... and therefore...
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day eleven (WIN)
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.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day ten (MODERATE WIN)
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.
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.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day nine (FAIL)
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)
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day seven (WIN against considerable odds)
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.
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.
Monday, July 6, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day six (WIN!)
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 :)
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 :)
Sunday, July 5, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day five (WIN?)
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 :)
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!)
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...
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...
Saturday, July 4, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day three (FAIL?) (WIN?)
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...
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...
Friday, July 3, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day two (FAIL)
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...
Thursday, July 2, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day one
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:
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:
And now: oops. Apparently I should've started my health kick with slightly less extravagance. Today I was reasonably healthy with the food, but after walking the Twines down to Canada Place at 3pm so they could meet up with Barney and listen to the drummers, I turned off down Cordova with my Zen player playing loud, and walked, er, all the way down Cordova and then all the way around Stanley Park before returning home up Robson.
It turns out that my previous two efforts to circumnavigate Stanley Park have failed at significantly earlier points than I had thought. When I tried going around it anticlockwise last year, and the path was closed from the landslide, I hadn't gotten much further than the SS Empress Of Japan before having to climb up to the main road and walk across to the Sequoia restaurant and come back from there. So, bit of a fail, but I thought I'd gone quite far. A few weeks ago, after we'd manfully represented for Broadway Chorus before the Rape Relief walk (thinking about it, 'manfully' was perhaps a tactless choice of word there), I left Sarah at home, in more pain than I realized, and got what I thought was halfway around going clockwise before she rang and I had to run back.
So today I thought "Eh, I must've pretty much nearly closed the loop, how bad can it possibly be?" And the answer is, well, it's 5.5 miles. Which isn't really that bad, I used to walk nearly that far across London most Friday nights to get home, but that was, er, fifteen years ago, and I'd already walked down to the Park, and then I walked up afterwards.
So the upshot is, having started at just after 3pm, I got home at ten to six. I had at least remembered to buy some water, so I looked considerably less grey than when Sarah met me after the Sun Run - which I did with a hangover after an epic singing party with a hangover and no breakfast or water - stupid panda! - but I've been somewhat achy since then. A trip to the hot tub and a very relaxed night with Barney and Sara in the apartment along with the Twines (I know, I know... "relaxed" has such an elastic meaning sometimes) has just about fixed it all. But I expect post-traumatic ache disorder tomorrow morning...
This is all because there were two noisy people with a ghettoblaster in the gym room on the third floor. If they hadn't been there I'd've just done half an hour on the treadmill. I blame society.
You may, correctly, ask whether I couldn't tell how long I'd been walking by how much music I'd listened to. Well, I thought that too, but apparently, while I listened to only two albums, they were both long ones:
1) Camel, "Breathless". Mmmm. I'm a bit of a fan of prog rock, which got a bad rep in the 70s. But if it was like this, I can sorta see why. I'm a big fan of Genesis because of their sci-fi stylings and the undeniable keyboard excellence of Tony Banks, and I'm a big fan of Jethro Tull because they were winking all the time, except when they weren't. But this, eh, it's just kinda there, with precision-perfect instrumentation but GOD IT'S DULL... and the lyrics are dreadful... witless, charmless, pointless, and not even a hint of pretension to redeem them. And the singer... well... he's just not very good. So, y'know, it's a problem. I have a bunch of Camel albums to listen to thanks to a hint on Wikipedia that they were of a proggish disposition - I'd never heard of them until a couple of months ago - but I'm hoping their earlier stuff is better... "Breathless" comes from 1978, and their 1979 album "I Can See Your House From Here" wasn't much better. I foresee this collection may be more of a chore than a pleasure. Ho hum. (That's the sound you hear when listening to the women standing around outside the Penthouse Club on Seymour. Sorry.) Here's a sample track, "Echoes", from "Breathless". This entire album sounds like this...
2) Blur, "13". Mmm. I've been listening to Blur's albums again in order, and here we are at their sixth. Very interesting career trajectory, by no means unique:
- "Leisure" - rubbish, but at least it exists and it shows they were a band.
- "Modern Life Is Rubbish" - not great, but they're figuring out what they want to do.
- "Parklife" - all of a sudden, an astonishing document of London in the 90s. Awesome.
- "The Great Escape" - better and better - now they're summarizing England. Remarkable. So many good tracks.
- "Blur" - errrrr... what's... happening... album... not... quite... the... same... as... the... last... one... - leading to huge sales in America, because it sounded American and the band didn't actively try to piss on the country... you've probably heard "Song 2" from this album, but it's so irritating I'm not going to embed it, it's the one where he goes "Wahoo" a lot.
Now I'll grant you that the opening track, "Tender" - while lyrically sounding a lot like Damon Albarn had just seen the spine of the novel "Tender Is The Night" and thought, "That's wicked! Just add parallel structure" - is quite a nice song... if twice as long as it needs to be for us to get the point. I would advise stopping watching about halfway through to compensate:
And then there's "Coffee And TV", which I'm warning you right now will make you sob...
... and then there's the rest of the album. And if you were expecting, er, songs... well, sorry, please take the next left turn...
It's interesting to listen to "13", because what happened next to Blur was that main songwriter and singer Damon Albarn went off and formed Gorillaz for a while (for which the videos are even more interesting than the music, look for yourselves if you don't believe me), Graham Coxon was sacked for bad attitude (he's the guitarist; he did a bunch of solo albums which sound suspiciously like "13"), and the other two... well, they're the rhythm section, no-one cares what they did.
