Smart Dogs in North Vancouver

Apparently, (at least according to the people who make the signs for the parks), dogs in North Vancouver can read:

400 Days and some Saint Saëns

Sometimes you miss when the odometer turns to a particularly impressive sequence of numbers. I missed when our car hit 6666 kilometers a couple of weeks ago. On the other hand, back in July, I did take notice when the calendar hit 07-07-07 (although I didn’t head over to the River Rock Casino in Richmond to play craps as apparently many people did).

Today, however, is significant for a couple of reasons: first, it’s Beethoven’s birthday (he’d be 237 years old today, just shy of three 80-year old lifetimes, one after the other, if one could manage such a medical feat.)

However, today’s date means something even more important, looking forward, than it does looking backward or numerologically:

As of today, George W. Bush, or WPIUSH, as I often refer to him, has just 400 days more in office. Now, that’s something to look forward to.

What I’m Listening To
Some fellow bloggers (Gene, M.J. and Nancy) have requested that from time to time, it might be nice if I noted what I was listening to and wrote a little bit about it, since my tastes in music are a little different from most people.

(By way of explanation, for those who don’t know, I tend to listen to a lot of Classical music, and very little popular songs, mainly because I never learned how to listen to Pop or Rock music, as I was brought up in a household that never had any of that on. This sometimes makes me feel a little bit like someone from a different planet, and despite my attempts to get to know popular music more, I fear it’s a losing battle, because I’m always listening for the wrong things. I can’t understand the lyrics, and my taste in musical language has always been toward music that has a relatively complicated and rapid harmonic rhythm [harmonic rate of change]. This is pretty much the opposite for what people listen to in popular music, from say, 1955 onward. I’m OK with some Jazz, and even have been known to ‘get’ the odd pop ballad or folk music — even some Country Western, but I’m most comfortable with repertoire that rarely is played outside of NPR or CBC Radio 2. Fortunately, there are several centuries of music by thousands of composers to choose from, and the genre is far from dead, as there are indeed, living composers all over the world writing what some people now refer to as ‘concert music’, for lack of a better term.)

So given today’s birthday, you would expect that I’d be listening to Ludwig Van. As it turns out, the piece I had running through my head this morning is one that I’ve sometimes heard on 2-piano recitals and even at parties my parents would have, since in the evening, they would sometimes play (or have guests playing) their 2 pianos, either in their living room, or now in their teaching studio. It’s ‘Variations on a Theme by Beethoven’ by the composer who is, for better or worse, known for a children’s classic, The Carnival of the Animals, Camille Saint Saëns (which, oddly enough, also includes 2 pianos, so I guess there is something of a pattern going on there).

This piece make the most of the effect of switching the music from one piano to another, a technique called ‘antiphonal music’ which goes back as far as the Renaissance — if not further. Composers like Heinrich Schütz and Giovanni Gabrielli wrote church and secular music that took great advantage of groups of performers, sometimes significant distances from each other, with the music alternating between the different groups. Despite the fact that pianos are usually placed next to each other on the stage, recordings can really make them distinct from each other, and a recent recording by the Turkish Identical Twins Güher and Süher Pekinel, makes it so that one piano is situated at far left and the other at far right in space (or at least, it sounds that way). Besides all of this spatial entertainment, this piece is everything that Variations should be about: how to take a simple theme and play with it. Like a pair of children trying on all sorts of different outfits, the 2 pianos in this piece go through all sorts of moods and acrobatics, but can’t escape the fact that it’s the same theme, no matter how it’s dressed up. In the end I have to admire both Saint Saëns ingenuity and his sense of drama. The piece includes a prerequisite almost-Fugue, a Baroque period creation that 19th Century composers like Saint Saëns (and others) delighted in riffing on to show that they too were well schooled in compositional technique, and a great rollicking big finale that hops away to a completely satisfying (if a little pat) finish.

