Trivia that matter
I shot over 1500 frames this week during the rehearsals of the Friends University fall ballet concert, and it’s going to take me a while to go through them all. Until then, here’s a selection from Prodigal Son, choreography by Stan Rogers after Balanchine.
Continue reading “Balletic debauchery”
Several otherwise sane and sensible people recently have been posting their Champions Online or City of Heroes characters. I thought I’d check the games out. Fortunately for me, the former is Windows-only, but the latter does have a Mac client and a free trial period, so that’s how I spent a couple of lunch hours this past week. (Actually, I spent the first lunch twiddling my thumbs while the client downloaded nearly three gigabytes of additional content — if I had realized that it would do that, I wouldn’t have bothered.) It is fun to play with the character creator; you can make a (rather skanky-looking) schoolgirl, which isn’t possible with such sites as Hero Machine. The game itself, though, looks as dull as every other MMORPG I’ve visited, as far as I could judge from the tutorials (I tried both the heroic and villainous options). It’s nifty to design colorful avatars, but “jogging heroically” to fight random enemies is tedious. I’d rather listen to music —
— which is what I do in Second Life. My initial impressions of SL were rather negative, and if you want to find intelligent people to discuss anime with, you’ll do better hanging around Steven’s place. But there is lots of music there, some of it good, and there are other people with tastes as wide-ranging as mine. It’s possible to stream music from your computer to sites within Second Life, which I’ll be doing Saturday evenings for while. If you have a SL account, stop by Grizzy’s Café between 6 and 8 p.m. SL time (i.e., California time; between 8 and 10 p.m. in the central USA time zone). Tonight I’ll be playing very miscellaneous Japanese music, from Yoko Kanno to Hatsune Miku.
*****
I’ve sampled some random examples from the fall anime season. So far I haven’t finished a single episode. Surprisingly, the one I watched longest was Kämpfer, this season’s attempt to create the ultimate anime. Let’s see … we have
• high school students
• fighting
— with guns
— with swords
— with magic
(… but no forks)
• sailor fuku
• panties
• sexual ambiguity (question of definition: is a guy who actually changes to a girl truly a “trap”?)
• a meganekko
• henshin
• absolute territory
• .4 Rushunas — and that’s the hero. He also runs like a girl.
I hesitate to say whether there are any moeblobs or tsunderes in the show. I think one character qualifies on both counts, but that isn’t my field of expertise.
That’s in just the first fifteen minutes or so. There are also hints of a developing harem, a ridiculously powerful student government and perhaps a vast conspiracy. I expect future episodes will include copious steam. There are unlikely to be nekomimi, mecha or winged people, but I wouldn’t put it past the writers — it really is a silly show. Sad girls in snow are probably too much to hope for.
My only hope for the fall season is Kuuchuu Buranko, or Trapeze, whose crew includes Kenji Nakamura and Manabu Ishikawa of Mononoke.
*****
A couple of odd links:
I finished going through the hundreds of snapshots I took at Winfield and posted a selection in my gallery here.
I spent most of the weekend at the Walnut Valley Festival. It’s primarily devoted to acoustic string music, particularly bluegrass, but there were some items of interest to students of Japanese popular culture.
• The second-place winner in the fingerpicking championship was Akihiro Tanaka, from Kyoto, Japan. I wasn’t able to get down to Winfield on Thursday, when the contest was held, but the fingerpick winners made an appearance on the main stage Friday evening. Here’s what Tanaka played then: ((The sound is less than wonderful. Stage one is a noisy place.))
• I spent several hours listening to the jam sessions at Carp Camp. ((I don’t bring my dulcimer to Winfield unless I’m camping. This year I day-tripped, so I just listened.)) Here’s the tune that the campers call “Finish (sic) Polka.” It sounds strangely familiar.
(This is not my recording, but Carp Camp’s own from last year. The campers played the tune at least twice this weekend, but neither time did I have my recorder handy.)
• One of this year’s Carp Camp catchphrases (if you write it as a single word, you get six consecutive consonants. Can you think of any other English words like that?) was “Don’t hurt the old people.” The third Monday in September (usually the day after Winfield), is celebrated in the Japan as Respect for the Aged Day.
Fiddlers at Carp Camp, budget- and economy-sized.
Recently I spotted something called Choujikuu Romanesque Samy: Missing 99 OVA on AnimeSuki. It was written and directed by one Seiji Okuda, who has worked in various capacities on anime ranging from Ponyo to Dream Hunter Rem, so I thought I’d check it out. Well, sometimes there is a good reason why an old show remains obscure.
