indessed roscivs

Event #1: Wyatt Cenac

We were a little late getting out of the house, and although we made it to the show half an hour before it was scheduled to start, we barely missed the end of the standby line. It was a bad miss, but we vowed to watch some Daily Show to make up for it, got a bite to eat, and headed to the next show early.

Event #2: Black Eyed Peas

This was probably the highlight of the weekend—a stadium packed full of Black Eyed Peas fans crowdsurfing, shouting, and singing along to an awesome show that had dancing (including spectacular break-dancing by a local eight-year-old boy), lights, video, smoke, confetti, and more—along with the music, of course. The only negative was that the sound unexpectedly went out a couple of times during the show, thoroughly killing the vibe. Including during the finale. I hope somebody got fired for that!

Event #3: Oren Lavie

Oren Lavie was pretty good on the piano and on the guitar, but it was his cellist—Emma Wood—who made all difference. With her accompaniment, Oren was occasionally reminiscent of Nick Drake; without it, he was a talented but unoutstanding musician. I plan to check and see if his CDs include Emma or not … such a distinction may influence my purchasing decisions!

Event #4: Various Art Exhibits

These were interesting, but the only part worth remarking on is that my favorite part—interestingly unique photographs of various major world cities—were actually intended to be a statement on light pollution. I thought the pictures were beautiful. Oops.

Event #5: Portland Cello Project

This was not your ordinary cello orchestra. They played stuff like the Super Mario Brothers theme song, some neoclassical stuff, and ended with Aha’s “Take On Me”. I was a bit disappointed that they were more of accompaniment to the main vocalist (who also played the guitar), and didn’t really lead the melody on their own—but I guess there’s only so much you can do with a cello. It was fun to listen to anyway, for the most part—and gave me a few ideas of my own.

Event #6: Franz Ferdinand

I’m a fan of Franz Ferdinand, but they’re a little too loud for me even normally, so I thought hearing them live might be a little excessive. So, we just caught a few of their songs while walking by the stadium where they were playing—which was plenty enough for me. I’m glad I got to hear a bit of them, but after getting stuck in the crowds after Black Eyed Peas, I was happy not to repeat that experience.

Event #1: The Rain

Okay, so technically this wasn’t a Bumbershoot event; it was just a normal autumn rainstorm. But we stayed at home for most of it—partially because we didn’t want to get soaking wet, and partially because it was just so beautiful to listen to while relaxing inside the house.

Event #2: Dutchess and the Duke

After avoiding the rain for as long as we could, the sunshine finally broke through and we caught the end of this performance. It was not at all what I expected—I thought it would be a much calmer sound (featuring guitar and tambourine, after all), and without who I assume was the “duke” it might have been, but his yells over the din of over-amped music completely failed to do anything for me. I’m glad we missed most of that one.

Event #3: Zak Smith

This was the first completely non-musical event I attended. Zak was a punk rocker type visual artist (with a black dragon tattoo on the shaved half of his head, and a black mohawk on the other) who had somehow become a sort of part-time porn star, “acting” in porno flicks every couple of months. He had written a few books about the experiences he’d had, and this presentation turned out to consist solely of him reading excerpts from his most recent book (mostly boring), and him answering audience questions (mostly interesting). All in all, I’m glad I went—but I wish he’d spent more time talking than reading.

Event #4: D. Black

The weather had turned cold and windy by this point, but this was an indoor show, so we felt lucky—until we showed up at the venue over half an hour early. They had everyone lined up outside in the cold—so we decided not to wait and just headed home a bit early. A short day, but a good one.

Bumbershoot Event #1: The Goldberg Variations

I’m a huge fan of the Goldberg Variations—I own probably a dozen different recordings, and have listened to them countless times. However, this was my first time listening to a live performance, which made it completely worth it just for that. It was fascinating. I’d anticipate the complex passages and hear the pianist stumble or succeed, slow down or muddle through. I’d expect a repeated passage and get none—or vice-versa. I’d cringe as she failed to emphasize a favorite passage, or swoon as she played a variation more melodically than Gould or Pi-hsien. Every difference—whether a mistake, a stylistic flourish, or a mere tempo change—was taken in and thoroughly appreciated.

The pianist, however, was not the intended highlight of the performance. Each variation was accompanied by a (usually solo) dancer, interpreting each movement with their motions and gestures. Although some were extremely creative, and some made me laugh out loud, overall I was disappointed. Many of the reasons why I love the Goldberg Variations are because of the intricacies of the piece that are not evident from casual listening. For example, although each of the thirty “variations” has a completely different theme and motif than the Aria, the common thread that holds them all together is the bass line, played by the left hand—with very little variation, it is nearly the same in every piece. Another eccentricity is that every third variation is a canon, where the first voice starts out with some melody, and then the second voice joins in shortly after, playing identical notes as the first. Each subsequent canon adjusts the pitch of the second voice, raising it a note every time, producing wondrously rich and complex harmonies.

