Gentlemen, Start Your Engines

September has always been my favourite month of the year, and not only because it is the month of my birth. When I lived in the Northeast, it was always the time of lots of blue skies, crisp, cool air, and that spectacular fall foliage. It was always a serious month, dealing with the end of things, and perhaps even thoughts of mortality. My mother has always vehemently been a Spring person, associating her birth month with rebirth, new blooms, the end of winter, more comfortable weather (although often not quite yet), and longer days. Nope, not for me. I’ll take a Fall walk in Vermont with the smell of wood fires over a muddy trek through a garden that’s maybe getting ready to get going.

These days, I can’t say that I love September quite as much. Vancouver doesn’t get those flashes of color in the trees and the air isn’t all that different, although you do have to start wearing a coat again. Instead, what’s in evidence is the switch back to the city of the mind from the city of the body. I’ve talked about Vancouver’s yearly pendulum swing between the hedonism of the spring and summer months and intellectual and artistic pursuits of the fall and winter months. This is not unique to Vancouver; my parents, who spend a lot of time in Paris, talk about ‘la rentrée’ (From the web site understandfrance.org):

For the French, the year does not begin January 1st! It begins in September and the beginning of the year is so unpleasant that it ruins the Summer vacations (no wonder the French need so much vacation during the rest of the year). It is called “la rentrée”, like in schools. Just imagine : in September, you receive the tax bill, kids start school and it is the period of the year where, traditionally, many strikes take place, particularly transport strikes (train, metro, etc.). It takes a few months to recover, then Christmas comes (nothing spectacular) then the “soldes” (sales, more interesting), then February vacation (very appreciated), then Easter vacation and the wonderful month of May, with its “bridges”. Then it is time to plan Summer vacation.

I’d say for Vancouver, it’s more like ‘le réveil’ (the reawakening); a time when you no longer spend the long afternoons that stretch into the evening at the beach or sitting in the park (or hiking up Grouse). Even though the summer did have some theatre, including the successful ‘Bard on the Beach’, there are now several festivals and concert seasons that are all set to begin. This past weekend, we made another short visit to the PNE (hardly big brain food, but after all, we were just getting started). I think I’ll always think of the PNE as a sort of farewell, to summer. After that, The Vancouver Fringe Festival, which includes 10 days of entertaining and sometimes challenging evenings of theatre, mostly on Granville Island stages, starts in 3 days. Just 11 days after that, the 25th Annual Vancouver International Film festival, including some 300 shorts and features from over fifty countries (and a quarter of the films this year are non-fiction - which I guess means Documentaries in most cases). At the end of the month, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra opens their season with Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. So as you can see, everything starts up, and not quite in the way that the French do it.

I’m a big culture vulture, so I’m thrilled that this is all happening, and if it is in part because it’s not going to be so nice out and the sun is going to set earlier and earlier, then, so be it. My mind is tired of being on vacation.

Sick Days, Childhood TV and the New Apple Cube

On Thursday morning I noticed that I had a sore throat. By noon, I was weak, a little nauseous and sunlight was giving me a headache. At that point, it was obvious that I was running a temperature, so I went home early and went to bed. By nightfall it had turned into a pretty bad fever and chills, along with the usual cold symptoms. This morning I was still a bit feverish, but a bit better, and tonight I feel 100% better. Hopefully this recovery will continue and I’ll be back to work on Tuesday.

Tuesday? Yes, this weekend is a three day weekend that I would not be enjoying if I was still living in Boston. It’s Victoria Day, the first Monday before May 25th, in honour of Queen Victoria’s Birthday and the current reigning Canadian Sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II. Celebrating a British holiday is not all that new to me; I remember celebrating Boxing Day and Guy Fawkes Day (and isn’t it funny that Guy Fawkes has made a comeback in V for Vendetta ? ) but it does feel a little odd, given that we fled an ‘Imperial Presidency’, to be celebrating the birthdays of British Monarchs. Hey, it’s only a week before Memorial Day back in the US, so at least it makes up for that.

The Future with Strings Attached
With a day at home, I spent some time on email and phone, communicating with the office, but I did have a little quiet time to myself. I indulged my inner 5-year old. I watched some videos that I have gotten over the Internet of what was probably the first television show I was ever a fan of: Fireball XL5.