It’s the same kind of story as Leda — The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko: an apparently ordinary girl is transported to a fantasy world, where she allegedly has great powers. Unlike Yohko, however, Samy, as herself, never learns how to use her powers and just stands around uselessly as others fight to protect her. Her little non-magical dog is a more effective combatant than she is. The conceptual framework is a melange of Buddhist mythology, the Old Testament and Big Bang physics. It perhaps make a little more sense than RahXephon ultimately does, but that’s not saying much. With a more competent protagonist, Samy might have been watchable, but as it is, it’s a waste of time. I can’t even recommend it for fanservice.
Highlights from the posts I don’t have time to write:
• Taishou Yakyuu Musume is the first new show this year to sustain my interest beyond the second episode. In the first eight episodes of the story, the writers have kept the focus primarily on high school girls learning to play baseball in 1925 Japan, and they have not let the themes of feminism and westernization versus traditionalism overburden the story. There’s also been very little teen angst. ((Some of the girls waste time being moody and depressed in early episodes; part of the story is how they find the mental toughness to keep playing despite errors and losses. However, there hasn’t been any romangst — yet. (In the eighth episode, it turns out that one of the girls has an unlikely crush on the central character. If this gets played up in the remaining episodes, it will be seriously annoying.) )) If the last four episodes are on the same level as the first six (the seventh and eight episodes are essentially filler), the series might be worth recommending.
Taking the maxim that “the pitcher and catcher should be as close as husband and wife” too literally.
• Ponyo is in its fifth week in Wichita, the longest any Miyazaki film has ever played here, and it’s at a theatre within reasonable bicycle distance. I watched it last weekend. The dub is tolerable, though “bug off” is not an adequate substitute for “baka.” It made a little more sense than the fansub I watched last year — I suspect that there was some discreet re-writing in the dub script — but the logic of the story still is, um, hard to follow. I’d rank Ponyo as second-tier Miyazaki, not a classic like Spirited Away or Totoro, but far better than Howl’s Moving Castle (skip the movie and read the book instead). It is well worth seeing on a large screen if you have the opportunity, particularly if you have kids.
• For the convenience of any balletomanes visiting here, this is the only section of choreographic interest in Hakucho no Mizumi, the 1981 animated version of Swan Lake.
[flv width=”480″ height=”382″]http://tancos.net/flv/wp-content/uploads/cygnets.flv[/flv]
Sorry — if you want 32 fouettés, you’re out of luck. Swan Lake does have one of the better stories in ballet, but this adaptation trivializes it. Skip it, and find a video of a good dance production instead. Or, better yet, attend a live performance when you have the opportunity.
A recent discovery: GOLEM: Journal of Religion and Monsters.
It mostly concerns Western horrors, but there is an article on “The Religious Functions of Pokemon” here (scroll down a bit).
I wonder what the contributers would make of Mononoke, or Mushishi.
(Via Eve Tushnet.)
… of sodium vapor lights in the fog.
Sony and the Blu-Ray consortium have created a format where the system requirements for honest users are vastly higher than for pirates. They’ve created a system in which even the honest are given an incentive to break in.
In lieu of a substantive post, here are some random links.
For anyone who has ever operated a sewing machine: famous last words, cosplay edition.
“Oh look, a Windows ME install disc!” (Via Eve Tushnet.)
George Lucas is no engineer. (Via First Things.)
Someday I may forgive Dale Price for posting this. (Alarming fact: Before Star Trek, Shatner acted (if that is the word) in the pilot for a teevee show about Alexander the Great, costarring Adam West.)
Does the use of accordions violate the principles of just war?
For what it’s worth (very little), I’m now on Facebook. This was research for work, believe it or not.
My vacation last week started disastrously (see below), but once I arrived at my friends’ home it improved markedly. One of the highlights was an impromptu jam session with the young fiddler Roger and a couple of his friends. I just happened to have my little portable recorder at hand.
Different instruments require different micing techniques. Fiddles, I’ve read, sound best with the microphone positioned two or three feet above the fiddle. With banjos, the further from the microphone, the better — in the next room, say, or across the street, or in the next county.
Old Mother Logo:
Cluck Old Hen:
Update: Here’s Roger in action at a contra dance:
If you have 400 miles to travel and your options are Greyhound bus or a skateboard, choose the skateboard. You’ll get there faster and in greater comfort.
