Wedding tidbits

Boys, don't read this, since it will probably bore you.

* * *

Ala: I just read about my responsibilities as the maid of honor, and according to this guidebook, I'm supposed to help you pee. I love you dearly, but I'm not sure I want to take my relationship with you to that next level.
Ch: I'm perfectly capable of peeing on my own, so I won't need your help.

* * *

Ala reads something out loud about the symbolism of breaking glasses and how it's supposed to symbolize the irrevocability of the wedding vows.

Ch: That's hogwash. We have no such romantic notions. We do it to symbolize that life sucks and sometimes glasses break. Every Jewish person knows that.
An: So this whole glass breaking to symbolize irreversibility of marriage is revisionist history propagated by non-Jews?

Engaged, but. . .

Had a girls+guy night last night at H&NMs. I skipped the Mamma Mia part of the evening, but joined them for dessert. H&MM officially announced their engagement, and lots of oohing and aahing over rings, etc. ensued.

They bought a house together and have more or less combined/merged most of their belongings.

Their dishes and kitchenware are merged.
Their home decor and furniture are an eclectic mix of their collections.
They share a large closet for their clothes.
Their books coexist peacefully on shared shelves.

As for their CD collections? Heh. Still completely unmerged and in fact, located at completely opposite sides of the living room.

I don't know if this is the case for them, but several of my friends would probably sooner merge checking accounts than their music collections.

Pretty in pink

Alas, I couldn't find my linear algebra notes from college, but while I sifted through the contents of my boxed up past, I did come across this high school bio lab report from many many moons ago, which reminded me of why I wouldn't've (if that isn't a real word, it ought to be) survived in a school system in Japan, where you don't get away with submitting lab reports written in bright pink ink on purple paper.
I didn't pull this on everyone or do this all of the time, but I think I was practicing my mirrored image penmanship for some reason and my bio teacher graciously humored me. (Note his comments.) We still keep in touch.

My proclivity for pink ink continued through college, but I did this out of practicality rather than any inclinations to be non-conformist.

Final exam from literature class, ca. 1996

I discovered that in a class of 200+ students, when you are trying to locate your blue book exam among a pile of 200+, and you are the only one out of 200 students who took the exam in pink ink, then finding your exam out of the mass pile is very easy. (Yes, I really am that lazy.) It's too bad I went through an entire year of blue book exams before I figured this out.

And for the record, maybe I don't have any pink pens handy anymore, but I still need to take my notes in 2 or 3 different colored inks on different-colored paper.

Notes from class, ca. 2008

Still searching for slanted eyes

Are people ever turned off by the search terms via which someone lands up on their blog?

Well, when you've just come home exhausted from work/classes, the last thing you want to know is that five people landed on your blog today searching for some variation of "Why Asians have slanted eyes" or "Asians, tilted eyes". UGH.

First, lest someone land on this post using those very search terms, Asians do not have slanted eyes. And no, people should not get surgery to "correct" this "problem", either.

A less insulting way to say this is that we have epicanthic folds. Or maybe that we are mongoloid. Is the latter pejorative? I don't know, though I far prefer it to being told I have slanted eyes or that I have slits. I know cartoons make Asians look like they have slits that are slanted, and I've seen "Asian" dolls that don't exactly portray us in the most flattering light, but people, these are caricatures. I don't know if there is an English equivalent, but in Japanese, there is actually a term to describe our eyes: 一重。(Literally, "one layer". Does this word exist in Chinese?) Unfortunately, the J-E dictionary I have isn't too helpful. They suggest "single-edged eyelid" or "smooth eyelid" as a translation. Meh.

I have to admit that ever since moving out here from NJ, I hear far less of this nonsense, and less people I meet are inherently or overtly racist, whatever-ist, so I'm not taken aback as much when I hear ridiculous stereotypes about Asians or gays or any other group. I've also become better at tuning out ridiculous comments and not taking things personally. Yet, I guess one can't entirely shake off one's past, because stuff like this still bugs me somewhat. (Ok, more than somewhat, b/c I'm blogging about it.)