The dancers, despite their skill, did nothing (so far as I could tell) to riff off these intricacies. They didn’t mention them or follow them or exploit them—in fact, they seemed completely ignorant of them. I was, to say the least, more than a little disappointed that the immense depths of the piece were left unremarked on, leaving the audience to attempt to detect those little beauties on their own.

Bumbershoot Event #2: Improvised Shakespeare

An awesomely hilarious improvised rendition of “Flying Potato” (the audience-suggested title of the play) in the style of the Immortal Bard. Prominent features included: an ensyphiled nursemaid, an Englishman with a bad Italian accent, “two guys one cup,” an oliphant from an African safari, and imagined ziplines galore. They kept the crowd laughing for nearly an hour—an impressive feat for any improv troupe.

Bumbershoot Event #3: Matt & Kim

I didn’t know anything about these folks, they just happened to be playing at the stage where my uncle and family were sitting. On the way there, I noticed that I was probably not the target demographic—everyone seemed to be thirteen or fourteen at the oldest. That was a bit of a shock after the previous two events, where I was among the youngest (rather than among the oldest). My cousins remarked that they felt a little pervy just being there. The music wasn’t actually half bad (at least compared to what I was expecting), but I was glad I was sitting far enough in the back for the percussion’s shock waves to have dissipated enough to only half-deafen me while making my innards reverberate. Drums so loud I can feel them (and not gently, either) has never been one of my concert favs.

Bumbershoot Event #4: Eric Hutchinson

I lay down on the grass and read Lawrence Lessig’s “Free Culture” to the tunes of Eric Hutchinson. It was a relaxing, soothing afternoon.

Bumbershoot Event #5: Sheryl Crow

I’m a big enough fan of Sheryl’s to know how to spell her name—so I figured that was enough to go to her concert as well. And she played all my favorite songs—a brilliant end to a brilliant day.

For a while now, I’ve been collecting newspaper headlines that I’ve found, for whatever reason, difficult to parse. Today, I discovered a neologistic name for such garden-path headlines, brought to you by the venerable Language Log: crash blossoms.

Like mondegreen, Cupertino, and eggcorn, “crash blossoms” is taken from an example of what the phrase itself refers to. The original headline is, “Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms”. Your first attempt at parsing this headline might end in confusion, as you likely took “JAL crash blossoms” to be a noun phrase (especially given the priming effect of seeing “crash blossoms” by itself elsewhere in my post). However, the intention behind the headline is that “JAL crash” is the noun phrase, and “blossoms” is a verb whose subject is the violinist. A less ambiguous rewording would be, “The career of the violinist who was linked to the Japan Airline crash has been blossoming.”

The first headline I saw that made me start writing them down was: “Avalanches Close Passes”. At first I couldn’t figure if the avalanches had caused the mountain pass to be closed, or whether the road closure due to avalanches had passed and is now over. After some thought, it seemed obvious that the first meaning is the correct one, but it took me several attempts to make it through successfully.

Another amusing headline I saw recently was: Peanut Plant Was Cited for Violations. I pictured inspectors digging up an individual peanut plant and issuing it a citation. And, in the hockey arena, I saw this headline: Varlamov’s clutch save keys Washington’s Game 1 win. I still don’t understand who thought that mouthful of a headline was a good eye-catcher, but I find it almost impossible to parse the first time through.

Seen any good ones yourself?

It’s been a while, but so far I’m still very happy with the iPhone. In fact, I just discovered a Wordpress iPhone app that let’s me write posts (like this one) on the iPhone, even when I’m not connected to the Interwebs (like now, when I’m waiting underground for the subway).

There are still significant annoyances, though. Selecting a block of text is often insanely hard (especially if you don’t want to select on a word boundary, or if you want to select more than a screenful of text but not “select all”). Battery suckage is immense, especially since the 3.0 upgrade.

And it’s still annoying that I can’t fix the screen to be horizontally rotated. The “iPhone can’t rotate 180 degrees” trick makes surfing while lying down bearable, at least—otherwise you’d never be able to have the screen properly rotated no matter how you held it—but if I move from one side to the other, I have to rotate the phone 180 degrees (and slowly, often pausing for five or six seconds at 90 degrees to get the iPhone to adjust) before I can continue my reading or browsing or whatnot. Hardly a seamless experience. And sometimes it just doesn’t rotate at all.

