Not Just Another Concert at the Chan Centre

We waited a long time for a bus to UBC on Broad­way, but for­tu­nately, thanks to some run­ning in the rain and hav­ing got­ten tick­ets ahead of time, we made it in to the CBC Orchestra’s after­noon Con­cert at the Chan Cen­tre just before the doors closed. This was impor­tant, since the con­cert was being taped for broad­casts (it will be aired on April 18^th on In Per­for­mance, June 11^th on OnStage, and Septermber 10^th on Jazz Beat) and miss­ing the first half would have been a major disappointment.

Pam and I were at the con­cert for a bunch of rea­sons. First of all, it was an inter­est­ing pro­gram: the Shostakovich Piano Con­certo No. 1 (this is actu­ally for Piano, Strings and Solo Trum­pet), a pre­miere of a new work, and the Sym­phony No. 2 of Kurt Weill (of Three Penny Opera fame). The con­cert was billed as ‘Swing Soft-Play Hard’, about the Jazz influence/orientation of the sec­ond work on the pro­gram, the pre­miere. The sec­ond rea­son was that I’d never heard the CBC Orches­tra before, and I was curi­ous. They are, as it turns out, the only Radio Orches­tra in North Amer­ica. Thirdly, I knew the soloist per­son­ally. In fact, I knew the soloist when we were young — I’m think­ing when we were around 15 or 16 years old. We took a typ­ing class together at the Friend’s School in Bal­ti­more. I still remem­ber the three of us (my brother, my friend, and I) all typ­ing ‘All Glad Lads Fall’ as the typ­ing teacher called out the words. Hey, 2 books and prob­a­bly 1,000 times that much typed later in total (includ­ing right this very moment!) and I’m glad I spent that sum­mer get­ting it right from the start.

Oh, one more thing: when I knew the afternoon’s soloist, their name was David Buech­ner. Today, he’s a she. She’s Sara Davis Buech­ner, and a world-class pianist and fac­ulty at UBC.

I’m happy to say that for me, the Shostakovich was absolutely bril­liant. If you had a check-off sheet for every­thing that makes a great per­for­mance, it was there: tone, pac­ing, wit, ensem­ble, drama, sen­si­tiv­ity, you name it. I doubt if I’ve ever heard a bet­ter per­for­mance of any of Shostakovich’s music, and the CBC is one of the best orchestra’s I’ve ever heard. Add to that a fan­tas­tic con­duc­tor (who I’d never heard of until today: Yan­nick Nézet-Séguin), who is the artis­tic direc­tor of the Mon­treal Sym­phony, and only 31 — watch out for this guy; he’s going to be a major league tal­ent, and I’ll bet he’ll be the direc­tor of an even big­ger orches­tra in a few years. Sara was ter­rific, and I hope I get to hear her again. We met her after­ward back­stage, and although she didn’t rec­og­nize me at first, I pointed out that we had both changed a lot in the inter­ven­ing years. We all agreed to get together when the term is over (espe­cially Piano Juries, which are very time con­sum­ing as I remem­ber from my — and my par­ents’ — years in music schools).

I was a lit­tle anx­ious before meet­ing Sara. I’ve never know­ingly met any­one who is a tran­sex­ual (although in 1 or 2 cases, I’ve sus­pected that this was the case). Also, I only knew her per­son­ally before the change. At any rate, the unusual-ness of being back­stage after a big con­cert prob­a­bly over­shad­owed the unusual-ness of meet­ing up with a for­mer child­hood friend after a sex-change operation.

The rest of the con­cert included the first time I’d ever heard the Kurt Weill work live. It was a real treat, and had a lot of the charm, wit and gor­geous har­monic shifts that you hear in works like ‘The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’. As for the new work (the one with the Jazz influ­ence), well, all I can say is that I really didn’t like it, and will leave it at that. I’m still hop­ing that I’ll hear a pre­miere of a new Cana­dian work that will really knock my socks off, but it hasn’t hap­pened yet.

An Absence at Work and Online Tryouts

It was a bet­ter week at work, largely because one of the peo­ple I work with had a back injury last week but was able to make it in this week for part of each day. In a large com­pany like Fidelity Invest­ments, where I used to work, if some­one was out with a sick­ness or injury, you filled in with some­one else, and projects didn’t usu­ally suf­fer unless the indi­vid­ual was absolutely key and their absence was unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally ill-timed. Con­trast that with a com­pany of about a dozen peo­ple, where any sin­gle employee has key skills and knowl­edge, so take them out and things grind to a halt. Last week had really been a lit­tle crazy, as I had to try and fill in with all sorts of tasks that I’m clearly not trained to do. I mud­dled through some­how, often learn­ing as I went.