Perhaps because there is a whole lucrative industry in Japan that makes money off of such distorted notions of beauty where one can get their eyelids "corrected" via surgery or inserts or other silly ridiculous things. "Look like a Caucasian"; "Look more beautiful" these ads tout. I have no idea how many people do this, but there are ads for stuff like this and whitening skin all over fashion magazines, and if people weren't conditioned to think that Asian eyes were defective or ugly, such a uselessly self-esteem-denigrating industry wouldn't exist.

It also bugs me when my Asian friends say things that indicate that they've internalized this notion of Western beauty as the "ideal". If you ever look at Japanese comics, most of the characters are drawn with more Caucasian-looking features.

Part of the thing that bothers me is that I think people sometimes have no idea how offensive they are being when they say certain things. Some of it is not explicitly whatever-ist. (I'm not sure if "racist" is the right "ist".) For example, when my friend tells me that Asians are exotic-looking, or that she has a little bit of slanted eyes b/c Genghis Khan raped her ancestors (a topic on which I've written a long diatribe about long long ago, so I won't bore people here w/ my vituperative rants), I think she actually believes this and that she's not trying to be mean or offensive, b/c she is otherwise very sensitive. In fact, when I got upset over this once, her reaction was that "slanted" is not a negative term.

True, except that we almost always use this word in a pejorative or negative context, e.g. "slanted views". Plus I grew up around people who used to associate slanted eyes with ugliness. So maybe I'm hypersensitive, but as far as I'm concerned, slanted has negative connotations.

Much as I'd like to think that my childhood experiences are a thing of the past, people are still landing on my blog via search queries like "how to fix slanted eyes" or "why do Asians have slanted eyes".

Sometimes, these inherently ___-ist remarks are less overt, but still equally annoying. On the east coast, two questions I used to get a lot were 1. Do you have an American name? and 2. Are you ever planning on going back to your country? The people asking these questions are usually very nice people and I imagine wouldn't nec. think of these questions as offensive. In fact, I didn't really think anything of these questions until I moved out here and realized that no one asks you such things.

I can be more forgiving about 1. because Chinese people tend to have American names (Whereas Japanese people and most Koreans tend not to pander to people who can't bother to learn pronounce our names. Is it because we are we more vain?). I always found this practice of assigning oneself a more "American-sounding" name rather odd, but to digress a little bit, I think this might be a cultural thing related to how countries teach English. For example, in China, from what I've heard, students are (sometimes? often?) given American names as part of their English-learning experience. When I took Chinese, I was given a Chinese name. But in Japan, people just use their given names in English classes. Maybe it's a bit of a stretch to suggest that this might be one reason Chinese people are more likely to assign random English names to themselves than the Japanese. But really, how hard is it to pronounce Dongxiao? (Dong-shao) Or Xiaohong? (Shao-hong) I suppose some people give themselves English names to make things easier for poor addled white people who can't pronounce such complicated names, but the more people make a practice of doing this, the more people expect that all people with weird names like Anzu or Apricot or Patita have a more quotidian alternative name like Jane or John.

As for 2., 2. used to annoy me when I lived on the east coast and I wasn't as snarky and secure as I am now, but now, I've become jaded enough that I find this question more amusing than annoying. Actually, I haven't been asked this since I've moved out here (though back east, strangers used to ask me this within 10 minutes of introductory idle chatter.), so I don't know how I'd answer that question, were I ever to be asked this, other than my standard "excuse you?" or lately, 甚麼? (said with attitude, like a 北京er) seems to roll off my tongue quicker than anything in English.

I'm not trying to imply that everyone from the east coast is like this. I have many good friends in NY, NJ, DC, Boston, etc., none of whom are _____-ist. But I did encounter this sort of thing far more on the east coast than over here and I'm still reminded of people's biases when I occasionally go visit my home town.

Conversely, it's not necessarily the case that everyone here is more "openminded". Actually most of the people I meet here are transplants originally from the east coast or other areas/nations. Heck, I meet more non-Californians here than "native" Californians. Also, the various ______-isms simply manifest themselves in different ways, so it's not entirely absent here. But generally, people I run in to here have lived in different areas (different countries even), have been exposed to more different cultures, and the fact that they choose to uproot from their familiar surroundings and move out here from wherever already indicates to me a more open mind. (I'm biased, of course, because I did this once upon a time.)

