Games and art

Thought:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts?


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I'm okay with that, for now.

The Jaysmiths Hit California (part two)

Thursday 24th and Friday 25th...

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

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

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

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

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

The Jaysmiths Hit California (part one of N)

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

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

Wednesday 23rd...

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued...

Much easier not to finish...

Deadline: Sunday!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something / Anything

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

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

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

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

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

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

31 Days Of Panda, to July 31

Well.

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

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

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

So, 31 Days Of Panda restarts for August.

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

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

... so I have to admit a FAIL just on principle, even before we get to the details, which are also, if I remember correctly, pretty much fail-shaped. Memo to Kate, or it would be more efficient to send it to myself: doing a month of anything is hard, isn't it?

So the 22nd was... er... last Wednesday. So, Thursday, Kim came round and we nebbished. Friday, James and I went drinking, and boy was that fun, drinking in a relatively uninhibited way for most of the evening. Although apparently I'm out of practice as I sweated out the night in the second bedroom and didn't get up till past midday. Saturday, we went round to James' and toddled out to see the South African entry in the Celebration Of Light, a big annual fireworks-synchronized-to-music display/competition they hold in English Bay. It was raining heavily - Bear! we did ask nicely! (Bear has since apologized, grudgingly) - so we got somewhat drenched, but it was worth it for the middle section, where, with "Who Wants To Live Forever" playing loud, they saturated the sky with endless golden streams, making it look like Heaven was crying. It was overwhelmingly beautiful and I was in floods. Music-synchronized fireworks displays so often suck, and not just when the sync goes wrong - I don't really believe there's a whole lot of latitude in the grammar of fireworks, and mostly it just comes across as "Yes, something went bang broadly at the same time as the downbeat... so what?" But this was wonderfully effective. And once that was over, we went back inside and watched "Get Smart".

Sunday: Sarah back to "Rent" rehearsals... I spent most of the day sitting in the corridor outside the Arts Clubs rehearsal hall, trying not to listen to the sitzprobe (the first singthrough with the full band, but no acting) and then the first half of a full run. I'd brought my laptop, so I plugged in the earphones and watched "Eraserhead" and then "Transporter 2".

Now it must be said, after all these years and with so much implicit buildup, "Eraserhead" seemed ugly and horrible but not exactly unparseable - it's a man's fears about fathering a child, made explicit. I expect it shocked the crap out of people in the 70s (or in their 70s), and perhaps if I'd seen it at university when probably everyone else my age saw it, I'd have given more of a toss about it. But now, approaching 40, and rather aiming to have children myself... well, it was just a movie, and one I don't intend to dwell on a great deal.

"Transporter 2", on the other hand, was completely silly fun. With the exception of, well, some people being shot in the head and a chick being impaled on a load of spikes (but tastefully), this is actually the kind of harmless action movie which I have a lot of time for. The stunts are impressive, the fights are (largely) nonlethal, Jason Statham's character is the new Man With No Name in terms of cool (but don't take me too literally: his name's Frank) and his friend, an older French cop, is a little comic gem. I enjoyed "Transporter" much more than I was expecting to, and this sequel was well worth the 80 minutes it ran to. And I have the third one to watch when I get a chance.

(I have no idea how the sitzprobe and rehearsal sounded, by the way - that's what earphones are for. However, people who had won a competition to see the rehearsal effused about it no end, which is nice, especially if it means more ticket sales and concomitantly more kerching for Sarah ;-)

And she survived it, which is good. She also survived today's four-hour runthrough, although in somewhat less than perfect health. But, she's now healed enough that we can go back into the hot tub, which is holding things at bay. This plus uber-painkillers and I think she's gonna make it...

I was suddenly considering whether I deserve to buy a Xenon (sorry - an X-Box 360 as most people know it) and Sarah approved of the decision, so I may well come back one night with one. But, I know from plenty of past experience that I have a tendency to Buy Shiny New Stuff and then Rarely Or Never Use It, so I'm going to test myself by playing through my pile of Wii games first, and possibly borrowing a couple from the Radical library, and seeing if I still enjoy console games in general. If I do, then I'll get one at the start of Sarah's "Rent" run, and that should keep me busy for August at least.

Mmmm, a bit matter-of-fact tonight... a sure sign that I don't have anything to say and know how behind I was. P'raps tomorrow will be more inspiring. It wasn't really a very good day in most respects: my blood pressure was challenged by various computer crashes and work-related incidents. Really the only good news is that Sarah is smiling more with every passing day. That makes me so happy.