It’s a shame that Saint Saëns is mainly known for what’s essentially a work for children, as well as his Organ Symphony, which was used for the music for the movie ‘Babe’. Maybe there is something childlike about him, but nevertheless, I like these Variations, which probably aren’t so famous. Debussy wasn’t a big fan of Saint Saëns, who he felt was too sentimental and old-fashioned. Indeed, Saint Saëns is one of those Parisians who were in attendance in 1913 for Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and I don’t know if he contributed to the riot, but he reportedly stormed out. (He reportedly said that he didn’t like the high bassoon solo that starts the ballet) I can forgive him, as he was 78 years-old by that time and definitely a man of the last century, not Stravinsky’s.

About that recording by the Pekinal twins: It’s great fun, and available from the iTunes music store, but unfortunately, you have to buy the whole album. In this case, that’s not such a bad thing, because it includes a fierce performance of Brahms’ two piano version of his Quintet in F-Minor (a piece I definitely grew up with, as my father performed it many times), and 5 of his op. 39 Waltzes, which they play with a little too much rubato for my taste (it isn’t a drunken performance, but maybe a little tipsy) and some Hungarian Dances. Here’s a link to the Album (picture to art, button to iTunes):

Holiday Cheers

It’s understandable that some people get depressed around this time of the year. There is the uncomfortable weather, lack of sunshine, and incessant reminders of how we should all be out shopping, etc.. Fortunately, the flip side of that is that we can get cozy at home (with a tasty stir-fry of lemongrass-marinated beef), meet with friends in the evening (the blogger meetup was this Thursday night), give and get gifts, and perhaps even make plans for the new year. Pam has the jump on me this year in several ways: first, with one of the coolest gifts that you can give a nerd, an OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) XO computer. Although it hasn’t arrived yet, I got the email confirmation of the gift so the cat is out of the bag. The way the OLPC purchase works is to ‘give one and get one’, so in getting me this interesting piece of technology, Pam’s also insured that some child in another country (like Uruguay and Rwanda) also gets one. It’s a project started by Nicholas Negroponte, the flamboyant and charismatic founder of MIT’s Media Lab, and now the of the Non-profit organization (OLPC) that has created the device with the idea of getting an inexpensive (the original goal was <$100, the real price is now a little less than twice that number) laptop in the hands of children in poorer countries all over the world, with the hope of bridging the information divide). Here’s an ad with Heroes’ Masi Oka for OLPC:

You can be sure that future postings will be about this new gift, and given that it has a pretty long wi-fi range and is one of the few laptops that has a screen that is visible in full sunlight, as well as long battery life and lightweight design, I’m hoping that there will actually be some postings for this written on it (perhaps from the park out back?) as well.

Big Travel Plans

I mentioned that Pam had the jump on me in the gift department. She’s also out ahead on plans for next year. She’s going to do something that she’s wanted to do for years now: see Antarctica. In February (the end of summer for that part of the world), she will first fly to Santiago, Chile, then board a charter flight to the southern tip of Argentina at Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego (the world’s southernmost city). At that point, she’ll board the ship Explorer II, a “Double bottomed Ice Class vessel with an ice rating (Italian RINA Class 1-D) that exceeds the requirement for operating safely in Antarctica” (thank goodness for that, with the recent sinking of a vessel from Gap Adventures, the M/S Explorer) The ship cruises for 2 days through the Drake Passage to the Antarctic peninsula. She’ll spend about 4 days there, making excursions in Zodiac rafts to the ice,where hopefully she’ll see penguins like these. There are plans to land on the South Shetlands, including Half Moon, Cuverville, Paulet, Penguin, Goudier and Deception Island, depending on the weather conditions. I’m hoping that she’ll be able to send some of the day-to-day details of her voyage, although I’m not sure how easy email will be.

Before all of this starts, there are a few other (less impressive trips), including a visit to my parents’ house in Baltimore, and a week in San Francisco for MacWorld Expo. Looks like 2008 is going to get off to a busy start.

Happy Chanukah!

A picture can say a thousand words, can’t it?

