Gung Hei Fat Choy!

So, Happy New Year! Welcome to the year of the Dog. To put things in perspective, Chinese New Year is the main holiday of the year for more than 25% of the world’s population. With one of the largest Chinese populations outside China here in Vancouver, it’s a big deal.

Rather than celebrate it by going to the parade through Chinatown, we actually had another mission. Or rather, I did. Today, I had my first writing gig for the Georgia Straight. The Straight, for those of you not in this area, to quote the ‘About the Straight’ section of their web site, is:

About the Straight
Canada’s Largest Urban Weekly
No other city publication knows more about Vancouver than the Georgia Straight. Established as the lifestyle and entertainment weekly in Vancouver for over 30 years, the Georgia Straight is an integral part of the active urban West Coast lifestyle with a per issue readership of almost 340,000.
Every Thursday, the Georgia Straight delivers an award-winning editorial package of features, articles, news and reviews.
Regular weekly coverage includes NEWS, ARTS, MUSIC, MOVIES, FASHION, TRAVEL, BUSINESS, HIGH TECH, FOOD and RESTAURANTS, plus Vancouver’s most comprehensive listings of entertainment activities and special events.
Throughout the year, the Georgia Straight also produces a series of reader polls covering a variety of interest that are entertaining and informative.
The Best Of Vancouver - September
The Golden Plate Awards - March
The Straight Music Awards - June

My assignment was the Sunday Vancouver Symphony Orchestra concert celebrating Mozart’s 250th birthday. For me, this is both easy and hard. Easy because it required less research; I knew most of the music on the program already: Overture to The Magic Flute, Piano Concerto No 23 - (that’s the one with the last movement that sounds like the theme from The Flintstones - go check it out and see if you don’t agree!), Exultate, Jubilate, and the Symphony No 39 (the first of the final trio of them that ended with The Jupiter). Hard, because, well, what can you write about Mozart that hasn’t been written already before? Prodigy, Genius, Billiard Player extraordinaire, it’s all been done before. Not to mention the fact that there have been Mozart festivals all around the world, including some 24-hours of non-stop partying in Salzburg and Vienna. What can Vancouver (much less I) add to the millions of notes and words being played and uttered about one of the greatest musicians who ever lived? Oh, and lastly, it had to fit within 500 words, and be written in the Straight’s style. If I get to write for them again (and I’m hoping I will), I’ll expound more on what I think the style (or maybe even formula) for a Georgia Straight review is. I think I’ve got it figured out, but I’m not positive yet. Only my editor will tell for sure. The review, if they print it, like everything else in the magazine, will be available online on Thursday. I’ll link to it if and when it goes up.

Yesterday, we met Matt and Oana for breakfast at The Elbow Room on Davie Street, a café that cooks some of the best breakfast creations I’ve ever had, served up with a side order of ‘personality’ (if your waitress doesn’t give you a hard time, she’s apparently not doing her job). Nevertheless, despite the wisecracks, it’s no surprise that nearly every movie star that spends time in Vancouver ends up there a morning or two. Like Lindy’s or Sardie’s in NYC, the place has signed photos everywhere and quite a few dishes named after celebrities. I had the Brett Cullen, which is two poached eggs, sautéed spinach, bacon, avocado and blue cheese on a sour dough muffin, topped with hollandaise sauce (Delicious!). I guess Brett Cullen was on West Wing this month. Pam had the Cindy Williams (of Laverne and Shirley fame). That’s sautéed mushrooms, red and green bell peppers, white onion, fresh spinach, blackforest ham and tomatoes, one large egg over easy on a croissant, covered with melted mozzarella and feta cheese. What could be bad?

Afterward we took refuge from the rain for a while at the mall downtown (imagine us, mall rats!). We later ended up at the Caffe Artigiano, where I had one of those gorgeous Lattés as we chatted the morning and afternoon away. It felt great to just hang around, and it helped get my mind off my impending review, which is now, thank goodness, in the hopper.

