Just In

Just in from Internetlandia--a pic from the school show we did back in September:

I think it looks dangerous. And I could have sworn we were standing like 25 feet apart from each other when we were throwing those chekere around.

Oh, and I'm almost done with the chekere I've been making. I'm unhappy with the netting. It's not as responsive as Jenny's chekere. Don't know if it's the beads I'm using, or how I tied them, or if it's just a matter of getting the bottom ring on right. More fussing with that when I'm done moving.

Moving

While most of you were eating turkey (ok, I ate turkey too) I was packing up 8 1/2 years of STUFF, getting ready to move out of this teeny tiny apartment. Yes ladies and gentlemen, I'm upgrading to a 2 bedroom place. Now I don't think of myself as having that much stuff, but hey, after 8 1/2 years, things seep out into the corners and into the nooks and crannies, and they just accumulate. It's like stuff expands and does cellular division and multiplies like a virus. And I've got a full carload of stuff to be taken to the Salvation Army. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to decide if you should keep something or throw it out if you know you have to carry it down one flight of stairs and up another only to find a new place for it. Those shirts from the 90's you absolutely loved and think you'll wear again? Uh-uh. Really, people. Paislyey was a bad idea in the 60's, and it was a bad idea when it came back in 1993, and it's a bad idea now and in the foreseeable future. Anyhow. It's not as bad as I thought, it's just that seeing it all on my living room floor makes me a little tired and not as excited as I should be. I'm thinking about hiring some young men with musclely forearms and names like Joe or Frank to do the moving. Or not. It's not that much stuff, really. That's what I keep telling myself. Here's what I'm dealing with:

Oh and the books. As a lit major I've kept tons of books and unfortunately, underlined in the vast majority of them. I had this great system of underlining pretty passages in blue ink, and paper-worthy passages in red. This makes for un-re-sellable books and a great library. And when I say library, I mean multiple bookshelves worth of books. Classics, many of them. And I gotta part with them or move them, and as a lit major, you'd have to understand I'd rather move them than part with them. This means multiple trips. Seeing as I'm only moving blocks away, I'm willing, no matter how begrudgingly, to take the 2 or 3 trips, to move them. The things you do for art, people.

And speaking of art, tomorrow at 10 I have taiko, which means that I have to dig through that pile of stuff!! and find my shime and bachi bag. And for shame, this week has been so busy with packing and work-related catastrophes that I didn't work on taiko stuff. Hopefully I'll be able to get through a mental version of Kai to Ryu over my Frosted Shredded Wheats + tortilla. But really, I have good excuses. One of my co-workers got hit by a car while crossing the street (she'll be ok) and another's husband had to have a bizarre infectious growth removed from his belly (he'll be ok too), leaving only me and the other girl to cover for the admission office during a particularly important deadline. Plus the database went down for 2 days and we spent a day recovering all the work we had done the previous friday. Good excuses, people.

Oh, and just for entertainment's sake, I'm enclosing a picture of the carrying case of cassettes I decided to toss. Remember cassettes? The data was stored on electro-magnetic tape and played back chronologically, rather than digitally. If you remember the rotary phone, then you probably remember cassettes. Or if you know what I mean when I say that back when you were in high school and had a crush on someone then you made them a mixed tape. Someone told me about a year ago that the last blank tape rolled off the assembally line, only to go the way of beta (as in video cassettes, remember?) and giant floppy disks (back when they were actually floppy) and dinosaurs, and other long-dead things, like cukoos and shoulder pads. Here is my last stash of cassettes. Classics, each and every one of them. Long ago purchased on cd, and now transferred to mp4 format, or else forgotten, like all those really bad mixed tapes:

Taiko Show and Interpretation

Last night Janet and I played hooky from our batacuda class and went to go see Somei Yoshino Taiko Ensemble's show in the City. We got there half an hour early, and were amazed to find out that the show was already sold out. We heard it had been sold out the night previous, and I'm guessing opening night too. What a wonderful problem to have! We put ourselves on the waitlist, and with a little luck and a little help from someone I had taken a class with and who is connected to Somei (I'm so sorry! I don't remember your name! I know you and see you all the time at taiko events and you seem so nice!) we got into the standing room only section, which was actually a seat on the steps. Janet stood half the time--she absolutely refused to take my seat, which had a half-way decent view in between bodies and railings. I thought I was Japanese, but she's way more insistent and Japanese than I am the and the way she can order me to take a seat and all, well it's hard to put a fight up against--but hey, I'm working with a handicap, since I'm only half Japanese. I'll have to work on that.