I left the house at 2 a.m. a week ago Sunday and arrived at the Wichita bus station shortly thereafter. I sat down with a book to wait for the 3 a.m. bus. And waited. And waited. And waited.
Evidentally Greyhound assumes that nobody reads any more, because there was a television up on the wall, tuned to CNN, the volume set to Very Loud. It was hard to read with the nattering voices. Nobody watched the television.
The stairway to the men’s room at the bus station was dark. It was not pleasant walking up them and, with my recent orthopedic problems, it was no fun at all making my way back down. Two of the four stalls were out of order, as were three of the five urinals. At the sink where I rinsed my hands, water flowed down the drain and onto the floor. There was no soap in the dispenser.
At 4 a.m., CNN repeated Larry King’s 2 a.m. interview with Colin Powell. Neither Powell nor King said anything worth hearing once, let alone twice.
At 5 a.m., just as CNN began repeating their 3 a.m. news report, the 3 a.m. bus arrived. It left the station shortly before 5:30, about two-and-a-half hours late.
My 7:15 a.m. connection east was long gone by the time the bus rolled into the Kansas City station, so I had the privilege of spending the rest of the morning there. At least the fixtures in the men’s room worked, and I was able to purchase a small hamburger that merely cost three times what it was worth. However, there were, not just one, but two televisions blaring, and none of the seats were comfortable. There were occasional announcements on the loudspeakers, but they were unintelligible with all the noise. I saw no chart listing which bus was boarded from which door. Fortunately, I correctly guessed which line was for the bus I needed in time to catch it.
The second bus left only about twenty minutes late, and I eventually arrived at my destination, about six hours late. ((Let me note for the record that all the Greyhound staff I talked to were courteous and apologetic. I’m not angry at them.))
Never again.
This was not my worst experience with Greyhound. Some years back, during a complicated journey, one of the bus drivers didn’t bother to go to work that day. I eventually reached my destination, exhausted and furious, in the middle of the night rather than the scheduled mid-afternoon.
It wasn’t always like this. Years ago, busses ran on time. You could even check in your luggage as you do at an airport rather than lug it from bus to bus, and you didn’t have to pay $10 for a second suitcase. I could buy a two-week pass for a very reasonable price, visit friends and family in several states out east and spend a few days at the Pennsic War on the way home. I used to entrust my hammered dulcimer to a friend with a car and take the bus to Winfield, arriving in time to set up my tent before the fingerpicking championship.
But not any more. Fewer busses run these days, seldom at reasonable times, almost never on time, and they don’t stop at Winfield.
Celebrating well-groomed, cuddly predators …
Schoenberg’s Opus 11, performed by cats.
… and the 88 counties of Ohio. ((“… this little application is not at all idiot-proofed, so my apologies if you are an idiot.”))
(Via Frëd, Lynn and Charles G. Hill.)
The 1985 OVA Leda — The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko, which Steven recently discovered, looked like fun, so I downloaded it. ((According to ANN, it was once licensed by The Right Stuf International, but I found no sign of it on the RightStuf website.)) The story is straightforward anime fantasy: a high school girl is mysteriously transported to an strange world, where she transforms into a warrior in a battle bikini. Screen captures are below the fold.
It’s silly, but it’s not cheesy. The art is detailed, and the animation looks smooth to my non-expert eyes. Although there are characters named “Lingam” (spelled “Ringhum” in the subtitles) and “Yoni” and the girls don’t wear a lot of clothes, there is actually very little that’s off-color. It’s probably tolerable for all but the youngest audiences. If you have any interest in old-school anime, it’s worth checking out.
Update: Here are two sets of six consecutive frames. Each of these whizzes by in a fifth of a second.
All the pictures from Anime Festival Wichita are up now.
Update: here they are in video form:
[flv width=”480″ height=”340″]http://tancos.net/flv/wp-content/uploads/afw slideshow.flv[/flv]
The music is from the Oh! Edo Rocket OST.
*****
Is there anything that doesn’t come in a Hello Kitty version?
(Via Dustbury.)
*****
Large green ducks. There’s more rice paddy art here and here.
1. Underwear goes under your other clothing. ((And a bath towel cape looks really stupid.))
2. Heath Ledger’s Joker might be a great character, but the makeup is ugly.
3. Please don’t shriek when you’re standing next to me.
4. An all-ages anime convention is not an appropriate place to lead your pet about on a leash.
5. Please don’t stage large group photos in the middle of congested hallways.