So, my schedule (which continues to be pretty full) and my new writing gig have made my postings to this blog a little harder to squeeze in. I’ll put up more if I have the time, but to be honest, the pay stuff comes first. I hope you’ll understand, dear reader. Next week is much like this past one: Gamelan rehearsals on Monday and Tuesday Night, and one evening event, a meeting regarding Podcasting, on Friday. Never a dull moment, despite the nearly perpetual dull and gloomy weather. Busy schedules are potentially one treatment for S.A.D….

Did We Move Here Too Late?

All of the newscasters are predicting a win for Stephen Harper and the Conservative party. He’s making a final campaign stop in Windsor, Ontario, which up to now everyone had assumed was not winnable (that’s in Parliament seats, I guess). I suppose it would be the equivalent of Bush making a final campaign stop in New York City or Boston.

Some conservative Canadian bloggers emphasized the fact that Harper is not Bush-lite when you ignore the scary Liberal attack ads that say he is. Nevertheless, I have to admit that his constant repetition of tax cuts has me very worried. That’s what got Bush in the first time around. I have to believe that Canadians are not so easily swayed by some wad of cash waved at them that they’ll have to spend at Walmart. Needless to say, I don’t buy it, and if I ever actually got a wad of cash as something I didn’t pay on taxes, I’d never spend it at Walmart. (In fact, I’m proud to say that I’ve never set foot in a Walmart and don’t ever plan to, unless dragged in by force.) If Harper starts to do the kinds of things that Bush did, you can bet I’ll be joining others in a move to get him kicked out via another election as soon as possible. Power here is not as concentrated into the Executive Branch the way it has become in the US (Executive Branch? Let’s call a spade a spade: For all intents and purposes, the ‘Executive’ in the US is a Dictator, surrounded by Military Regalia and propaganda merchants.) There’s a long road that Canada would have to travel down before we reached the level of corruption, fascism, religious extremism and militarism that defines the US today.

I subscribe to some local events calendars, so events in dark green appear as if by magic on my iCal window. Yesterday I noticed that Darren Barefoot is hosting a ‘Drown your Election Sorrows’ party at the Library Square Public House tomorrow. That’s a heck of a way to find out who’s ahead in the polls. As Darren put it: “I believe local election coverage won’t start until 8:00pm, but you may want to get a head start on your wailing and gnashing of teeth.” If I weren’t going to be at a Gamelan rehearsal (now Mondays and Tuesdays every week until our concert in February - ouch!) I’d be there. Not being able to vote on this makes me feel almost as helpless as I felt in the last two stolen US Presidential elections.

An Echo of the Beats

Last night I went to a fascinating concert. Fascinating really is the best word to describe it. It was at the Chan Centre at UBC again, but instead of what must have been nearly a hundred performers the first time I went there, it were just two people: Terry Riley and Michael McClure. Depending on whether you followed Twentieth Century Music or Poetry, these two men are preeminent in each of their fields.

Riley is acknowledged as the father of Minimalism, a movement which began in the mid-1960s. Without Riley, one could argue that there’d be no Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Pauline Oliveros, John Adams, or even Tangerine Dream. His best known work, ‘In C’ was one of the first pieces to use static harmony, or modality, as well as a process or scheme to create the structure of the piece, rather than strict notation.

As for McClure, he was one of the members of the Beat Poets of the 1950s, who are mainly known for their most famous practitioner, Jack Kerouac (although we shouldn’t forget Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder or Lawrence Ferlinghetti ).

Riley, and McClure, who are 71 and 74 respectively, were nevertheless extremely charismatic and vital performers. If this was a trip back to those decades, it certainly wasn’t via a museum exhibition. The concert began as Riley, sporting a long white beard and embroidered cap, took the stage and bowed, as both would throughout the evening, with hands held together as if praying. He began with a solo improvisation on an Indian piece (I didn’t get the name). Like all of his playing, it was remarkable in that it was an utterly smooth blend of Indian music, jazz and classical music (in many cases, Debussy and Chopin). He also sang some words which I have to assume were Hindi. After that, McClure, looking very professorial, complete with cardigan sweater, joined him on stage, and in the same way that he used to work with Ray Manzarek, spoke his poetry as Riley improvised. Sometimes this worked well. At other times, words would be obscured by a piano (or synthesizer) flourish, or a silence would fall in a place that didn’t make sense. At it’s best, the poetic fragments and musical ideas worked well together. I wasn’t sure if this was a happy coincidence or something they had worked out in advance. This was the first public performance of this collaboration, which was already on CDs on sale in the lobby.