How did I start with a rant about slanted eyes and end up with a comparison between east coast people and Californians? Eh, I don't know, except that I still associate that kind of attitude with my home town, and by association, broadly, The East Coast. Incidentally, the slanted eyes queries all originated from the east coast--Massachusetts, Virginia, New York, New Haven (plus two queries from the Philippines and Bangalore, where I guess people believe that Asians have slanted eyes. . ..).

Prepping to become a despotic ruler

Ok, S, Yv and Sage Broccoli know about my aspirations to become a despotic ruler. I really need to stop blogging and buckle down and get on with the first part of my five-part plan in order to achieve this hefty goal. (f(x) =1/y, where x=number of blog posts, and y=how much stuff I'm supposed to be doing instead of blogging or trolling around on FB.)

However, yesterday, I spoke with an expert in this field, and he was so positive, that I'm newly inspired and exited again about this for a change and need to document this.

Truth be told, I've been a tad frustrated, b/c the bar is so damn "high" (Ok, to call getting an 800 on the math GRE a "high bar" is a joke for some, I know, but my brain has really atrophied that much. Ten years ago, this would've been the least of my problems), the hoops are so so many, the timeline to attain this ultimate goal is just daunting, and if I'm serious about this, I need to actually rearrange my work schedule and reduce hours so I can drive all the way down to SJState during the middle of the workday and take a few "remedial" courses in despotic regime theory, because my local community college doesn't offer upper level courses in despotic regimes, and I just don't feel like paying $6,000-$7,000 per class to take it at my own university.

Plus my dear friend S thinks that I'm "wasting my life for the next few years" and that I should instead be focusing my energies on finding a girlfriend or husband, because in spite of women's lib and feminism, etc., I guess our ultimate goal in life and joie de vivre is still to find someone you love, marry and perpetuate the gene pool. Humph. If only things were that easy. Not that I don't want to do this or obsess about this from time to time, but I don't necessarily want to plan my life around this either. If it happens it happens, and if it doesn't, well, that's that. But being told things like this makes one reevaluate how much one wants to be a megalomaniac and wonder whether I'm cut out for this vibrant living thing that Yv and Sage Broccoli and I have discussed. It's a lovely concept--to be vibrantly alive rather than merely comfortable and complacent--but just what exactly this entails still eludes me.

My advisor was also much more sanguine about job prospects and opportunities in the field, which was heartening, even if I'm still not sure if both my heart and mind are committed to this idea. But for the time being, I'm going to take a plunge and see.

So next week begins the chaos, the ensuing business (that's busy-ness, not business), and I might change my mind about this and get frustrated again when I find out once again that I don't get stuff like uppersemicontinuous this and that and I've learned that I've forgotten what one does with eigenvectors. Gosh, I'm getting apprehensive just thinking about this. . ..

But yesterday, I was in high spirits about this, so I'm writing this mostly as a reminder to myself for those days where I'm back to dithering about. My advisor gave me some helpful tips about programs to look into, and suggested courses of study that would give me the most options for becoming the leader of a despotic regime. He thinks that since despotic rulers don't make money like lawyers and doctors, no one should really have to pay to study to become one, which is good news. (My secondary goal in life is to keep going to schools without paying for them.) He also thought that given my background, I shouldn't be scared away by the math. (Despotic rulers are very calculating, so it turns out they need a fair amount of math. Surprising, eh?) And much as I would love to go to a top tier school, realistically speaking, I think I need to look at the mid-tier ones. So instead of the usual suspects (yes, everyone aspires to get into MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc.), he gave me programs that were "pretty good"--still in the top 15, but below the top 5. And if I don't get that elusive 800, I can alway go lower, too.

So I guess I should go study while I'm in high spirits and am sufficiently motivated.

Swoon-worthy things

Ok, there are two things that make me theoretically* swoon. (*theoretically, because I don't actually swoon. I'm more of a gusher, but swooning sounds so much more. . .Elizabethan and grown up and proper. As an aside, swoon should always be italicized, because it just looks more unstable and swoon-like that way.)

One is my Congan drum instructor, who is unfortunately gay, but has a beautiful tenor voice, plays piano beautifully, is very knowledgeable about music, speaks multiple languages, is well-read, writes beautifully, is funny and witty as hell, is both interested and interesting, and is also the nicest, humblest, most unassuming person I've ever met. (I'm sure there is a less-awkward way to write that, but I'm swooning, so please cut me some slack.)

