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Exhibit poster here (huge file)

View of Fuji from the balcony (some zoom used). Select the picture for a full view.

Behold the glory that is Brussels!

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Episode one of NHK’s New Silk Road series covers the ancient civilization of the Takla Makan desert, in the center of the Eurasian landmass, currently in China. There is a mummified woman with European facial features, who is still beautiful even though she’s been dead for over 3,000 years (stunning because this is definitely not what you expect in a mummy).

Occasionally I experiment.

It can be interesting to change instrumentation and to a lesser extent structure to see what happens. So I took Bach, who wrote music that is highly structured, where instrumentation is flexible, and started changing things.

This is my performance of Goldberg Variation #1. This was originally written for klavier, but I split the range so that most of the lower notes are played by koto. For the higher notes, I created my own musical instrument by mixing samples of flute, shakuhachi and pan chiff. And I added a triangle on the upper end. So you’ll hear a “ting!” that accents the high notes. I recorded it without much preparation, and noticed later that I was rushing the tempo. Please ignore this. I’m too lazy to fix it. Also, the sound is messed up. Sorry.

The result is recognizable as Bach, if a little sacharine for my taste. Not too different from a million other people who’ve taken Bach and redone the instrumentation.

Download my Bach for Koto from here.

However, I can take this idea further, with strange results.

Take an ordinary Bach prelude and add a violin chorus, with bells. To makes this a bit more interesting, add harmony: the violins play in perfect fourths. In other words, if I play C, the violins play C and F: perfect fourths. In the original score of this prelude, there are never more than two notes being played simultaneously. But what previously would have been, for example, G and E-flat played together, becomes G-C-E-flat-A-flat in ascending order, with bells playing the G and E-flat quietly.

This introduces a new level of dissonance to the piece without significantly changing the structure (I could argue that I’m just increasing the sound level of a harmonic that already is there in the violins), and the bells just add a kind of percussiveness. To me this sounds like Bartok.
Download Bach for violins.

So why limit yourself this way? We don’t need melody that much. I split the range, with the higher part of the range (roughly the right hand) being assigned to electric bass to maintain a bit of melody. The lower range had each note assigned to a different piece of the drum set.
So download this and hear what a change in arrangements can do to a baroque piece. Remember, I’m playing straight, just having assigned different instruments. No additions or changes.

By the way, the original prelude, for your reference, is contained in this midi file (Prelude #2).

We spent some time on the Noto peninsula recently. On the way up I stopped one night in Kanazawa, which is kind of like a pleasant version of Kyoto, almost small enough to be walkable.

The station is being reconstructed, with the front entrance a stylized torii.

It used to be that there were no tall buildings in Kanazawa. Now, just outside the station is a monster hotel run by ANA, where I stayed last time. And since then, JAL has built a hotel about twice as tall, strategically located exactly to block the view for ANA guests (and of course I stayed at the monster JAL hotel).

I’ve visited Kanazawa countless times over the years. And on this visit I spent a lot of time thinking about all the changes from the first time I visited: a modern train station, English signs in the tourist areas, broader streets, tall buildings, children who don’t scream in terror and run from me, and I realized with some surprise that my first visit to Kanazawa was 18 years ago. So now I’ve become one of those pathetic old people who walk around muttering about How Things Used to Be.

Moving up the peninsula, I spent three hours on the Noto Tetsudou, a picturesque railway line with about 50 tunnels that moves slowly up the coast. It is being closed in March 2005 because it can’t seem to make a profit. Although the train was quite full, I was probably the only paying passenger: the other passengers were either old people or students, who ride at a significant discount. So there is no shortage of riders, but a large shortage of paying riders. Perhaps if the train company had tried eliminating discounts it might have stopped losing money. But it’s too late now. Besides, the new Noto airport has changed transportation patterns; tourists tend to fly in and take taxis to their destinations rather than figuring out the local train system.

After that ride, and a 20-minute taxi, we went past this local landmark and turned right, towards the sea.

Here are pictures of the onsen. Click the thumbnails to see large versions with my comments.

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On the Way to Language by Martin Heidegger contains a strange dialog on language between “a Japanese and an Inquirer.”

Early in the dialog, Heidegger and the inquirer discuss the difficulty of talking about aesthetics, since their cultural backgrounds differed:

Some time ago I called language, clumsily enough, the house of Being. If man by virtue of his language dwells within the claim and call of Being, then we Europeans presumably dwell in an entirely different house than Eastasian man.

He begins to speak of iki, which he defines as “sensuous radiance through whose lively delight there breaks the radiance of something suprasensuous.”

Now it is clear that Heidegger’s inquirer is Count Kuki Shûzô ( 九鬼周造), who studied under Heidegger for many years and published a seminal work titled The Structure of “Iki” (「いき」の構造) in 1930.