The concert was a beautiful interpretation of a folktale I'm completely ignorant of--something about a horse seeing the reflection of the moon in a pool of water at night. I dunno. I was looking at the pretty arm movements and listening to the rhythms and watching their faces. Afterward, Janet kept asking me what I liked best about the show, and I was having a hard time trying to find ways to put my thoughts into words. For me, music is so wonderful because it transcends language, and one of the reasons why I love music so much is because it can do what language can't. This is coming from a creative writing major. There are whole worlds of emotion that reside in the nuances of the ma of a rhythm and in that lilting place between minor falls and major lifts (quoting Leonard Cohen, there). When I was writing my thesis for my MFA, I always wanted to try to incorporate the idea of music into my writing, but always found myself really frustrated because you can't really get the feel of a don to sit there on the page. Or arm muscles and intense faces and beautiful kata.

I think that I will need to be better at that--be better at being able to express myself from a more critical standpoint. Just another thing to practice.

Anyhow--chekere is almost done. Just need to decide how to attach the bottom ring to the rest of the net. I'll post when I get there.

Chekere Making, Part IV

Now I'm on the next and final phase of chekere making: beading. I was kind of dreading this part. I had to wait a long time for the right kind of string to come along. You'd think thin black twine would be easy to find, but no. I had to order it off the internet (ugh!) and they shipped it via snail mail, and I suspect they used actual snails to transport the string. Anyhow. The instructions said you create a ring to go around the top of the net for the other strings to hang down from and that part was easy. But then you had to cut the vertical strings and that part was easy too, except I was halfway through cutting them when I realized I was cutting them all too short. Good thing I know to expect this of myself and had ordered extra string for this sort of idiocy. I was a little nervous to start beading because I wasn't sure what I was doing. I had instructions, sure, but still. Here is a shot of me just starting out on the beading and being, in general, very happy:
Maybe when I get halfway down the chekere I won't be as excited anymore. Tying these knots sure can give you carpal:
But it's turning out a prettier than I thought:
This is not the kind of project for the wishy washy, or the hurried, or the far-sighted, or people with unsteady hands. I look like a grandma in this next shot. Or at least the kind of grandma who wears football jersies and makes chekeres. More later when I finish the thing.

disk error: memory full

More batucada last night. This time I brought ear plugs, but still went home again with a pounding headache. I'm pretty sure it has to do with the fact that my brain is full and I'm trying to cram more info and beats in there than there's actually room for. I guess I'll have to forget some things like the word for that thing that hangs in the back of your throat and the whatchamacallit thing that does the thing. Hopefully I won't forget that street sweeping is every 3rd Tuesday and when rent is due. Anyhow played the tamborim again last night. I actually bought a repinique for the class, but the assistant teacher was saying that the repinique is the lead instrument, and it's fine to learn it, but the master teacher will give you a hard time if you decide to play it. I'm gonna leave it at home for now. I actually didn't just get it for this class only. I was inspired by On Ensemble (who came up here to give a show a few weeks ago) and they said they liked to try to learn new instruments and incorporate them into their sets and to just try playing them because what the heck--kumi daiko is constanly evolving and changing and growing and there is always room for experimentation. Plus I just wanted a drum to pound on and maybe for parades or whatnot. Maybe I should get a tamborim.

So last week we got to learn from the master teacher, but last night he was out of town so an advanced student was teaching. It was nice because he broke down some of the patterns and explained things like where the 1 is in a certain rhythm (and now I know what he was talking about! And also why knowing where the 1 is is so important!). It's also nice to learn from advanced students because they'll often have a little more sympathy for you and where you're at in the learning process because maybe they're still struggling at the things that a master teacher would think is so easy. I still think of myself of an intermediate student but sometimes Janet will be talking about her new space and how she's going to have taiko classes and says that I'm going to be one of the teachers and that just seems so weird to me. Guess I better get used to it because I hope to be standing in front of a bunch of cheerful, eager students--someday.

And taiko yesterday too. We reworked a song. I don't mind changing things. That was one of the things that used to annoy me--people would get really upset if anything changed, so I think we missed a lot of opportunities to improve things in favor of getting one thing down, right, forever. But anyhow, yesterday we took a song that I had beautiful notes for, and we reworked and did and redid and undid parts and cut them into pieces and sewed them back together new and improved, and shall I say, more interesting. And just cause I like to look at pictures, here's a pic of my beautiful notes post-rework mangling:

My mom used to get so frustrated with me because I had bad handwriting. She had handwriting like a school teacher, and my dad used to teach drafting so he has the neat handwriting of an architect. My elementary school teacher said that I tried to write too fast and that if I slowed down my cursive would be better. I say speed-writing skills are way more practical and applicable and anyhow, don't we like things fast?