The other is the Takacs Quartet playing Intimate Letters. The first is not a productive swooning endeavor, but thanks to my dear friend Sofiya who has direct access to this quartet's members (she's very powerful like that), my swooning sentiments won't be completely for naught. Although these quartet members have no idea who I am, she is going to tell them that I thought their Janacek was swoon-worthy, because she thinks they will appreciate that.

Isn't it cool that a quartet of that stature that gets so much acclaim and attention from the bigwigs can still appreciate comments about their swoon-worthiness from a random un-bigwig audience member?

My 21 (actually six) demands

Not to abuse my ghettoizing power as a blogger, but while I have the fleeting attention of a certain critic, I wonder if it would be out of bounds for me to present to him my Wishlist for the SF Chron. He can ignore me if he wishes, but I can't not try. :) I've made these requests before, but here is the reader's digest version (I don't want to push my luck that far):

1. I would like to find the music reviews in under 5 clicks from the sfgate homepage. (Last time, it took 12 clicks to find the review I was looking for, because I couldn't spell "Rheingold" properly and I didn't know whether an opera review would fit under "performance", "music and nightlife" or "art".)
2. If I click on the author of a music review, I want to find a page of more reviews by him, instead of his email address (besides which, why would you want to give your readers such easy access to the writers?). You already list their email addresses, replete with a helpful hyperlink, at the bottom, so linking the author attribution at the top of the article to an email address is redundant.
3. Instead of classical music reviews being hidden under "entertainment", I'd like a separate tab--perhaps "arts" or "fine arts"? (Classical music would be even better, but I understand it's out of vogue to give classical music its own heading.)
4. All of those photos of performances you put up to pander to some reader who wants visual stimulation to entice them? Well, I'm a Tufte disciple, so I'm not enticed. More graphics means less content and more scrolling for me. A pretty picture is not going to make me want to read a review more. Thus, off with its head.
5. In lieu of all of the flashy graphics, I'd prefer it if you list the author of the article, since there is usually only one reason I'm ever on the Chron website.
6. When I go to the "Performances" section, currently, the reviews are on the right, with opera way at the bottom, below theatre and dance. If I click on the "more" link, instead of taking me to this empty search page, resulting in more clicks, I would like it to lead to more opera reviews. (This is usually why one clicks on a "more" link--because we want to see more reviews or articles by someone; not because we want to be led to a search page.)

That is all.
Now, back to my usual program. . .

Quote of the day

Said by my choral director, during my voice check: "You shouldn't feel like a slacker. It's not like you sit at home and smoke pot for 5 hours a day."

Hmm. If only he knew. . . On second thought, I don't want him to know anything.

A new way of reviewing new music

Yikes. I don't know anything about this piece or much about Tan Dun to legitimately critique this review by Mr. Joshua Kosman, but it is pretty scathing. He does not mince his words. At all.

He seemed to find the first half pleasant enough. But not so the second half:

Thereafter, though, things soon bogged down. Kenneth Frazelle's Piano Trio, commissioned for the occasion, turned out to be a long and rather shapeless recycling of ideas from Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Ravel. Frazelle's work at least bore the marks of modesty and honesty.

And then,

For truly overweening emptiness, there was Tan Dun's "Elegy: Snow in June," a pointless 25-minute jumble of sounds for cello and four percussionists.

Each of the percussionists . . . had what seemed like several dozen instruments at his disposal - none of which was played for more than five seconds at a time - and cellist Andrés Díaz sat in the middle offering driblets of melody and squeaky interjections. The goal seemed to be to use the sheer profusion of incident to distract listeners from the lack of musical ideas.

I won't critique the writing, since someone elsewhere seems to have taken that up as their niche.

I've read enough reviews by Kosman to know that for the most part, he is a fair reviewer. He knows his stuff. He seems open-minded. Sometimes I feel like he gets carried away with his over-utilization of metaphors, but that's a minor quibble.

Still, I wonder about reviews like this. It's not that I expect reviewers to always like what they listen to. Nor do I think that it is the reviewer's job to help or support artists or performing groups (though I'm sure rave reviews don't hurt). And I certainly don't expect reviewers to gloss over something that is truly bad.

