Sock It to Me

I'm sorry I've been so lax about DW commenting lately; work and other things have been kind of crazy, as always at this end of the year. Why is it that the busier you are the busier you get, and vice versa?

I was looking for a Chinese idiom equivalent to “pie in the sky” and found 画饼充饥 (feeding hunger on a drawing of a cake) which is not quite the same but kind of related; I also found 天上掉馅饼, meat pies falling from the sky, which sounds related and actually means more like “serendipity” lol (in Japanese 棚から牡丹餅, botamochi cakes falling off the shelf, or tanabota for short. Do other languages have serendipity idioms which involve falling food items, I wonder?).

Jiang Dunhao song(s) of the post: 命名, one of his signature songs—I’m not actually wild about the chorus, too rock-vocal for me, but the verse and the last line raise the hairs on the back of my neck (in a good way). Warning for flashing lights! And for something completely different from the same singer, 又是艳阳天, an adorable duet with the Taiwanese singer Claire Kuo, over on the jazz end of pop. (*Because there are a lot of bilibili.com links here—if you’re not logged in it stops playback a minute in, but if you close the pop-up and hit play again the video goes on. I almost don’t notice at this point.)

Also Jiang Dunhao-related (I’m sorry, I’ve been this obsessed for a while now), I’ve been watching a program for young singers on which he is a mentor. I hate the competition part—why do people always do this with music—but I’ve found it very entertaining otherwise, the young singers are VERY fun. I’m pleased to notice that several of the twenty-odd women contestants are not just not c-ent standard skinny but well over on the plump side, including Niu Mengyao, who has a fantastic contralto, and the Chinese-Malaysian Vanessa Reynauld (莎莎 to her Chinese colleagues), who is all-round adorable with her slangy English-Chinese, as well as Zhang Jiayu with a pretty floaty soprano. Long Yuxun also has an amazing deep voice: a talented and sort of nerdily self-absorbed young man called Jing Shenghui fell in love with her voice at first hearing, grabbed her to form a group with (they all have to make groups of three or four people), and has basically been glued to her side ever since, while she treats him with a kind of amused, impatient fondness and everyone else ships them. (A lot of what makes this program interesting is seeing which singers end up working together. I was tickled, and confused as usual by censorship rules, that not only were two women telling each other “I’m in love with you and your voice!” but everyone else was commenting 嗑到了, I ship it.) Other interesting contestants include Yin Yuke, who seems to want to be the next Zhou Shen only much more deliberately androgynous, and the delightful twins Xie Yuxuan and Xie Yu’ang, who compete and perform as a single entity (I just realized that their names must come from the chengyu 气宇轩昂); then there’s Chen Yang, a rock singer listed as from the mainland on Baidu and from Taiwan on Wikipedia (I know which one I believe), who clearly has a strong personality to match her strong voice and, well, I don’t have the strongest gaydar but this lady’s style… (Some very short links: Niu Mengyao and Vanessa Reynauld, Zhang Jiayu and Yin Yuke, Long Yuxun and Jing Shenghui, Xie Yuxuan and Xie Yu’ang, Chen Yang)

Orchestra stuff. I survived the previous concert—there were some places where I wish I’d done better, but at least one prominent little twiddle which I got right for the very first time during the concert itself, giving me a Mizutani feeling a character from the baseball manga Ookiku Furikabutte who says to himself at one point during a game, wow, I’ve practiced this really hard and I can actually do it! wow!. The new program is movie music, mostly dead boring, but the Totoro suite is actually quite fun here and there (although I think I’ll be tired of it in six months). And I’ve always loved the Star Wars suite, it’s a symphony and a good one, with the accompanying images it calls up from the movies (although sadly it doesn’t contain the Mos Eisley cantina jazz piece). At our first rehearsal I was joined by a high school senior, son of one of the bass players, who was of course a much better player than me (Japanese high school bands are brutal), very solemn and big-eyed and polite; we’ll see if he stays around, knock wood.

Bits of assorted reading: Antony and Cleopatra with yaaurens and company, where I by no means did justice to Enobarbus but enjoyed him anyway (and decided to adopt Charmian’s “keep yourself within yourself” line when in danger of losing my temper). Some Margery Allingham mysteries, which are very weird; I did enjoy her sub-Wimsey detective’s interpretation of “seems like Sweet Fanny Adams to me” into “I am not very sanguine about this.”

With encouragement from everyone around here and qian in particular, I have been sending off the agent query letters for my original thing at the rate of one a day since around the beginning of the month; so far three polite rejections, not that I’m expecting anything else. Reminding myself that some of the best authors I know (personally and otherwise) are self-published. One good thing unrelated to results is that I was reminded of the one effective way I know to get an intimidating task done: break it down into the tiniest components possible and tell myself I’m just going to do one of them and I don’t have to worry about the rest yet. One little tiny subtask at a time is usually surprisingly manageable.

Composers riffing on B.A.C.H.: Bach himself (or maybe not, authorship is disputed, but it’s certainly good enough to be Bach), and Schumann. I love both of these pieces, so helpful of Herr Bach to have a name with half-tones in it.

Photos: Mostly from another historical-building tour with Y, at the Chourakukan in Kyoto, plus some autumn sweets and some nice skies.

Be safe and well.