See that lack of mountains? Those sprawling farmlands? The snow piled 3-4 feet deep? That is JAPAN, man! Only not, because Hokkaido is hardly anything like the mainland, except for that people with black hair and brown eyes who speak Japanese live there. And a healthy smattering of foreigners, too.
Foreigners who don't get stared or marveled at as much, it seemed to me. What I really liked about Sapporo was that people would leave me to my own business, but were very helpful when I needed directions or whatevs. Also the grid system. Oh. My. Jeebus. Grid systems are BEAUTIFUL, and cities built on grids are made of win. Sapporo is a Japanese city where you absolutelycannot get lost, it is un-possible. And it has great shopping, and great eating, and cheese, a-a-and BAGELS. BAGELS WITH CREAM CHEESE I seriously almost started crying right there in the middle of the store, I have been having the worst goddamn cravings for bagels and cream cheese for, what, probably a year now?
Best moment of Christmas day, in fact, for me, was sitting on an express train out to Asahikawa with my travel buddy, looking out the window at what honestly could have been any flat stretch of Wisconsin, eating my earl-grey flavored bagel with plain honest cream cheese slathered all over it. A close second was finally making it to a hot spring bath after getting hella lost, but by that time my Christmas Present From Japan, a.k.a. raging cold / very probably swine flu, was in full swing and I was feverish and cranky. This is the podunk mountain village we ended up in at one point, and grumbly as I was I couldn't help but admire the irony: ...Okay this is one of those things that is only really funny to people who know Japanese. Basically, we are at this point in central Hokkaido where it is cold as the ninth circle of hell, and stumble across this place whose name literally means "to know coldness" and on top of that sounds pretty darn close to what my students exclaim in the open-air hallways of our school at this time of year: "Wah! Samu'-!" ( "cold" is supposed to be "samui," but Kansai people love to drop syllables) I guarantee the Japanese teachers will find it hilarious. Moving on, Touhoku. Really, really effing pretty c: The snow followed me all the way back to Nagoya, for pete's sake. Just look at this magic right here (this is in Nagano Prefecture, just south of Matsumoto):
After another 10 minutes or so, the snow got so thick you couldn't see 50 feet out, and the mountains just sort of disappeared. And then reappeared, even bigger than before. Japanese Alps: way impressive, you guys.
I connected up with two of the three slated hosts for my Great Meander back southwards. First night, my Japanese host dude took me out for a local (Akita) variety of nabe, in which the special ingredient was kiritanpo, mooshed-up rice cylinders that are hollow and closed at one end and sorta diagonally sliced at the other. The rice still retains its ricey-ness, so it's not at all like mochi, and it does an excellent job of soaking up the tasty nabe broth :d
Second night, I was crashing the couch (well, futon) of a fellow JET. He's been around the world a bit, did Peace Corps in South Africa, and was eminently gracious in sharing his stash of American cold medication with me, as well as some tea. We went out for Italian food in Sendai and talked for hours without really noticing the time go by and it was generally a very chill and groovy stay. I really wished I'd had more time to spend in that city. As it was I probably could have just stayed a second day & night and not bothered with Matsumoto / Nagano, but then I guess I wouldn't have had that lovely picture to show you above.
My would-be hostess down thataways never connected up with me, so around 11:30 I wandered into a business hotel that was about as overpriced as anything you could expect to find near a busy station - 5,500 and change for one person for a night. Actually most of the other hotels were charging more, but that still doesn't mean it's reasonable. As it happened, I'd managed to sneak in half an hour past the stated closing time, but before the manager guy had left and set the key-coded lock on the main door. So when he waddled out from a back room I asked if he had any free space, not really expecting anything. Must've had a soft spot for foreign girls down on luck, though, 'cause he offered to let me have a room for the 4,000 yen I claimed was everything I had on me (this was a half-truth: I DID have 4,000 yen in my pocket. And another 10,000 in my wallet, which was in my bag.)
Got back into Nagoya on New Year's Eve, and spent the night out with friends. Then I spent most of Jan. 1 sleeping off the effects of New Year's Eve / travel weariness. Still got a sniffle and a cough lingering, but otherwise I feel mostly peachy-keen.
I'll leave off with a view from the top floor of the Chocolate Factory in Sapporo city, where they have a sweets cafe overlooking Shiroi Koibito Park (Snowman Park). That was a very delicious Christmas Eve indeed :3
By which I mean, please to enjoying my arts exhibition pictures very much yes! ~/o/
First off, lemme just say that all the other exhibitors at the Nagoya Foreign Artists Exhibition are amazazing artists and superfantastic peoples. There is a core circle of folks who've been showing their stuff there since the first one 24 years ago - I heard a couple veterans marveling at the fact that this was the first year they had a few participants who were younger than the event itself (that would include me <.< but only by a few months!)
