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 19^th 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.