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

Normal service resumes after an action-packed Sarah Health Escapade. The pain got much worse on Monday evening and we ended up calling 911-James and heading off to St Paul's. Excellently, they took pretty good care of her, kept her in overnight, and concluded that the mesh they installed for her hernia repair was probably reacting badly - fibrosis? - but it would get better itself and meanwhile here are some "potent" painkillers. Speaking from a point two hours or so after she took the first of them (it took a while to collect them from the pharmacy), they appear to be (a) indeed quite potent, and (b) working quite well.

So that accounts for where I was on Monday night, and I was kinda worried so I didn't go to sleep till 6am on Tuesday morning - and Sarah called at 7:45am to arrange us picking her up and bringing her home. 105 minutes' sleep is not really a lot, for future reference, but I survived the day at work and then I survived the opening session of Strongbow Chorus. A whole bunch of us were pretty much dead on arrival - Elena freshly back from Paraguay, James suffering the same sleep deprivation as me, and so forth - but I think fun was had. This season we're doing the ensemble version of "Tonight", which Sarah has arranged for more ensemble-ness (the four-part female vocals she's added behind the big male solo are absolutely gorgeous, and yes, I do realize I'm talking about Sarah having the skills, and the balls for that matter, to not just attempt to but successfully improve upon Leonard Bernstein), and "The Swingle Song", which confounded us a little but then improved dramatically (I may be mostly talking about the tenor section there). Tara did sterling work at the keyboard while Sarah sat relatively still. Next week neither of them is here so I have to lead the rehearsal - by using Finale as a sequencer and the big keyboard as the sampler, with a lot of muting and solo'ing tracks to help people out. Which should be fun - I hope you all look forward to that, Strongbowers! But it was great fun, even though I was moderately punchdrunk.

Exercisewise, well, bit of a disaster until today, when I managed to walk back from work. Only takes me about 35 minutes though, and I had no music, having exhausted Zen during the day (too sleepy to recharge it recently).

But what have I been listening to lately, you ask... well now:

• Jean Grae, "Jeanius"... okay, she's amusing and she can rap reasonably well, but her material gets a bit monotonous after a while, and I'd rather listen to Sarah Jones:

• Juno Reactor, "Bible Of Dreams" and "Labyrinth"... so they have an awesome band name, and that's why, after a deeply unpromising start with "Beyond The Infinite" a while back, I tried them again today to help get me through some lengthy spots of coding. And, hey, their brand of averagely-inventive techno was somewhat more serviceable this time round. It's not like they do songs that will ever crack the charts (of any relatively tasteful record-buying public) but it's mood music and it does the job. They could do with more tracks like "Conga Fury", mind you. And they could also, really, just do with being better. Like this, for example:

• Jupu Group, "Ahmoo"... I didn't know what this was, and a day after listening to it, I don't remember what it is. I would take this as "not a recommendation". I think it was New Age keyboard stuff, if that either helps or deeply shocks you.
• Method Man, "Tical 2000 - Judgement Day"... ahh, one of the last great Wu-Tang solo albums. A winner in every way, frankly. The title track doesn't show up until the end but it has a fantastic beat and spacey keyboard decorations with a cross-rhythmic chorus. Before that point you've heard over 20 proper songs (with a couple of surprisingly amusing skits). A thoroughly worthwhile album, great value for money, and, er, yes, don't buy anything by the Wu-Tang Clan that's dated after this point, would be my advice. Think of this as "a great way for them to go out". And don't worry about the turgid visuals in the video, just give it a listen:

(And, in what might be considered a special kind of bonus content: there's no sign of U-God making any sort of guest appearance on this album. Winner!)

• Missy Elliott, "The Cookbook"... now here's the problem with most women rappers, exemplified to perfection: they're different from men, but the only thing they rap about is that they're different from men. It's dull as ditchwater. Missy was a whole lot better when she was trying to be funny and not self-important. Her last four albums have all sounded like this: monotonous cascades of songs indistinguishable from one another, demonstrating how old-school she is, how true hip-hop is dying, oh, and how she wants to "ride a nigga", and all that crap. A lot of that. Rinse and repeat. Even the beats are getting old. Missy. Stop. Now. Please.
• Moby, "Wait For Me"... I listened to this today and, well, it just kinda drifted past my ears in a general way. I'll withhold comment. It was pretty at the start and end, but that's all I remember.