There's one more Blur album, "Think Tank", which I don't remember listening to at the time. Apparently it goes still further in this direction. It's fascinating to see this band, who in 1994 were pitched against Oasis in the ultimate Britpop battle (and there's a whole story to tell about that sometime), concluding that they just aren't interested in repeating themselves, while Oasis went on to forge a careful career for themselves by exactly repeating themselves over and over... and over and over and over. Now hey, there's nothing intrinsically wrong in writing the same song twelve times on every album - the Red Hot Chili Peppers do it, to name but one example, and theirs is really quite a good song so it doesn't hurt too much to hear it a lot - but it does mean your music ends up fitting that excellent description "It is what it is". Whereas I don't think anyone would accuse the Blur of "13" of sounding like the Blur of "Parklife".
And yet... I did like Blur's songs, when they actually had them. On "13" you get a couple of songs, and then a lot of soundscapes (good word, that), images, textures, drones, and a whole bunch of other things, none of which are bad... but the one connecting factor is that none of them happen in C-major or in an AABA kinda way. And that's a shame.
I feel you should get to see this, from "The Great Escape":
And to be honest you should just watch every Gorillaz video right now, but here are the most awesome ones:
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
31 Days Of Panda, day zero
Very civilized meal out tonight at The Main with The Twines and, er, The James. We bought James a print of his favourite cartoon and he was very pleased. Least we could do, really, considering how he's been our eternal taxi for the last two months. Food at The Main is always pretty civilized, obviously, but it was a very relaxing evening, and James got to witness how, just as with Broadway Chorus plots, the automatic response when regaled with almost any Twine story is a slightly stunned "Of course" - e.g. "Of course you got innocently and accidentally locked inbetween glass doors in the psychiatric section of a deserted hospital. In Finland."
Sarah and Twiney apparently made much sweet music together today while I was busy finishing my last day of work for the week. I'm chirpy because I had a good-ish day with lots of good feedback from my users, and it doesn't take much positive validation to make me a happy panda... and also because Sarah reported that Twiney has fallen in love again with our song Just A Moment.
Today I was kinda healthy foodwise: a bowl of cereal, two peach yogurts, four slices of turkey, an apple and a pack of chewing gum... and then, er, Mediterraneo pasta and four pints of cider... what? (That's kinda healthy by my standards. You should be asking why I don't block out the sun, given my diet of the last 20-odd years.)
Today's music collection was the experimental mixed bag I hope to sustain for the month, too. Let's see, I listened to what turned out to be CD 2 from a five-disc pack of The Style Council's greatest hits... oooo, it's "funk"(TM) - I have heard of this before. I sort of vaguely registered The Style Council at the time - it was Paul Weller's next band after he broke up The Jam - but while possibly too experimental and advanced for the time, it's also possible that he was just competing in a slightly clustered market, and, y'know, not all of it is that good, based on this disk. Synth bass and drums give it a slightly cheap feel, and it's painfully obvious that the acoustic guitar songs such as Ghosts Of Dachau somewhat piss all over the sub-Sting funk:
But then again you could argue that the better funk songs, such as "Walls Come Tumbling Down":
... were prefigured by The Jam's "A Town Called Malice", which is the only reason you'll ever need if you want to argue that the movie of Billy Elliot is better than the musical ;-)
... oh alright then, if you insist:
So, four more disks of the same to go. I must confess to a slight "Eerrrk" at that, but the point of this month is that hope will spring eternal, by force if necessary. And I seem to recall having a huge liking for the big keyboard solo at the end of their otherwise negligible B-side Party Chambers. I wonder how it's aged and whether it now just sounds like a tin whistle gone wrong...
But enough of crazy footloose video embedding, at least for now. Also today, I finished listening to The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's spoof musical A Shoggoth On The Roof. Yes, it's a rewrite of Fiddler On The Roof with, er, lots of tentacles. But! This is less lame than it (a) sounds and (b) could have been. The thing with spoofs is, you have to pitch it just right, maintain a theme (not necessarily the original one), and carry it off with complete sincerity. A fine example is the superb West Bank Story. Not-so-fine examples would include, er, Anything In The Last Twenty Years Starring Leslie Nielsen. And, to my surprise - since it wouldn't be a 'thing' if everyone naturally did it right - this felt like a success. I'm not a dedicated Lovecraft fan - in fact I've only read Cthulhu-related by Clark Ashton Smith and Alan Moore - but from what I've picked up by tentacular osmosis, this is already very amusing. The singing is solid, the plot seems well-adapted, and I grinned a lot. I prefer it to (the admittedly rocky recording of) Evil Dead - The Musical... but then, I'm actively uninterested in the source material for that so it had to work a lot harder, and didn't.
And for variety, I slapped on Asian Dub Foundation's Conscious Party. I've liked ADF since they showed up on, I think, The Late Show, back in the early 90s. They sounded like a petrol bomb, and age has not particularly withered, etc. Excellently, their studio albums have so much energy that their live albums are effectively the same super-complicated street-techno but with a rawer mix, so you don't miss out on all the lovely texture but also you don't feel like the live albums are now your only option. Heavily political - and strangely successful at it, where The Style Council now seem embarrassingly emo - and yet still totally danceable, ADF should be required listening. Here's an example:
I could get used to this whole multimedia thing. That's another aspect of life I intend to loosen up about.
Anyway that was my last day of June, and when I next wake up we'll be properly into 31 Days Of Panda. And I note that Barney is already posting pictures of red pandas, based on my promise to declare July as an amnesty-tastic time for the little... crimson darlings. G'night for now.
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.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Stubby ears rotate...
... 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):
So here is advance warning of some of the things I'm planning for myself:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
The Dust Settles
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Being A Good Panda
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...
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...
Monday, August 11, 2008
You, Sir, Are No Terry Pratchett
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.)
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.)
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Sleeeeepy Paaaanda
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.
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.
Friday, August 8, 2008
Why Frog Likes The Olympics (Friday August 8th)
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 :-)
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 :-)
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