a lovely melody and some chords. We then figure out either another verse or the bridge, sort out the overall song layout, and tighten it up. So that's what happened. Over the course of Thursday evening, in five hours of very hard work, we ended up with everything except a melody for the bridge. (And Sarah was a bit uncertain about the melody for the end of the chorus, but she couldn't sleep so she got up at 4am and sorted it out.) Bizarrely, when I went to get supper from the kitchen at 12:30am, an entirely different song called Velvet popped into my head - an entire verse, chorus and tune - so we got a bonus for the evening. Presumably once you start songwriting you just can't stop. Needless to say my song is, if not disgusting, certainly somewhat raunchy. Justine, you'll have to cover your ears ;)

On Saturday Sarah was able to demonstrate When You Smile to Ieva and the rest of the High Spirits tenors when she came to collect me after the tenor section rehearsal. It seemed to go down well and she'll be performing it on Thursday. However, that's not the end of it! On Monday we got another request from Ieva, this time for a song of Sarah's which Ieva could sing at a friend's wedding. Now the obvious, if perhaps too 'special' and quirky, wedding song of Sarah's is the one she wrote for our wedding, and Ieva loves that, but we thought it would be interesting to try to write the definitive 'wedding' song, just as I think we wrote the definitive 'friendship and love' song in the form of I'll Rescue You. So last night we hammered out, with again a lot of hard work, the chorus, chorus melody, and three verses for a song called All You Have To Say. Today Sarah sorted out the verse melody, and tonight we've sorted out the bridge lyrics and melody. And I think we've achieved our goal. You'll have to decide. We'll try to put up recordings of all these songs on a secret Posse page later this week, assuming Squeaky Bunny sorts her voice out or I can sing it in a suitable range.

This then is why no blog posts, and this now is making up for it. Any questions?

NB I don't know what happened to the photos from two posts ago. Dan pointed it out. I'll sort it next chance I get.

Wuxtry! Wuxtry! (part two)

2007-04-16T01:50:00.000-07:00

If you do only one blog-related thing today, it should be to scroll down and read the first part of "Wuxtry! Wuxtry!" directly below this post. Reason: I'm making two posts in one night. This isn't the best way to overcompensate for running at a weekly pace, but it's my way or the highway.

The specific good news in this bonus entry is: our stuff has arrived! At last! And it was a relatively painless process. We got a call on Wednesday to say it would arrive between 9am and 10am on Friday morning. I immediately (1) booked a 'defrag day' (paid emergency leave, six days a year, separate from my proper holiday allowance) so I could be at home to help Sarah with it all. In the end it took about an hour and a half from top to tail, and we had the rest of the day off. Er, unless anyone from Radical is reading this, in which case we also unpacked lots of stuff and generally did things which would have proven impossible for Sarah (a mere woman, you'll remember) to handle on her own.

Photographic proof, if proof be needs be, of our stuff's arrival now follows. This is our 'room 2', initially empty:

And this is how the truck looked when it arrived at the back of the building:

This is the red carpet upon which the boxes were delivered unto us:

And this is how it looked at the end. 80 boxes!

Tenpence and Hugh!!!!!!!!

And Rattle. Well, I was sleepy, and Rattle was closest.

What a cute rabbit. Actually, this is not a cute rabbit, rather a very unhappy one: this photo is timestamped 9:03am and is of Sarah standing at the bus stop as we waited on Saturday morning to go to our choir's full-day singing workshop.

I, on the other hand, was all set for a bouncy day!

After singing, a tenor needs: cider! And after trying several individual pints, a tenor likes to try: a pitcher of cider! Yes, friends, this is my pitcher of cider. Go buy your own.

There. Two posts in one day. Painless. You may go again now.

(1) After a day's delay and numerous reminders from Sarah