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

Well, the answer to all those questions is "Yes" - except the "how and why" one, to which the answer is, well, frankly, that's how I learned to filter out music which isn't really very good. I got into the habit in my 20s of listening to tons of music while doing something else, and relying on good music to intrude on my concentration and distract me so much that I have to listen to it simply because it's too good to miss. After all, why should I waste time listening to garbage? (I don't mean the band Garbage: their stuff usually does attract my attention.) If you want my attention, if you really think you're that good, Mr Musician, then prove it. Don't bore me while I'm listening to you: impress me while I'm not.

And that's why I now draw your attention to Radiohead's "OK Computer", because ten years later, this album is still able to focus my attention on it while it's playing. It's riveting. It's awesome. It was called the best album of the 90s, and there's a reason, man. I listened to it again today, and it made me listen to it.

Here are some of the disturbing videos it spawned. Warning: these push buttons. Be advised.



And this one's "Karma Police" - can't find an embeddable version, soz. But I should point out, this album is not all about creepy videos to songs of alienation. It's hard to describe, but this was one of the first albums to articulate the modern unspeakable, the unutterable that philosphers talk of. What is wrong with your life? What is wrong with our lives? How can that be voiced?

Radiohead tried. They did a magnificent job. This is why I listen to so much music. I'm always trying to find something else magnificent.

31 Days Of Panda, day 19 (WIN)

I liked yesterday's walk so I did it again this evening, taking a different route through the south side of Stanley Park and finding some rapidly-narrowing paths which instantly put me in mind of "Doctor Who and the Seeds Of Doom". Suitably scared, I kept up a brisk pace and got to Stadium station just as my album-for-the-night ran out, which tells me I walked for, eh, let's call it just under 90 minutes, which if my Sun Walk time was anything to go by means I covered maybe 8.5k. I'm enjoying this.

Unfortunately tonight's album - in fact today's music, since I listened to an album at home this afternoon - was pretty poor. This "Complete Adventures Of The Style Council" pack I've got has been woefully tagged, and having listened to CD2, then CD1, tonight I found myself listening to CD5... and woe was I, for CD5 is the one with a round dozen 12" mixes. Now the Style Council appear to have done a whole lot of songs which only just filled out three minutes, so listening to them stretched out in late 80s style to six or seven minutes was.... somewhat excruciating. I couldn't honestly tell you anything about any of them, even just an hour later, except that the first one was called "Promised Land", and had about thirty words of lyrics all told. Woeful stuff, honestly. The things I do for the sake of fairness. I suppose the pacey drum machines kept my walking speed up, but ugh... Paul Weller is not Prince, nor should he have tried it on for size...

So the other album I listened to today was, and I'm not making this up, U-God's "Dopium". Yes, there exists in the world a mong so spectacularly mongly that he thinks "Dopium" is such a cool portmanteau word that he must title not just a song but his entire album accordingly. To give the full-spectrum analysis of this album I must take you back about fifteen years (but trust me, it won't take us fifteen years to get back to here - although it might feel like that long if you don't like how I write).

FX: TARDIS noises, and here we are back in 1994. Yr Host is living in St Albans, age 24, and getting well into music thanks to the local libraries. At this time I was getting and listening to 10-12 albums a week from libraries, and dramatically expanding my musical horizons. I was also reading three music magazines a month: Q, Vox, and Select. UK music magazines were, frankly, awesome; they pissed all over Rolling Stone in terms of quantity, and if they didn't have Rolling Stone's extensive (and, now that I've read it, really boring) political commentary attempting to engage "ver yoof" with the world around them, well, so what? We grew up watching Ben Elton on "Friday Night Live" - we already knew about politics.

So one month I pick up, I think, Select, and there's a big article about the new rap sensation coming across from New York, namely the Wu-Tang Clan. And I was hooked. This was a group of nine, count 'em, nine distinct, differentiated, high-quality rappers, who formed like Voltron into an invincible super-rap outfit and then split off to emit their solo albums. At the time the Wu-Tang catalogue comprised the collective's "Enter The Wu-Tang", Method Man's "Tical", and GZA's "Liquid Swords", with a bunch of followups soon after, such as Raekwon's "Only Built 4 Cuban Linx", ODB's "Back To The 36 Chambers", RZA's "Bobby Digital"... and I'm not even getting into the "Wu-affiliates". But trust me, just reading the article was like an electric wire to the brain. I bought those first three albums the next day, and "Liquid Swords" in particular has stayed with me; the Wu-Tang Clan made extensive use of samurai movie samples, moving on to mobster movies and Hong Kong actioners, and their production was this fantastically gritty lo-fi thing which now underlies UK grime such as Dizzee Rascal. I've had a bunch of musical revelations in my life, but this was a major one, and it was thanks to a magazine. It didn't at all hurt that not long afterwards Select started a two-page-spread feature analyzing a song's lyrics every month, and it was noticeable that the song they picked from "Liquid Swords" ("Cold World") was dense with allusion, NYC-specific facts, and references to black culture, whereas the crappy white limp-rock songs they picked in subsequent months were full of comments like "La, I just thought it sounded cool, right?" from the songwriter. These albums were packed with lyrics, and with anger and comedy and sorrow and energy.