But can music be this bad? Here is a recording of it. (The link doesn't seem to work too well on my computer.)
According to info I found online, Tan Dun's piece is supposed to be an elegy for victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. Kosman may not have liked it, but such an undertaking sounds very personal and significant to me. It certainly doesn't sound "empty" or "pointless".

I'm not trying to undermine a reviewer's expertise or his job, but part of me wonders whether a review that is this acerbic serves any meaningful purpose. If I go to a performance of this work, even though usually I try not to take reviews at face-value, I or anyone who has read this review will now go into the performance with a bias.

Could he have just said something to the effect of, "this wasn't my cup of tea" or "the concept was nice, but it failed in the execution" instead of calling it overweening? What about the piece was so vacuous and pompous? Were the themes not developed enough? Was it just so "out there" it didn't work? Too gimmicky? Too "Eastern" sounding?

I wish that given how critical he is, there was more room for elaboration. While I grant that reviewers have the right to write scathing criticisms and have a right to their opinions, negative or otherwise, I do feel that a) because experiencing music is somewhat subjective (True, no good musician would dispute the greatness of Beethoven, Bartok, etc., but most music runs the gamut in terms of quality); b) new music already has enough "barriers to entry" for many of his potentially concertgoing readers to "get" than say, Bach or Brahms; and c) unlike a well-known piece by any of these aforementioned "B" composers, my guess is that many readers may not be familiar with Tan Dun's piece; that when one writes a review about pieces that he feels this strongly about, more details are in order.

Such an explanation would be much more useful to readers (and not to mention, to Tan Dun, if he reads this review) than say, "This work is feces and serves no purpose."

Not that Kosman's job is to champion new music, but his review also doesn't help quell the fears of new music-phobes who might be further dissuaded from attending future concerts or taking risks with this genre.

I admit to being this new music-phobe at times. I've definitely become more interested in contemporary music over the last few years, particularly since joining an ensemble whose mission is to promote such works. But this "interest" extends mostly to "brand name" composers who are hardly "new" anymore. I am also open to new things if the price is right, but I confess that when I did see this last program for the Music @ Menlo series, at the price point they were offering this new music concert, I wasn't willing to "risk" it, given that the only name I recognized was Tan Dun's.

I know that is closed-minded of me, but after reading Kosman's review, I'm not left with much incentive to open it up much.

Witnessing the process of making music

Last night, my friends let me sit in on one of their rehearsals of Mendelssohn's Piano Trio in D minor. Wow. Except one former professional musician, none of them are professionals, and all haven't really played in years, but they sounded great together. I couldn't just pick up my violin and play like that. The pianist was just something else. Prior to last night, I had never heard her play, but had strong suspicions that she was pretty good, b/c she has a grand piano. Her part is at least 10.3 times as hard as the other two parts. She was amazing.

I know that listening to amateur musicians rehearse and work through passages doesn't excite most of my musician friends, professional, elitist, or otherwise, but what a treat to be able to hear the process of music being created. So often, what we hear is the final product, which, as a (sortof) performer, I know is also itself a work in progress. It evolves, and even if you play/sing the same thing three times, each performance is slightly different. Still, what you present is theoretically a polished final product. Never perfect (well, at least speaking for myself), and can always improve, if you had more time, but a final product all the same. You rarely get to hear a work-in-progress, in which the performers deliberate over this and that dynamic, tempo, and other minutiae. True, I get a sufficient dose of this in my own rehearsals, but it's quite different when you're an outside observer, because you get to listen with an undistracted ear, and you're not immersed in the process.

I love live concerts put on by professional musicians in venues with perfectly engineered acoustics, and 90 percent of my live listening experience is of this sort, but sometimes I just prefer music as I heard it last night. Impromptu. Mid-rehearsal, before everything is 100 percent polished. Music as it undergoes the stages of transformation. Plus the music somehow sounds more significant, because it is being played by people you know really well. It's Mendelssohn but mediated through a familiar filter. I almost felt like I was peering into their soul somewhat, since I wasn't supposed to be there, and you don't take that sort of thing lightly.

The best part is that this all happened within a stone's throw from my apartment. Isn't it nice to have such talented friends so close by so I can get my Mendelssohn fix?