Fireball XL5, created by Gerry Anderson and his wife Sylvia, was a new genre of science fiction and action television that used marionettes on strings, brilliantly executed models, and clever cinematic techniques, along with an innovative use of an audio triggering mechanism attached to the jaws of each puppet’s face, so that the puppets automatically synchronized their speech movements to spoken dialogue. The show’s initial run was from 1962 to 1963, which means that by the time I saw it, the series was already over and in reruns. Nevertheless, I adored it, particularly the opening sequence (some frame grabs shown above) where the Fireball spacecraft took off through the means of an acceleration ’sled’ on rails, gaining speed on it’s vertical run until the track tipped up at the end like a ski-jump and as the the rocket leapt skyward. As a kid, I missed all of the goofiness, ignored the obvious strings and wires and black and white (the TV was black and white anyway), the fact that the voice of Professor “Matt” Matic was obviously an imitation of Walter Brennan, and the accent that Venus (Colonel Steve Zodiac’s sidekick and ‘romantic interest’) had was clearly not French, or any other language, for that matter. Commander Zero and Lieutenant Ninety at Space City (Fireball XL5’s home base) were hysterically wooden (well, let’s not be so tough on them; they were puppets, after all). Robert the Robot, a transparent robot copilot, had a fascinating computer-generated sounding voice that eerily foreshadowed what synthesized speech would sound like in the coming decades, albeit in that monotone that everyone assumed robots would speak. Still, it’s a wonderful and strange sensation to relive some of my earliest childhood memories of cinematic storytelling inside the Quicktime player window. I put this up there along with getting an MP3 of the obscure collaboration between Dr. Seus and the Great Gildersleeve, Gerald McBoingboing, which I also loved as a child. (I’ve recently learned that in animation historian Jerry Beck’s 1994 poll of animators, film historians and directors, the cartoon made from this story was rated the ninth greatest cartoon of all time, so maybe it isn’t entirely forgotten.)

Meanwhile, in Manhattan
This week Apple Computer opened a new store on Fifth Avenue, between 58th and 59th Street in New York City. Besides the fact that it’s one of the most exclusive addresses in the world, and the fact that it will be open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, the entrance to this subterranean retail establishment beneath 5th Avenue is a stunning 5-story glass cube, which was apparently designed by Steve Jobs himself. Here’s a photo from a couple of days ago:
I’m bettting that Steve Jobs never saw the film ‘Thir13en Ghosts‘, in which Arthur Kriticos (played by Tony Shalhoub of TV Show Monk fame) and his family are terrorized by an intricate mechanized glass house (powered by the ghosts trapped within it) that they are told they have inherited from their eccentric collector Uncle, Cyrus Kriticos (played by F. Murray Abraham).

OK, it was more than just a cube, and much of the glass had extraordinary calligraphy written on it, and there were cogs and hinges and other weird mechanisms, but even if he had just seen one or two scenes from that movie, I’ll bet Steve J. might have been put off from having customers enter and decend from such a creation.

Follow-up on Fashion, Kathmandu, Oscar, and The Vancouver Movie Drinking Game

Based on some facts I learned today, further clarification is needed on Vancouver Fashion. First of all, my notion that there are 4 different seasons, and that you need different clothes for them is incorrect. Here, there are really 2 seasons. 2 1/2 if you want to be charitable; cold and rainy, and warm and dry. You can get away with one rain jacket year-round if you layer other items of clothing (sweaters, fleece, other jackets(!)) under it. That explains the ‘no leather jackets invited’ element of fashion here. As for the rest, I chock it up to West Coast vs. East Coast. Nevertheless, Matt and I both suspect that there will be a backlash against the ‘every day is casual day’ attitude in the local work force. That said, he thinks it will just be for Telus employees where he works; I think it could be a move province-wide, but don’t quote me on it.

Great Food on The Drive
Speaking of Matt, last night he and Oana introduced us to one of the best little restaurants I’ve been in since we got here, the Nepali Restaurant, Café Kathmandu. How to describe Nepali cuisine for the uninitiated? It’s kind of like Indian, but lighter and with many subtle and fresh ingredients, like mustard greens, or fenugreek. There was a meltingly tasty curried goat, some fiery hot sauces (as condiments) as well as toothsome little vegetable dumplings, which you could dip in either a coriander sauce, or a tomato-based sauce. It was a real treat, and another reason to return to the multi-cultural culinary strip of Commercial Drive (or ‘The Drive’, as it’s sometimes called here). We’d been to a pretty good Vietnamese restaurant when we visited a year ago, and I’d had a nice meal at the bohemian ‘Wasubeez’ Café, but Kathmandu is definitely a reason to return to The Drive again and again. I can’t wait to see what we’ll discover there next time.

