Does anybody else like Kate Bush? I've kind of been falling in love recently.

Merry Christmas!

Since I'm in a somewhat pensive and thoughtful mood I'll link to this Umberto Eco essay about Christmas (it's unfortunate that the essay is in a right-wing British rag like the Telegraph, especially considering that Eco is firmly in the mainline [culturally-]Christian-Socialist centre-left of Italian politics himself). I'm having A ( Read more... )

I'm enjoying Kajiura Yuki's ongoing years-long musical exploration of her (or someone's close to her, or somebody whose perspective she's trying to compose from) spiritually-violent-seeming inner life. I'm not sure if I'm justified in reading a conversion experience into some of these Kalafina lyrics she's been coming out with the past few years or ( Read more... )

I...I just discovered the work of Kate Wolf*.

Somebody please hold me...

;_______;

*The last one is Nanci Griffith and Emmylou Harris singing, but that is because the entire point of 'Across the Great Divide' is that Wolf was on death's door and knew it when she wrote it...She reminds me of a cross between Higuchi Ichiyo and Stan Rogers. And there ( Read more... )

Title: To the World of Love
Author: melengro 
Fandom: RPF (See-Saw)
Pairing/characters: Ishikawa Chiaki/Kajiura Yuki
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I do not own Ishikawa Chiaki or Kajiura Yuki. Slavery is illegal in Japan. You may also treat the ladies here as fictional characters with the same names and professional histories, since I don't claim to know the ( Read more... )

You know, my 'Image' here at the university, among the groups that know who I am--the Asian Studies department, some of the Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology, and History people, and the Nerd and Religious-Person communities in the greater Amherst-Northampton area--is pretty well-defined. I am reserved, highly intelligent, creative, sometimes a ( Read more... )

Shadows of Yearning
An Oratorio

Chorus
Jesus
Priest
Lawyer
Farmer
Kings of the Earth
Weaver-Women
Bodhisattva
( Hear the word of the Lord Incarnate made a man in Palestine; read in letters of gold and silver across the land from hill to brine the Gospel of the distant saudade eternal on the lily-shore; hear the words that shook the Temple and its veil asunder tore... )

Things of to-day:

Turn, turn, turn again...

...while she is yet alive, though I myself am dead...

• Listening to Fairport Convention.
• Read Kokoro by Natsume Soseki; cried.
• Bought a scarf from elderly, penurious West Indian gentleman on the street in Amherst. It is pashmina and purple and lovely.

...to record a concept album in which I play 'Centifolia' (the ending theme to Aoi Hana) over and over again while reading various Supreme Court rulings out loud. Much like how the last episode of the show times the crescendo of the music to coincide with the emotional climax of the series, I would time it so that the crescendo coincides with those ( Read more... )

So I just found somebody online saying very nasty things about one of my favourite people, West German-raised Japanese musician and impresario Kajiura Yuki. In and of itself, saying that somebody doesn't like her music, or even (what this was saying) that it hasn't been as good in the year since the Kara no Kyoukai soundtrack was completed, usually ( Read more... )