And, of course, as the years rolled by, the Wu-Tang Clan became less relevant. Their second collective album has some stunning tracks and a few fillers; their third was maybe two-thirds good; their fourth started to lose the plot; their fifth, I can't honestly remember a single track from it.

And then there's the decline in the quality of the solo albums. GZA, the best lyricist of the bunch, has made six albums in total, including one which predates the Clan - the lyrics are fine, the beats are this dreadful boppy late-80s junk which is just embarrassing to hear now - but his latest effort, "Pro Tools", is a bit of a mixed bag, and includes a couple of grave missteps, such as a diss track about 50 Cent which I'm afraid (and I'm not even a 'Fiddy' fan) sounds like your dad complaining about kids today, and a live bonus track which demonstrates why people shouldn't go to rap concerts. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

The rest of the Clan haven't really fared any better. Ghostface has put out about eight albums and the last six have all sounded the same. You could make the same accusation about many rappers, sure, and you could also note that many rappers already sound like they're repeating themselves after just two albums - or just on the second half of their first one, in some cases. But he's got fabulous breath control and a real imagination... he just doesn't seem to get the beats, not since his excellent second album, "Supreme Clientele" (see, even the title is good). As for Raekwon, the fast talker and slang king who brought the Wu into the world of the mobster... I can't even tell what he's talking about these days. It's like glossolalia meets Tourette's.

But... and here we come back to the point... the weakest link in the Wu-Tang Clan was always, not the unpredictable and frankly often crap Ol' Dirty Bastard, but the completely predictable and always crap U-God. ODB was generally out of material, but my god, did he sound like nothing else on Earth when he was at the mic. There's a track he did with GZA which fires up the normally relaxed and restrained GZA into such a frenzy that they pass the lyric between each other and sometimes you can't tell who's talking. Fabulous stuff.

U-God: not so much of the fabulous. Basically, he just sucks. He really does. He was always the most jaw-droppingly dull of the Clan when he 'dropped' (note cool authentic slang there) a verse on a Clan track, but his was the last solo album I picked up while still in completist mode. Why did I stop? Because his first solo album was crap. It was called "Golden Arms" (see, even the title is crap) and even before it had finished he was out of ideas, his rhymes woeful and childish, his imagery nonexistent. Disaster!

So, today, while sitting at home hacking around the Finale file for "Tonight" in preparation for Strongbow Chorus on Tuesday, I listened to U-God's most recent album, "Dopium", having picked it up in the same sweep which netted me "Pro Tools". And, dear god, he was out of ideas by track two. Let me repeat that: track two. How the hell do you manage that? And no, it wasn't just the track sequencing: all the subsequent tracks had nothing to recommend them. At all. Argh.

As a capstone to this humiliation, the album ends with three remixes of the tracks which I suppose were the least laughable potential choices for release as singles. Remixes! Of a Wu-Tang song! Techno remixes! Dance remixes! Oh god, U-God, you are such a loser. I pity the record executive who had to okay this album. Presumably he knew he wasn't going to get anything better out of the man.

What all of this has been in aid of is: when you find something you find you love, you never consider that you will, most likely, outlive it. We think of love as being eternal, and perhaps I'm weak and flighty and not a True Believer. But more likely, the Wu-Tang Clan has just lost it, their youthful energy diluted by success, family, and not having to work for it. They can do what they want, and they have many options available to them, and making awesome, no, crucial records is no longer a priority. That's fine. It's just a pity, because for a while they were electrifying.

It reminds me of when Franz Ferdinand's third album came out earlier this year. I'd been really looking forward to it, and I'm afraid I thought it was tripe. And yet, look at all the reviews. Look at how many of them are basically positive. I'm happy to say, actually, that since I last looked at this page shortly after the album came out, there have been a bunch more low-end reviews expressing the view that Franz Ferdinand misfired badly with this one. But the one I like is that last one, and I'm pretty sure it'll stay the last one no matter what else, because only an independent magazine would dare to give a big commercial release a rating as low as 13%. And I quote: "Truly, the four dapper Scotsmen that constitute this group should be ashamed of their tuneless, thoughtless, meaningless new offering, which distorts the proud legacy of a band that once mattered."