Speak­ing of knowl­edge, I’m once again going to see if all this accu­mu­lated trivia I’ve col­lected in my gray mat­ter over the years can pay off or not. The Jeop­ardy Game show has announced that for the first time, they’ll hold online try­outs. While this means that thou­sands of geeks will be hunched over their com­put­ers fir­ing off answers (and they explic­itly say ‘Not in the form of a ques­tion this time’) to var­i­ous Potent Pota­bles, Rhyme Times and State Capi­tols, I’ll see if I can make it this time. I had tried out in per­son in Boston some 15 years ago and came very close…but not quite.

In the off chance that I do make it to being a con­tes­tant, at that point after the first sta­tion break where Alex Tre­beck tries to make some con­ver­sa­tion with me based on some bio­graph­i­cal tid­bit on the card, I’m hop­ing it would be about music, or per­haps mov­ing to Canada (I’m sure he’d like that, being a Cana­dian him­self), and not the fact that as a stu­dent I had green hair and once protested Mar­garet Thatcher. Bet­ter not to share any of that, to be sure.

You Wanna Talk Money?

This in from the United Press yesterday:

WASHINGTON, March 16 — The Sen­ate voted Thurs­day to increase the national debt limit to almost $9 tril­lion, the fourth hike since Pres­i­dent George W. Bush took office.

The vote was 52–48, with three Repub­li­cans join­ing Sen­ate Democ­rats in oppo­si­tion, the New York Times reported.

Sen. Charles Grass­ley, R-Iowa, head of the Finance Com­mit­tee, urged a vote for the bill, blam­ing the increase in fed­eral spend­ing on the Iraq war and national security.

Pam and I were talk­ing about the fact that the US will soon be mov­ing from tril­lions (1,000,000,000,000) to 10-trillions (10,000,000,000,000). Gee, if they keep this up, they can move from 10 to the 12^th power to the next big num­ber, 10 to the 15^th power, or a quadrillion.

If these num­bers don’t make any sense, maybe this will: The Share of the National Debt for every US cit­i­zen is now at about $27,729.20. Accord­ing to my research, that’s just about the cost of a 2006 Toy­ota Prius. So in the U.S., every Man, Woman and Child owes the equiv­a­lent of a Prius.

I often say that we left the US for polit­i­cal rea­sons, but much of it comes from not want­ing to be in the mid­dle of the the com­ing fis­cal melt­down. We won’t be entirely insu­lated from it here in Canada (far from it, in fact), but I like to think that we’ve moved our­selves slightly out of way.

It’s hard to believe that just before we left, I was talk­ing about the decline of the US in these terms:

…It’s not only about hat­ing (yes, I must admit it, I hate) the man who sits in the Oval Office, as well as the craven Vice Pres­i­dent. It’s not only about how the coun­try is clouded over with signs that read ‘Call 311 for sus­pi­cious activ­ity’ and TV Net­works that spew polit­i­cal pro­pa­ganda that Pravda would have been happy to print or broad­cast. It’s not only about more home­less on the street with no atten­tion paid to their plight, or the fact that chil­dren no longer learn music or art in many pub­lic schools, or that peo­ple seem to think that a mag­netic rib­bon on their gasoline-gulping SUV con­sti­tutes sup­port for the troops in a war that just goes on and on as far as the eye can see. It’s not only the grow­ing cul­ti­va­tion of reli­gious fanat­ics, both here (the Chris­tians) and abroad (the Mus­lims). It’s not only the fact that athe­ists are not even con­sid­ered cit­i­zens and sci­en­tists are seen once again as heretics for teach­ing the facts of evo­lu­tion. As far as I look on the hori­zon, I see decline for the US, socially, polit­i­cally, intel­lec­tu­ally, eco­nom­i­cally, and philosophically…

Gee, not only was I depress­ing, but I wasn’t even close to how bad it could get. As Sarah Vow­ell (who I must admit, I sort of have an intel­lec­tual crush on) said on the Daily Show last month: “I talk about going to [Pres­i­dent George W. Bush’s] Inau­gu­ra­tion and cry­ing when he took the oath, ’cause I was so afraid he was going to ‘wreck the econ­omy and muck up the drink­ing water’… the fail­ure of my pes­simistic imag­i­na­tion at that moment bog­gles my mind now.”