I haven’t tried kanji input much lately. I got a special iPhone stylus, which worked surprisingly well for drawing characters, but at the end of the day the minor differences between the Japanese and Chinese characters made it more or less unworkable for daily study. However, I’ve discovered renshuu.org, which has the vocabulary for the textbook my class is using, conveniently separated by chapter, and a Leitner-style spaced repetition algorithm to ensure that I get the most practice on the words I know the least. In the latest site upgrade, they’ve even made the multiple-choice questions more tricky, making it difficult to guess if you don’t really know what the word is. I’ve been doing that vocabulary practice nearly every day, and I think it’s helped significantly.

All in all, the iPhone has been a win in general, but I wish they’d fix some of the minor annoyances.

(From Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter.)

[In ordinary prose ... problems of translation do occur]. Suppose you are translating a novel from Russian to English, and come across a sentence whose literal translation is, “She had a bowl of borscht.” Now perhaps many of your readers will have no idea what borscht is. You could attempt to replace it by the “corresponding” item in their culture—thus, your translation might run, “She had a bowl of Campbell’s Soup.” Now if you think this is a silly exaggeration, take a look at the first sentence of Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment in Russian and then a few different English translations. I happened to look at three different English paperback translations, and found the following curious situation.

The first sentence employs the street name “S. Pereulok” (as transliterated). What is the meaning of this? A careful reader of Dostoevsky’s work knows that Leningrad (which used to be called “St. Petersburg”—or should I say “Petrograd?”) can discover by doing some careful checking of the rest of the geography in the book (which incidentally is also given only by its initals) that the street must be “Stoliarny Pereulok”. Dostoevsky probably wished to tell his story in a realistic way, yet not so realistically that people would take literally the addresses at which crimes and other events were supposed to have occured. In any case, we have a translation problem; or to be more precise, we have several translation problems, on several different levels.

First of all, should we keep the initial so as to reproduce the aura of semi-mystery which appears already in this first sentence of the book? We would get “S. Lane” (”lane being the standard translation of “pereulok”). None of the three translators took this tack. However, one chose to write “S. Place”. The translation of Crime and Punishment which I read in high school took a similar option. I will never forget the disoriented feeling I experienced when I began reading the novel and encountered these streets with only letters for names. I had some sort of intangible malaise about the beginning of the book; I was sure that I was missing something essential, and yet I didn’t know what it was … I decided that all Russian novels were very weird.

Now we could be frank with the reader (who, it may be assumed, probably won’t have the slightest idea whether the street is real or fictitious anyway!) and give him the advantage of our modern scholarship, writing “Stoliarny Lane” (or “Place”). This was the choice of translator number 2, who gave the translation as “Stoliarny Place”.

What about number 3? This is the most interesting of all. This translation says “Carpenter’s Lane”. And why not, indeed? After all, “stoliar” means “carpenter” and “ny” is an adjectival ending. So now we might imagine ourselves in London, not Petrograd, and in the midst of a situation invented by Dickens, not Dostoevsky. Is that what we want? Perhaps we should just read a novel by Dickens instead, with the justification that it is “the corresponding work in English”. When viewed on a sufficiently high level, it is a “translation” of the Dostoevsky novel—in fact, the best possible one! Who needs Dostoevsky!

We have come all the way from attempts at great literary fidelity to the author’s style, to high-level translations of flavor. Now if this happens already in the first sentence, can you imagine how it must go on in the rest of the book? What about the point where a German landlady begins shouting in her German-style Russian? How do you translate broken Russian spoken with a German accent, into English?

Then one may also consider the problems of how to translate slang and colloquial modes of expression. Should one search for an “analogous” phrase, or should one settle for a word-by-word translation? If you search for an analogous phrase, then you run the risk of committing a “Campbell’s soup” sort of blunder; but if you translate every idiomatic phrase word by word, then the English will sound alien. Perhaps this is desirable, since the Russian culture is an alien one to speaker of English. But a speaker of English who reads such a translation will constantly be experiencing, thanks to the unusual turns of phrase, a sense—an artificial sense—of strangeness, which was not intended by the author, and which is not experenced by readers of the Russian original.

Problems such as these give one pause in considering such statements as this one, made by Warren Weaver, one of the first advocates of translation by computer, in the late 1940s: “When I look at an article in Russian, I say, ‘This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.’” Weaver’s remark simply cannot be taken literally; it must rather be considered a provocative way of saying that there is an objectively describable meaning hidden in the symbols, or at least something pretty close to objective; therefore, there would be no reason to suppose a computer could not ferret it out, if sufficiently well programmed.