The most curious thing for me was the way that Riley would every once in a while fall into a standard jazz sequence, like a strange reversal of how a jazz performer sometimes dwells on a passage of static harmony. Instead of a modal passage in the middle of a jazz tune, Riley’s music is like little islands of jazz chord sequences floating in seas of Eastern equilibrium.

The second half began with another improvisation by Riley. Just as this was beginning to be a bit too much of the same thing, the two men did a reinterpretation by McClure of a Cantus from Dante’s Inferno. Here the extra element of storytelling added a lot, even if if it was psychedelic (and how could the Seventh Circle of Hell be anything but phantasmagoria, man). As McClure described a great beast that Virgil and the narrator rode above the chasm, I had to work at not getting dizzy.

The best part, with all respects to McClure’s poetry, was the last piece, an excerpt from Mexico City Blues by Jack Kerouac. Kerouac’s electric words always worked so well with jazz improvisation; that’s what it was made for. So, with these two white-haired survivors channeling the Prophet of ‘On the Road’ and ‘Satori in Paris’, they gave us a taste of what the Beat Generation was all about when you witness it instead of read it. I may have been born after all of that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t wig to their Jam, Daddy-O. (Beat Poet Slang courtesy of Beatitude: Dictionary of Jive)

Geeking Out

With this week nearly over, I decided to take a pass on the BC Apple User Group meeting. The rain (yes, it’s back, with a vengeance), the bus ride to the south and the fact that I’m just a little tired kept me away. Anyway, it’s good to have a night home.

I’m in a nerdy mood, even if I didn’t go to the User Group Meeting. I’m listening to KUSC streaming Beethoven’s 7th over the net and the fidelity is nearly as good as I’d get playing locally. In fact, I’d have to listen really hard to tell.

As I often note, the Net has changed a lot of things, even from my last job. I take some comfort in seeing old friends and family in my buddy list (I’m using Gaim at work, which like Adium for the Mac is a multi-protocol chat client). So I see my AIM buddies as well as the MSN and Yahoo users. By the time I get to work it’s already noon on the East coast, so there’s not much overlap as the day gets later. Still, it’s nice to see everyone there, and occasionally I’ll ping someone hello.

If I can’t run on a Mac, at least I can make it more Mac-like. I arrange the icons like a Mac (disks on he right, trash can at bottom right). I also run Yahoo Widget Engine, which, if you set the widgets to appear in only ‘Heads Up Display’, mimics the Mac OS X Dashboard that I like so much. It all requires a bit more fussing and setting up (which I did after-hours) but it works fine and I can get about 80% of the same functionality that I get at home including the weather, stocks, webcam views of the Burrard Bridge and Jericho Beach, clocks for the different time zones, the current US to Canadian dollar level and a few other niceties. I can mount my iDisk, and I can retrieve work mail both at home and at work (no Exchange Server, just plain old POP). It would be great if there was a version of OmniGraffle and Circus Ponies Notebook that ran under Windows (or better yet, they let me have a Mac), but for the time being, it’s not bad at all. Except for Visio. Yuck.

OK. Enough geek talk. Over and out.

One more Thing

Today marks the six month Anniversary of our move here. I was thinking of all that’s changed since then, and how we’re settling in and starting to enjoy a good life here. While I do miss our friends and neighbors from Cambridge, we have made friends here as well. Last night we had our next door neighbor over for dinner, and we’re taking it easy today before the week kicks into high gear. In another 6 months, I can see a little party. Maybe on the beach.