Wine and Cheese in Port Moody and Émigrés Compare Notes

This after­noon Pam and I took the Sky­train out to the Lougheed Town Mail sta­tion, where Matt picked us and fer­ried us up to a Wine and Cheese Party at Oanna’s house up the hill (about a 15 minute drive, and a great help). It was a bright, sunny day, and a lit­tle cool, but gen­er­ally pleas­ant. We saw lots of patches of melted snow as the car climbed the small moun­tain where Oana’s house was.

We had a really nice time, meet­ing a lot of her friends and Oana was par­tic­u­larly help­ful in giv­ing many guests a proper intro­duc­tion so we knew of where inter­ests might inter­sect. Some­times we also learned of other coin­ci­dences that only arise after a bit of con­ver­sa­tion, like the fact that the small town of Wait­s­field, Ver­mont was also fre­quented by one of the other party guests, who often vis­ited there from Mon­treal(!). Oana had assem­bled a great vari­ety of cheeses includ­ing Sage Derby, Aged Gouda, Wens­ley­dale with Mango, Tiger Blue (which is a BC bleu cheese that is quite good). and sev­eral oth­ers, and Matt also con­tributed some fiery (and even more fiery!) sal­sas. We brought some Bril­lat Savarin, a lit­tle Salt Spring Island Chévre and some Mimo­lette, which were also munched on along with the rest of the ‘cheesy comestibles’, as the Monty Python sketch goes.

It all Depends on Your Point of View
We also met another cou­ple of Amer­i­can émigrées. Cecily and Larry moved here from Cal­i­for­nia at about the same time we did. They were retired from work­ing in IT with a daugh­ter in col­lege, and are now liv­ing in Bel­carra, an area on the east side of Indian Arm (a north­ern fjord of the Bur­rard Inlet), about an hour or so from down­town by car.

After each of us told the other our sto­ries ? which were sim­i­lar enough; We’re all escapees of Bush’s Amer­ica, even though were were safely sur­rounded by friends and rel­a­tives who were in blue states ? we got to com­par­ing the dif­fer­ences that we noticed between where we were now and what we remem­bered of the US.

Mass Tran­sit: They felt that it wasn’t done right here, mainly because there weren’t park­ing lots near some of the key Sky­train hub sta­tions, mak­ing a ‘park-and-ride’ strat­egy incon­ve­nient or down­right impos­si­ble. In addi­tion, they said that they sus­pected that a lot of peo­ple didn’t pay the fare (it is on the honor sys­tem). I’d have to say that we didn’t expe­ri­ence this at all, since we don’t have a car, and I never gave a thought as to whether there was ram­pant cheat­ing on the part of pas­sen­gers (since we were so care­ful that we thought we’d be caught if we ever didn’t pay and never asked anybody).

Roads: They felt that Cana­dian roads were not main­tained as well, nor were they as wide or fast as Amer­i­can free­ways. Again, with­out a car, we had no way of know­ing. In fact, when we have dri­ven up to Van­cou­ver from Seat­tle, we’ve noticed that the road appears to get bet­ter after you cross the bor­der, but this is just one high­way, and we just don’t have expe­ri­ence with the rest of the roadways.

Cost of Liv­ing: We both agreed that some things were much more expen­sive: our biggest com­plaint (no sur­prise) was wine. Com­ing from Cal­i­for­nia, they par­tic­u­larly missed good, cheap wine. Here wine is nei­ther good, nor cheap. Oddly enough, they felt that there was less vari­ety of fruits and veg­eta­bles in the mar­kets, where we, com­ing from Boston, had observed exactly the oppo­site. That’s not all that sur­pris­ing. I was happy to learn that their expe­ri­ences so far regard­ing med­ical care (they had got­ten cov­er­age the begin­ning of this month, just like us), was that it was just as good as what they had under the HMO back in Cal­i­for­nia, and that the wait for a doc­tor here was, if any­thing, shorter than the one they had under the pri­vate med­ical sys­tem of the US.