Post Script

Isn't it funny how life can sometimes throw things at you like a bad joke? So I posted this entry, went to my weekly meeting, and came back to my desk only to find an email from our database guys saying that due to a "catastrophic hardware failure," all the work I did on Friday has just vanished. Poof! Like it never happened, like it doesn't exist. I'm gonna have to do it all over again! And what's worse, I have to figure out what it was that I actually did! I just hope that after a batucuda class my head doesn't explode and I wake up not knowing how to play a tsu-ku or what bachi are.

What the *&%$ Was I Thinking?

OK, blue fingernails are not as cool as I thought. Maybe they're cool at first, but then they burn fiery hot and swell up twice their size and then turn all sorts of colors and a week later what you get is what you see--a disgusting nub of inflamed pain. Did I tell you I had to duck behind that backdrop we had set up in order to keel over for a minute while Janet kept the show going? I put the bear in there to offset the swollen grotesqueness that even the photograph couldn't caputre. And now my pinky is just in the way all the time. I can't type. I have a hard time washing my hair. And tonight I was practicing Renshu and my finger was sticking out and of course I accidentally whacked it again. I've never had a stronger urge to amputate a part of myself as I did after I whacked it again. I was told I'm probably going to lose my fingernail, and I was like what? And then what? This is just gross.

Renshu Makes Perfect

Learned a new piece yesterday. Basically it's a version of Renshu, but we were playing around with different arrangements and phasing and it sounds pretty cool. Renshu was the first song I ever learned at Emeryville Taiko, and we played it over and over and over till we went blind. I didn't think I could be excited about Renshu again. We play this version on slants and the energy is completely different--not so tense and robotic. But I realize that even after playing taiko for 6+ years, I still have a hard time with my doro suku's. My "homework" for this week is to learn how to play it really fast, and by really fast, I mean like so fast you can't even see your bachi fast. Yeah, we like things fast.

As if that wasn't enough new information to cram into my head, I also went to a samba batucuda class later that afternoon. I'd taken a workshop at Drum Camp this past summer and had a lot of fun with it so I decided to attend this class. Right before we started drumming they were like ok, time to put your ear plugs in! and boy they weren't kidding. Unfortunately my ear plugs were in the chekere bag at home. Anyhow, I played a tamborim, which is a teeny tiny drum you hold in your hand. It kind of looks like a tamborine, but no bells, and you hit it with a kind of floppy, doubled-up stick. I liked the way the class was taught. The teacher would introduce a pattern to people playing one type of drum and get you on that groove, then he'd go to another set of players and teach them something else, and he just kept layering on the players and then after a while he'd come back around and change your pattern so it was always interesting. And I've said it before, and I'll say it again, stepping on those downbeats really helps you learn.

Oh and I just got these pics a few minutes ago. They're from that circus benefit we did a month ago. I tried to iron my tabi for this, and when I told my fellow players this, they laughed at me.

I got one word for you: HEEEEEYYY!:

Halloween!

Last night, Halloween, we had our gig in the City. We were stationed outside what was called a "Haunted Garden," and our job was to play taiko while people waited in line to get in. Our setup was kind of cool and had that thrown-together look that somehow always works for Halloween:

And this is what the set looks like when it is actually haunted by a posessed demon drummer:

And yes, her bachi are actually the leg bones of some poor hapless soul. See?:

I have to say that this was probably the most effort I've put into a Halloween costume. It involved sewing, obi-tying, and a first for me--grease paint. That stuff is fun to work with. And with some sort of Clinique miracle remover-in-a-bottle, not so hard to take off. I copied a face I found on the internet. Here is a better view of our pre-sweat makeup jobs:

We got a chance to walk through the haunted garden and it was pretty cool. Every once in a while when we were outside playing, we'd hear the sound of children screaming cutting through all the other noise, which of course, warmed my heart. Tons more pics and scariness than what I'm posting here:
And yes that's Santa Claus. He was funny because he gets the kids on his lap only to ask them to give him some candy with the threat that if they don't he won't come to their house during the holidays. Isn't that hilarious?

And just cause I'm posting pics, here are pics of what happens to your hands when you play like posessed demons:

Blood blisters! Ew! Gross! (Yet I couldn't resist taking a picture of it--and it's not even mine) And I whacked my pinky so hard it turned blue! Isnt' that kind of cool? If it didn't hurt so much I'd whack all my fingers for Halloween. Today it's a little more grey and painful and I can't type with my pinky so now it's not as cool as I thought. Oh well. I had fun!