"A band that once mattered." I know exactly what they mean.

31 Days Of Panda, day 18 (WIN)

Daytime nothing much. Went for what I think was about a 7k walk, following the Sun Run route as far as the Burrard bridge but then going on around False Creek as far as Stadium. In the course of which I listened to one Asian Dub Foundation album and then some selected Scritti Politti tracks. The ADF album was a distinct downward slope of quality after a roaring beginning:


... but never mind, that track made up for it.

In the evening, a very civilized dinner at Kalypso with Kate & Theo, followed by some nattering back at the flat. All good, but nunya business ;-)

Sarah is fixing up 1+1 piano tracks and I'm fixing their tempos so that we have backing tracks ready for singers. We also did some hacking at the music for Strongbow Chorus (starting this Tuesday, erk). I entered the lyrics for "The Swingle Song", which is... well, 99% of the lyrics are either "doo" or "bah", and while those words may appear meaningless at a glance, let me assure you, by the time you've typed them several hundred times apiece, they enter whole new realms of meaninglessness so ultimate as to conceal the secret of life. It nearly drove me mad typing that lot. As for proofreading it - impossible. We'll all just sing what it says and cross our fingers. Meanwhile Sarah is arranging the theme for "The Muppet Show" and fixing up the ensemble "Tonight" (apparently just finishing her work on it ready for me to handle lyrics and dynamics, comes the word from the bunny in the big chair). This is looking like a fun Strongbow summer.

Almost bedtime - kthxbye.

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

Thursday: daytime was nothing much. In the evening James came round and we had food from Hon's, recorded his vocals for "Choices", and played Top Trumps.

Friday: signed up with a new GP, at long last... Dr James Lai at the Broadway Medical Clinic. He seems nice enough. It took longer than I'd thought and it was the Radical Summer BBQ today, so I stayed at home to make sure she was OK, and she had a nice long nap all afternoon.

During which time I got progressively more panicky about the 1+1 script and how long it all is. I've been trying to be fair to all the characters to let them speak their minds, but it turns out they don't half witter. I timed all the dialog and the thing ran to over two and a half hours without even all the songs written yet. Argh! So when she got up, Sarah thoroughly edited the script and I went for a long walk (retracing the Sun Run route, in fact... it was nice). Now it looks like the show will run to two-and-a-quarter hours at most, which is much more like it. I write too much, then Sarah edits it: the unbeatable combo ;-)

We were due to go to the Rent Patio Party at the Rosedale but we decided Sarah wasn't up to that much transport and general hubbub and excitement, so hopefully everyone there had fun. She returns to Rent rehearsals on Sunday, subject to being well enough, and I'll be escorting her to make sure. In preparation for that, she takes today easy - we'll see how much exertion it is to take in dinner at Kalypso round the corner.

I'm generously awarding myself a win for doing a 10k walk yesterday, but I'd better keep that up. Now it's 2:40 and I have no particular plan for the next four hours. Perhaps it's time for another walk after all...

31 Days Of Panda, day 15 (HMMM)

I'm still a little short on sleep, but hopefully that will be fixed tonight as we're about to have supper and then perhaps be in bed before 1am...

Today in fitness: walked back from work.
Today in food: errr, okay I think. I'm holding up reasonably well in terms of snacks for the month: I had a cookie today, and I nommed six squares of Dairy Milk while Sarah was in hospital, but otherwise, pure.
Today in work: pretty good.
Today in Sarah's health: well, she's now lurking around the apartment in what we hope is post-surgery kind. We'll have to wait a few days to see if things generally improve, but then for the last two months waiting for a few days has always led to things generally worsening, so I imagine we'll know by Saturday or Sunday whether or not this has worked.
Today in music: a whole bunch of stuff which I'm too tired to go into in details: Blur "Think Tank", Mike Oldfield "Amarok" and "Islands", Manic Street Preachers "Send Away The Tigers", Juno Reactor "Beyond The Infinite".

Good initial responses to the announcement of this summer's Strongbow Chorus. Chirpy panda. Chirrup chirrup.

And we spent some of this evening working on One Plus One: Sarah has sorted out the guide piano for the finale, and I recorded guide vocals for two songs. Small steps for us all.

31 Days Of Panda, days 13-14

... and therefore...

31 Days Of Panda, day twelve (FAIL)

Sarah back in hospital.

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

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.

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.

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.