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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I’ve been wanting to buy a smartphone for some time now, and after seeing the Japanese capabilities of the iPhone I decided on it—even though I think I’d be more likely to write, say, Java code for a handheld device than Objective C. Unfortunately, AT&T didn’t make it easy for me. Since I already had a contract with them, they wanted $400 for an iPhone (as opposed to the more usual $200). I’d have to wait until June before my “upgrade period” made me eligible to pay the normal, subsidized price.

Further delaying my plans, I discovered that Apple was having a developer’s conference the week after my upgrade period started—I didn’t want to miss out on anything they might be announcing, so I waited another few days to see what was coming out. In the end, I’m glad I waited—they dropped the price of the iPhone to only $100, making it an easy purchase (especially since work will pay for the monthly charges).

So far I’ve really liked the device, despite it having its little annoyances. For example, even though the kana Japanese input is great and easy to use, there’s no real kanji input—you have to use the Chinese modes, and some of the characters are slightly different. I also wish it had an optional stylus to make drawing characters easier on my wrist.

The web browser, too, leaves a lot to be desired. I think I’m most surprised about this, seeing as how I’d used the iPhone’s browser previously and been impressed. And, truth be told, most of the time it’s just fine. But when you’re using the browser constantly, the times when it can’t figure out where you’re trying to click, or decides to go gallavanting off to some other page while you’re trying to scroll, can be extraordinarily annoying. Furthermore, I think I’m spoiled by the speed and customizability of Opera. Sometimes I just get really annoyed at not having every feature I want right at my fingertips.

I’ll keep you posted on my thoughts on the device as the days pass. I’m sure I’ll find even more to like, even more to hate, and probably more than a little to be surprised at.

Yesterday, I made reservations at the ryokan we’ll be staying at. I was terribly nervous—they didn’t have an email address, so I had to make the reservation over the phone, and my Japanese conversation skills are shaky at best. (Speaking of which, I just received the results from the Japanese Language Proficiency test I took in December. I passed! 90% in writing, 80% in reading, and 60% in listening. That’s about what I expected, and enough over the 70% minimum requirement to pass handily. This year’s goal—JLPT 3!)

So, in preparation, I wrote down the entire dialog as I imagined it would go, along with other vocabulary words that I might need, just in case. I added the phrase for, “Do you mind if I speak English?” in case I got stuck—I figured in a foreigner-friendly ryokan they’d at least have one person who spoke English. Even so, I nervously kept putting it off until finally I managed to bite the bullet, pick up the phone, and dial the international number. I took a deep breath and mentally prepared myself for what was to come, as I heard the click on the other line as the phone was answered.

“Hello, Kimi Ryokan. How may I help you?”

I experimented with a few different forms. The chords I found online had the lyrics in romaji—for example, “konayuki mau kisetsu wa itsumo sure chigai”. I also tried putting them in hiragana—”こなゆきまうきせつはいつもすれちがい” for the same phrase. But it turned out that the easiest way for me to read the lyrics fluently was using kanji—粉雪舞う季節はいつもすれ違い—albeit with furigana (very small hiragana above each character). In this form I found the text very easy to read and understand—and keep in the correct rhythm.

When singing in any language, there are natural places to extend certain syllables or compress others in order to accomodate the melodic flow of the notes. When singing in your native language, you don’t even notice when you do this—it’s simply a natural extension of speaking, even if you would never actually speak that way. But when singing in another language, you often find that they compress or extend in places that seem strange to you.

The one that always gets me in Japanese is the dipthong “ai” (like in the English word “ice”). If, for example, I have four notes, but the Japanese text says “naikedo”, I imagine I have to extend one of the syllables, since there are only three syllables, right? Wrong—Japanese breaks up the dipthong into two syllables: “na” and “i” (rhyming with the English “pa” and “he”, respectively). This sequence occurs several times throughout the song (with, confusingly enough, the same sound being compressed into a single syllable elsewhere, when necessary), and I almost always got it wrong. But strangely enough, when I abandoned the romaji, it became much easier and natural to find the correct moments to pause and continue.

The final anecdote from my song-learning experience concerns a word in katakana. When katakana is used, it almost always represents a borrowed word—most frequently, from English. The particular word in the song was “a-su-fa-ru-to”, and in the song, accented on the second syllable. Normally, after understanding some basics of how English words get transformed into Japanese, it’s pretty easy to figure out a word based on the katakana. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what this was supposed to mean. Finally, after singing through the song several times, I gave up and checked the dictionary. Turns out it was the emphasis throwing me off—the English word is “asphalt”, and if I’d simply emphasized the first and third syllables instead of the second, I would have got it instantly!

The season when powdered snow dances always passes by …
Powdered snow, if you paled me, white to the heart,
Could you share our loneliness?

The song 粉雪—konayuki—was featured in a Japanese television drama entitled, “One Liter of Tears”, based on a book of the same name. It’s not so much a book as a diary—it was written by a young girl who was diagnosed with a fatal disease when she was fifteen years old. She writes about the daily events of her life, which include the normal activities of a teenager, along with the difficulties unique to struggling with such a disease. The diary was published when she was twenty-three—two years before she died.

Powdered snow, if you paled me, white to the heart,
You would wrap around our loneliness and send it back into the sky

I’m not sure I could handle reading the book or watching the series—it seems just too sad for me to manage—but I love the song. It has simple chords, so it’s easy enough for me to play, but the lyrics are moving and the melody stirring. I’ve been practicing it all weekend long.

Powdered snow, this heart that has transcended time is faltering

It’s a beautiful song.

My brilliant plan didn’t work out very well, unfortunately. It turned out that most songs I downloaded were actually by American artists, simply labeled in Japanese. (Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas” was apparently very popular in Japan.) I found a few interesting songs, but didn’t discover any smashing new artists whose sound I really enjoyed. Or so I thought.

Last September, I was cleaning out my downloads folder when I came across a video file I had never seen before. It had a huge filename and was obviously mislabeled with dozens of keywords one is likely to search for—one of which, I realize now, must have been クリスマス. I watched the first few seconds of it, but being short on time, simply relabeled it “Japanese Music Video”, since that’s what it was, and filed it away for another day.

Last Saturday was that day. I was cleaning out my downloads folder again, and came across the file and decided to take the time to watch it. I found it strangely moving, and (now armed with a little better grasp of the Japanese language) quickly discovered that it was called 粉雪—konayuki—and was written by a band called レミオロメン—Remioromen.

According to the Japanese Wikipedia page, the band’s name is a made-up word, consisting of a fragment meaningful to each of the three main band members. The “re” comes from the member named Fujimaki, who was fond of the band “Radiohead” (re-di-o-he-ddo in Japanese). “Mio” is from the member Jinguuji, from the name of the girlfriend he had at the time. And finally, “romen” is from the member Maeda, who took it from the Japanese word for streetcar, “romendensha” (literally road-surface electric-car).

The name of the song was “konayuki”—powdered snow. It was fitting, then, that this morning I awoke to freshly fallen snow upon the ground—as if I’d been calling it to me all weekend long.