Filmed In Front of a Live Audience

Before my working weekend, Pam and I were lucky enough to be able attend an event that was, at least as the comedian Simon Rakoff and ‘Master of Ceremonies’ described, the first time something like this had happened in 10 years in the Vancouver area: the filming of a Sitcom pilot in front of a live studio audience.

Because of an email from the CBC that I answered (I don’t know how I ended up getting it; probably from having signed up at the CBC web site at some point), at about 5:15 on Friday, Pam and I found ourselves shivering in line at twilight in front of what looked like a nondescript business office, at the corner of First Avenue and Gilmore Avenue in Burnaby. We had both just come from work nearby, so we were fortunate that it was easy to get to. The concession truck was feeding chili to the actors and crew (and it smelled good), but soon we were ushered in to a messy collection of sets, cameras, and bleachers inside. After a few minutes, Mr. Rakoff handed out tickets for a bunch of drawings for door prizes that would go on as the evening’s filming progressed, and explained our duties for the evening. “People watching TV aren’t too smart, he said, “so we want you to help out, and laugh so you can show them where the jokes are. Your laughter is an important part of the process of bringing this show to life.” OK. Bring on the jokes. But first, the setup.

The name of the show was ‘All the Comforts’. That much we knew already. Here’s the gist of the sitcom that we were to see, created for us the first time that evening:

The Bunion family is headed by Mac and Brenda, who, in their retirement years, are hoping to take off with their new motor home to celebrate their golden years alone together. Unfortunately, their plans are thwarted by their daughter Susie, a ditzy 20-something who has never left the nest, and the recent return of their always optimistic and timid but ne’er do well son, his pretty but abrasive wife and their 2 kids (2 typical precocious and cute sitcom children). Mac is a grouchy rubber-faced Jackie Gleason type who just wants to be left alone to enjoy his massager/recliner, his sandwich, TV and bottle of Snapple in peace. Solitude and space is to not be found. Through a series of physical gags, jokes involving aging and child-rearing, the cranky old guy eventually apologizes for yelling at his grand-kids and may even admit that there are advantages to having them around (one of them discovers and turns on the ‘auto adjust’ button on his hi-tech chair, ending his 4-year quest to find ‘the perfect setting’). While they aren’t a perfect happy family, they may just make it, although Mac will still be thrilled the day that all of his kids finally do leave, and he and his wife can hit the road together.

Before I get into any critical appreciation, it was just kind of fun to see how you shoot a sitcom. This was a four camera show, with director calling cuts and camera angles, 3 different sets (including the motor home), and a large crew, including a stage director, cameramen, sound man, grips, key grip, clapper, a bunch of writers doing rewrites of jokes down to the last moment, and bunch of other people (who I couldn’t tell what they did). This was as close as we’ve gotten to the filming of a real TV show, and it was a great education about how this is done these days.

As for ‘All the Comforts’, it sounds like pretty typical sitcom fare, doesn’t it? On this evening, what the writing of the pilot lacked, the actors made up for in professionalism and energy. They made the material far funnier than it deserved to be, but will it be enough for this pilot to catch on? That’s hard to say. The theme of the return of kids living with their parents far into their 30’s is something that many of us are uncomfortable with, to be sure. It used to be a stigma, but is becoming so widespread that it is clearly going to have to be re-evaluated. Discomfort often leads to humour, so this might have a chance. On the other hand, if it just becomes another collection of sitcom gags…

• Mac attempts to return a stolen xxx before discovery of the theft … Hilarity ensues.
• Susie is given the position of responsibility she can’t handle … Hilarity ensues.
• Brenda, tries to change her physical appearance through an xxx … Hilarity ensues.

I hope that they reach for plots and character development that’s better than these stock situations. Pam and I have both become real fans of Corner Gas, a CBC Sitcom that consistently provides a big laugh at least once in an episode. I suspect that it’s the writing staff, although that sitcom also has very good acting. So far, ‘All the Comforts’ is no Corner Gas, but perhaps it could be. I’m hoping it does, because to have been in the audience at the pilot could be a bit of history, if it is a hit.