Out of the tree of life, I just picked me a plum...
mujun, I'm sorry for contributing to the lack of movement on your flist. But. I forgot my keys this morning and spent most of the day locked out of the house. :D
:D :D I am that cool :D
:D
I haven't done that in five years, wtf, self A...at least I got 43 pages of research read! (...? that's totes not a big enough number, Meg, you fail)
Soooooooo I finally watched the Men's Team Matsuri!ItteQ episodes. WHO EDITS THAT SHOW AND HOW DO I PROPOSE MARRIAGE. The idol shots of Tegoshi on the snowboard! The repeated showings of Old Man Helmet fail! MIYAGAWA DAISUKE. And the soundtracking is brilliant, omg.
Speaking of brilliance and music and JE, WHO PICKS THE MUSIC FOR CAN!JANI. I almost died laughing when Hina and Ryo reached the osen. The choral arrangement of "Clementine"?! FANTASTIC SO TRITE WHERE DID THEY FIND IT WANT WANT WANT.
Next up: pouncing on Gwen! and doing some edits for Trivgod even though she makes me pout.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand because Triv posted this picture and made me go :O
SAKURAI SHO USES A MACBOOK. I KNEW I LIKED HIM. LOVE HIS HOTNESS, BITCHES.
Incidentally, this morning I met a man who lectures in music at Keio and managed to not go OMGSQUEEFLAILSQUEEFLAILFLAILSQUEE at him. Self-respectrestraint, I has it.
So, as I alluded to last night, I attended a special intersection-of-Japanese-and-Indian-music seminar this morning. EFFING AMAZING. Tim M. Hoffman is in the US at the moment to attend the American Society for Ethnomusicology 53rd Annual Conference, which is next weekend (and will likely cause me to be MIA for at least four days, since I am going, booyah!). He is the founder of the Indo-Japanese Music Exchange Association and primarily, these days, plays classical ragas on the shakuhachi and koto.
The koto, by the way, has taken on a new light, for me. He referred to it as "the uncarved block" and demonstrated some of its versatility. (You guys...if you don't know the concept of the uncarved block, you should look it up, because that concept was what I used to pull myself together after my first nervous breakdown and bout with serious depression, in middle school.) Purists, I'm sure, cringe at the very thought of what he was doing to his instrument, but the tones he pulled out of his koto were phenomenal. He plucked it in a traditional manner; shifted the bridges into an Iranian scale, then a Chinese scale, then a raga; he hammered it with wooden beaters and then re-shaped silver spoons; he finger-plucked and strummed; he depressed and shifted the strings to bend the pitches to match Hindustani singing; he bowed it with a cello bow.
He took up a marker and started drawing kana on the whiteboard, following with Sanskrit and kanji. He discussed the Japanese focus on visual concepts of communication and the Indian preference for sonic communication. Sound cannot be seen, thus the Indian culture over the millennia came to view it as closer to divine than visual, material, forms of expression. When my advisor asked him a question about communication in Japan (my advisor's wife is a koto master, by the way), he bowed.
He bowed, looked around the table, and asked, "what did you hear?"
This is a fascinating man. He is still an American citizen but he left the country in 1977 and has spent, over the last thirty years, roughly four years' time in the US. He has had access to musical worlds that should have been completely closed to him. He is married into a Japanese family and his teacher in Lucknow adopted him into the hereditary guild. He actually doesn't have a PhD: what he has are one undergraduate degree each from the US and Japan and India and a Masters from the University of Hawaii.
I cannot wait for SEM and the chance to hear him speak again. Even if he gives the same talk, I'll be able to concentrate on more than the OMGWHATSOCOOLNOWAYIDIDN'TKNOWITCOULDSOUNDLIKETHAT reaction.
omg why does this post merit so many tags
:D :D I am that cool :D
:D
I haven't done that in five years, wtf, self A...at least I got 43 pages of research read! (...? that's totes not a big enough number, Meg, you fail)
Soooooooo I finally watched the Men's Team Matsuri!ItteQ episodes. WHO EDITS THAT SHOW AND HOW DO I PROPOSE MARRIAGE. The idol shots of Tegoshi on the snowboard! The repeated showings of Old Man Helmet fail! MIYAGAWA DAISUKE. And the soundtracking is brilliant, omg.
Speaking of brilliance and music and JE, WHO PICKS THE MUSIC FOR CAN!JANI. I almost died laughing when Hina and Ryo reached the osen. The choral arrangement of "Clementine"?! FANTASTIC SO TRITE WHERE DID THEY FIND IT WANT WANT WANT.
Next up: pouncing on Gwen! and doing some edits for Trivgod even though she makes me pout.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand because Triv posted this picture and made me go :O
SAKURAI SHO USES A MACBOOK. I KNEW I LIKED HIM. LOVE HIS HOTNESS, BITCHES.
Incidentally, this morning I met a man who lectures in music at Keio and managed to not go OMGSQUEEFLAILSQUEEFLAILFLAILSQUEE at him. Self-respectrestraint, I has it.
So, as I alluded to last night, I attended a special intersection-of-Japanese-and-Indian-music seminar this morning. EFFING AMAZING. Tim M. Hoffman is in the US at the moment to attend the American Society for Ethnomusicology 53rd Annual Conference, which is next weekend (and will likely cause me to be MIA for at least four days, since I am going, booyah!). He is the founder of the Indo-Japanese Music Exchange Association and primarily, these days, plays classical ragas on the shakuhachi and koto.
The koto, by the way, has taken on a new light, for me. He referred to it as "the uncarved block" and demonstrated some of its versatility. (You guys...if you don't know the concept of the uncarved block, you should look it up, because that concept was what I used to pull myself together after my first nervous breakdown and bout with serious depression, in middle school.) Purists, I'm sure, cringe at the very thought of what he was doing to his instrument, but the tones he pulled out of his koto were phenomenal. He plucked it in a traditional manner; shifted the bridges into an Iranian scale, then a Chinese scale, then a raga; he hammered it with wooden beaters and then re-shaped silver spoons; he finger-plucked and strummed; he depressed and shifted the strings to bend the pitches to match Hindustani singing; he bowed it with a cello bow.
He took up a marker and started drawing kana on the whiteboard, following with Sanskrit and kanji. He discussed the Japanese focus on visual concepts of communication and the Indian preference for sonic communication. Sound cannot be seen, thus the Indian culture over the millennia came to view it as closer to divine than visual, material, forms of expression. When my advisor asked him a question about communication in Japan (my advisor's wife is a koto master, by the way), he bowed.
He bowed, looked around the table, and asked, "what did you hear?"
This is a fascinating man. He is still an American citizen but he left the country in 1977 and has spent, over the last thirty years, roughly four years' time in the US. He has had access to musical worlds that should have been completely closed to him. He is married into a Japanese family and his teacher in Lucknow adopted him into the hereditary guild. He actually doesn't have a PhD: what he has are one undergraduate degree each from the US and Japan and India and a Masters from the University of Hawaii.
I cannot wait for SEM and the chance to hear him speak again. Even if he gives the same talk, I'll be able to concentrate on more than the OMGWHATSOCOOLNOWAYIDIDN'TKNOWITCOULDSOUNDLIKETHAT reaction.
omg why does this post merit so many tags