Note that iki is written phonologically in the Japanese title. It’s an Edo term, and in the literature on iki various kanji are used to represent nuances of what is clearly the same term (the most common usage is listed first): 粋、意気、趣向、当世、好風、好意、好漢、好雅、風雅、大通、通人、程、秀美、花美. More on this later.

Anyway, they go on (my notes in parentheses):

…the distinction (between sensuous and suprasensuous)…that pervades metaphysics…our (East Asian) thinking does know something similar…but even so, the distinction itself and what it distinguishes cannot be comprehended with Western metaphysical concepts. We say Iro, that is, color, and say Ku, that is, emptiness, the open, the sky. We say: without Iro, no Ku…seems to correspond exactly to what Western…doctrine says about art when it represents art aesthetically. The aistheton, what can be perceived by the senses, lets the noeton, the nonsensuous, shine through.

Indeed. What are they talking about? I believe they are referring to a piece of Buddhist scripture:

色不異空、空不異色

色即是空

In the Buddhist context, the passage says observed phenomena are transient (the reality of matter is an illusion), and matter is void.

Which, if you stretch it, could get from there to what Heidegger said in the above quote, maybe. But probably not.

Alleged differences between how this is perceived through the lense of Western aesthetics vs. Japanese thought, would certainly seem to be a shaky foundation to build further on. But he plows on, with unconvincing examples of aesthetic differences, and at this point I lose interest and start skipping pages at random. For example, he says the film Rashomon, although it is chock full of symbolism not easily seen by one not familiar with Japanese culture, is still an example of rampant Europeanization because “the Eastasian world, and the technical-aesthetic product of the film industry, are incompatible.” A bit condescending.

And then he talks about the emptiness of the Japanese Noh-stage as something unaccceptable to Europeans for some reason, apparently content to ignore similar European art forms, from ancient Greek drama through to Elizabethan drama.

I think it helps to understand the larger context.

As noted earlier, iki has been written phonologically, and also using various kanji, which suggests a variety of situations in which it can be used. It’s an aesthetic term that came into popularity in Edo (Tokyo) in the 18th century. Kuki lists three defining characteristics of iki: erotic appeal (媚態) with pride (張り) and sophisticated indifference ( 諦め).

Unlike specialized intellectual Japanese aesthetic concepts that have been imported into American popular culture in recent years, such as wabi and sabi, iki belonged to the ordinary townspeople of Edo.
Although Kuki tried to intellectualize it, it is not an intellectual aesthetic concept. It was used variously to mean impromptu, one who follows fashion, fighting spirit (気負い) , chivalrous, valiant, courageous, energetic, dapper, rakish, etc.
I repeat: it is not a high-brow term.

In fact, I get the impression that iki was tied to the spirit of Edo, much like “fuhgeddaboudit” is tied to the spirit of Brooklyn. So what does “fuhgeddaboudit” say as a statement of the spirit of the city and its inhabitants? One could, in the manner of Kuki, write a treatise about it and use the slippery definitions of the term to conclude that American aesthetics cannot be understood by non-Americans. But that would be silly.

In fact, although it should be obvious that there can’t be anything in English that captures exactly what iki means in all its variations, one can find plenty of examples that match Kuki’s descriptions: deep blue straight jeans without variations in decorative pattern can be iki, as can a girl with short hair wearing a T-shirt and pants: slender, natural makeup, simple hairstyle. One could easily find close western equivalents in the behavioral and structural aspects of iki as well, given the time and inclination to do so. Finally, the fact that Kuki had to write a book explaining this concept should be a giveaway that he is trying to graft his own ideas onto this concept.

In fact, I think the driving force behind Kuki’s ideas were more nostalgic than aesthetic. He thought he’d found the origin of a national code through which all cultural discourse and a program of Japanese authenticity could be controlled. From Kuki’s book: “The central meaning of iki has been utterly confirmed and understood only when we grasped its structure as a self-revelation of our national being.” This is a dead-end concept. It is much more useful to discuss the extent to which studying Japanese aesthetics contributes to Western aesthetics, rather than trying to come up with reasons why Japanese aesthetics cannot be studied.

Note: This is not supposed to be a scholarly discourse; don’t take it as such.

You can utilize existing Python libraries to convert encodings in (basically) one line of code. I have to do this quite often, and I can’t figure out where else to put this information.

Import encodings, and set up your directories, and the magic line is:

newEncodedFile = unicode(contents_of_old_file, 'iso8859-15').encode(new_encoding,'replace')

This replaces the iso8859-15 encoding with a new_encoding that I’ve defined earlier or taken from the encodings module (like cp1251 or something). Possible values for errors are ’strict’ which raises an exception, ‘replace’ (which I’ve used) that replaces unknown characters with a ?, and ‘ignore’ which ignores errors.

At a Kyoto restaurant in lower Manhattan, this was printed on the paper wrapping the chopsticks.

My noticing that this is in Haiku form made the meal all the more pleasurable,  and I wonder how

many other wonderful details there were to this meal that I missed.