The Oscars, West Coast Style
This was my first Academy Awards Telecast that I’d ever seen from this side of North America. Since it is broadcast live, the show starts here at 5 on Sunday, and ends around 9:30. Apart from Jon Stewart doing a fine job (although I’ve noticed that critics seem to already be piling on their cries of disappointment - gee, that didn’t take long), the biggest impression this time shift made on the whole affair was that it felt far more like another big telecast that takes place on a Winter Sunday, roughly from 5 to 9, has a lot of guessing about who the winners would be and has expensive commercials: The Super Bowl! Next year, I think I want to do an Oscar party. Especially if I’ve seen any of the films that were nominated or won (which I hadn’t, this year), and especially if one of the nominees was shot in Vancouver. Statistically, there’s a good chance of that, since so many movies are shot here.

This leads me to my last thought: Is there a Vancouver Movie Drinking Game? (i.e. If you recognize and get agreement that the current shot is from North Vancouver looking at the skyline, take one shot, etc.) Help me folks, because I’d hate to be the one who came up with that one. Thank goodness that office centre (the converted cathedral) in Toronto that shows up in every mid to low budget Science Fiction (Tekwar, Land of the Dead, Mutant X) movie and series since 1985 is not not here or we’d all end up with alcohol poisoning.

Dear March, Come In!

For those not familiar with the poetry of Emily Dickenson (or the song cycle by Aaron Copland that my parents recorded for the composer back in the 70’s), the rest of it goes:

Dear March, come in!
How glad I am!
I looked for you before.
Put down your hat—
You must have walked—
How out of breath you are!
Dear March, how are you?
And the rest?
Did you leave Nature well?
Oh, March, come right upstairs with me,
I have so much to tell!

I got your letter, and the bird’s;
The maples never knew
That you were coming,—I declare,
How red their faces grew!
But, March, forgive me—
And all those hills
You left for me to hue;
There was no purple suitable,
You took it all with you.

Who knocks? That April!
Lock the door!
I will not be pursued!
He stayed away a year, to call
When I am occupied.
But trifles look so trivial
As soon as you have come,
That blame is just as dear as praise
And praise as mere as blame.

It’s a sweet little poem, and as a kid I was tickled at the thought of someone talking to a month like a long-lost friend at their door.

With the new month has come a bunch of new opportunities for Pam, and I’m glad that she is probably going to be busy with work for the next few months, at the very least. As for me, I’m finally feeling fully recovered from the exertions of the Gamelan concert at the Museum of Anthropology. We’ve both got bus passes now, and we’re not afraid to use them! With Spring indeed arriving (flowers and budding trees showing up everywhere), I’m hoping we’ll get a cloudless weekend day to take a trip to one of the gardens south of us (the Vandusen Botanical Garden on 33rd Avenue or Queen Elizabeth Park, which is nearby there just to the East).

I’m pleased to see that someone finally did a bit of a Google Mashup with some of the major bus stops and lines for Vancouver. Too bad it doesn’t do any of the locals, but it is nice to see where the Skytrain intersects with the other lines to the east of us, as well as where the CanadaLine (Rapid Transit system going in for the Olympics with a great deal of cries of pain and gnashing of teeth) will be in 2010.

written while listening to:
Tubin - Three Pieces for Violin and Piano (1933) - i. Sostenuto ” by Arvo Leibur, Violin, Vardo Rumessen, piano

Another Holiday, sort of

“Is this is what you do with Eternity?” asks Andie MacDowell.

It’s Groundhog Day, again. As I’ve often said, it’s one of my favourite movies of all time, partly because I think that Groundhog Day with Bill Murray is actually a very serious movie masquerading as a light, funny movie. If I were ever called upon to teach a course in say, ethics or karmic redemption, that film would definitely be on the syllabus. I particularly love it because it manages to ‘teach’ a lesson without being preachy or condescending.

It was a good day today, one I wouldn’t remind reliving (although not forever, to be sure).
There was the review in Georgia Straight. And it didn’t rain today. A pat on the back from the boss didn’t hurt either.

Experiencing a law of Musical Economics
I’ve been going to Gamelan rehearsals twice a week now, because of our upcoming concert on February 21st. It’ll be at the UBC Museum of Anthropology. In fact, I’m learning firsthand a rule that my father has codified after many years of performing music:

Arno’s Law of Remuneration
The amount of money that you will receive for a concert is inverse to the amount of effort expended in preparing and giving the performance.

This means that if you don’t work hard on a concert program, if it’s something you’ve played many times and comes together easily, you’ll be paid well. If it’s hard music that you have to practice and rehearse a great deal, forget about any payment. My father played Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue many times. So many times, that the last 10 or so performances were probably a snap, and sure enough, they paid well. But if he played Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunnaire, or perhaps Leon Kirchner’s Sonata Concertante for Violin and Piano (I remember that was incredibly difficult because I turned pages for it but I really liked it nevertheless), he didn’t get a penny.

The music for this concert that I’m playing in on the 21st is very hard. Yup, I’m getting bupkis.