How ‘Wired’: Pam and I noticed that our Inter­net ser­vice here is far bet­ter than the best that we could get in Boston. Larry and Cecil were blessed with a phe­nom­e­nal (and quite atyp­i­cal) fiber-optic link directly to their house­hold back in the states, which is some­thing I know is way above the norm.

‘Cana­dian Demeanor’: We both agreed that Cana­di­ans were far more polite and friendly than we found Amer­i­cans to be. I was actu­ally sur­prised to hear this, since I assumed that my per­cep­tion was skewed by the fact that Boston is reputed to be the very rud­est city in North Amer­ica. Nev­er­the­less, we both found our­selves sur­prised and pleased at the cour­te­ous­ness of our new neigh­bors. Larry was now a Fresh­man at the Emily Carr Insti­tute, and found that he was quite pop­u­lar and accepted by his class­mates (many, I expect, who would have been his daughter’s age).

Movie the­atres: Here we both shocked each other. I was impressed at how many there were and how nice they were. They felt that they couldn’t find any any­where. I think this says that movie the­atres here in BC are more clus­tered within the city, and the con­cept of a mul­ti­plex in a sub­ur­ban mall is less com­mon (although I’ve been to a pretty huge one at the Metro­town mall, but maybe that’s not far enough out to qual­ify as truly suburban).

Those were a few of the things we talked about. The biggest dif­fer­ence between us is prob­a­bly our work sit­u­a­tion (we’re not retired yet) and where we set­tled (after a brief period rent­ing not too far from us on False Creek South, they moved out to rural Bel­carra and we stayed in the city). They still drive every­where and have a dog. We have no pets and no car. Do these things affect the expe­ri­ence of Canada vs. the US? Prob­a­bly a bit. Cecily and I both noted that the News media in the US has become a drum­beat of vio­lence and sen­sa­tion­al­ism, which is some­thing you don’t get up here. This makes for a very dif­fer­ent pop­u­lace and a very dif­fer­ent life, in the end. It was fun to com­pare and con­trast, and I bet I’ll get the chance to do it again, per­haps with more Bush-dodging Americans.

One more bit of evi­dence of how small the world is: I also met Karen and Zhongxi, who both per­form on the tra­di­tional Chi­nese mouth organ, the Sheng (I believe that’s the one). I also found out that by coin­ci­dence, Karen had stud­ied piano at Ober­lin Con­ser­va­tory with none other than an old fam­ily friend of ours, Peter Takacs. Those coin­ci­dences just keep com­ing, don’t they?

Chicken Pot Pie

I had grown fond of the small pot pies served at À la Mode in Granville Mar­ket — they occupy a lit­tle cor­ner in the mar­ket, and are per­haps a lit­tle hard to find. Some of the pies I’ve had are in lit­tle alu­minum tins, and oth­ers in large porce­lain mugs with a mar­velous swath of pas­try laid on top of them and warm fill­ing in the mug, usu­ally mush­rooms and gravy or onion soup. The alu­minum ones had tuna, crab, lamb, turkey, chicken and beef. But none of these pre­pared me for what I dis­cov­ered tonight.

It’s a Fri­day, the end of a long week, for both Pam and me. This morn­ing it snowed a bit, but by the time I was back the Island, it was clear, albeit still quite chilly, and the sun had not quite set yet. I was think­ing about a pie for din­ner, and noticed that they had some uncooked pies in a cooler on the side. The sign said to ask staff about them. I asked about chicken pot pie. The guy there told me he had to go and look to see if there were any left in the back. After sev­eral min­utes of wait­ing, the phone of the other woman who worked there rang. She asked me if I was the fel­low wait­ing to find out about the sta­tus of a large chicken pot pie and I said I was. Unfor­tu­nately, there were none of that kind left. I was a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed, but then a sec­ond later she said “Tell you what, come back in 10 min­utes. I’ll make you one.” I went about my other shop­ping, get­ting sta­ples for the week­end (par­tic­u­larly break­fast): lit­tle red pota­toes, onions, double-smoked bacon from the butcher, eggs and sliced bread. When I returned, the pie was ready, in a box, and wrapped up in a bag. I took it home and baked it in the oven for about an hour.

The results were sub­lime. A freshly-made, hot chicken pot pie straight from the oven is just about the best thing I can imag­ine on a cold Fri­day night. We pol­ished off half of it, along with some salad. Dessert was some raisin and pecan bread with cream cheese and Chamomile tea. Bliss.