On opening day (Tuesday) it was a bit slow in the morning, but a big rush hit around lunchtime and a few of my friends showed up in the afternoon (it was a public holiday, so everyone was off work) Here are a couple Japanese ladies enjoying the artstuffs. Check out that wicked pencil portrait of Billie Joe Armstrong! And the pretty birds as well c: And the dood in back there is a German photo-journalist living in Nagoya who just started a new English-language magazine with his friend. How awesome is this show?! The answer is purty awsum, guys. And of course, here is my stoof. A bunch of people had name-cards next to their artist profile, so I decided even though I don't have a website or anything yet I may as well make my own. Y'know, for poops 'n' giggles. There were 14 left when I departed on Tuesday night, so we'll see how many are remaining on Sunday. And finally, proof that I was indeed there. A lovely volunteer coordinator by the name of Jan kindly took some pictures for me, as well as chattin' with me during the lulls and gently funneling people past my panel (n___n)
Unexpectedly had a four-day-weekend thanks to Mother Nature blessing me with an overabundance of springtime germs. I felt near death on Wednesday night, but I felt mostly human again by Saturday so I spent the weekend-weekend shopping & nerding out with a friend. I gave Japan my money, and it not only gave me fantabulous finds at its hippie shops, but my new favorite designer name in the whole wide world (this includes tokidoki, because yeah my new favorite's prices are still ridiculous, but not quite that ridiculous): drug store's. "It is a symbol of happiness beloved by girls," according to a lot of their overpriced t-shirts. Their mascots are little pigs, and they appear in every iteration imaginable, including but not limited to: samurai pig, noodle-shop pig, viking pig, Rastafarian-inexplicably-riding-a-Hindu-elephant pig, Harlem Globetrotters pigs, The Beatles' Abbey Road album cover pigs, and these little doods on the left here. HELLS YES that is Indiana Jones pig and Sean Connery pig. I got a surprisingly-not-overpriced backpack that is most definitely a direct play on LeSportsac's tokidoki handbag aesthetic but with viking pigs and "Helmetons" written on the button-logo instead of "LeSportsac." It is made of awesome and win ♥
In the next 3 days I wanna get some of the dust out of my apartment and take a crack at revamping my first-year students' classes so that they can actually get something out of them this year besides "I'mu fine sank you." Then I'm going to Korea.
What follows are some thoughts on "Nightmare Revisited," which I bought at Tower Records in Suzuka this weekend. All those in favor of NOT sitting through my musings about The Nightmare Before Christmas, contemporary bands, and two successive generations of movie-goers, stop reading nnnnnnnnnnnnnnn... ...ow.
Okay, I wrote the bulk of this while it was still very fresh in my mind, so forgive me if the transitions aren't obvious because my brain does that lateral-thinking thing an awful lot and I don't notice it because, well, it's my brain. To get right to the point (that's a lie), I don't at all care for any of the songs that have anything to do with Jack (that's the truth). Yes, that very much includes The Polyphonic Spree's version of "Town Meeting Song." They, like the rest of the bands that were inexplicably chosen for Jack-related songs, just end up sounding like parodies of themselves, and not in the good kinda way. About the only performer of which I am unqualified to make that assertion is Sparklehorse (haven't heard any of his [their?] other songs), but judging by the rest of the indie-pop outfits on this album I feel I can make an educated reach and include him (them?) too.
Something I should make clear: I am not simply singling out bands like All-American Rejects and Plain White T's because they happen to fall within more or less the same flavor of music. DeVotchKa did an amazing job on the overture, and sonically he is worlds away from Marilyn Manson, who did wonderful things with "This Is Halloween." The reason bands like Manson and DeVotchKa and Stars work for this collection is because they can stay true to their own sound - and, of course, knowingly spoof themselves; I mean, Marilyn Manson, THEE Marilyn Manson, singing in wee-tiny-witchy voices and going "whee!"??? I laughed pretty hard. The man is completely self-aware, acting as his own caricature here, and has a ton of fun with it - while also remaining true to the stories and emotions embedded in these songs.
By contrast, Plain White T's doing "Poor Jack" just sounds like Plain White T's doing their best Danny Elfman impression. And admittedly it's pretty spot-on. But if you're merely going to copy the original song exactly, how is it "revisiting" that song? What elements of your band, besides the name, are you adding in?
Flyleaf goes to the opposite extreme and does Flyleaf-sings-a-song-called-What's-This. Not Flyleaf reinterprets "What's This" from The Nightmare Before Christmas. I simply cannot integrate those two songs, because they are separate animals. When I listen to those vocals, to that instrumentation, I don't hear wonder and delight at making new discoveries in life, at breaking out of your own little world and taking joy in the diversity of experience.
I hear all the teenagers and twenty-somethings who did not see this movie as eight-year-olds. They saw it in their teens and twenties, because it has Halloweeny stuff in it, and because they mistakenly felt it validated their self-absorbed morbidity. They saw this film when they were too old to naively accept the fantastical aspects of death and monsters as commonplace within this particular fictional world - they had already been taught that those things are in fact taboo no matter what the context. So they did not understand that Jack's return to Halloween Town as the Pumpkin King was not, in fact, a triumph of their subculture - for Jack, being spooky is the norm, a regular 9-5 job, and thus for him it is a return to traditional values, albeit with an enriched worldview and renewed inspiration thanks to his having briefly experienced a different way of life. Let's not forget with near-disastrous results. If anything The Nightmare Before Christmas is a pretty straight-up cautionary tale about throwing yourself into alternative lifestyles or attempting to emulate different cultural practices without first gaining some actual knowledge and understanding of them, god forbid.
Granted, I acknowledge that the songs, in a way, simply embody a different generation's experience of the story, one that is not wrong in any meaningful sense. It is what it is. Jack can be a lonely guy with a stagnated career having a quarter-life crisis, and he can also be a whiny emo kid. I guess I just can't help but bemoan the connections that later and broodier audiences were missing out on due to their inability to see past their mascara and pink hair extensions. And also Flyleaf-chick's voice gets REALLY irritating after just a minute and a half. (Apologies to Jenni, and nothing against mascara or pink hair extensions - they are really quite awesome when given into the right hands, i.e. not-most-15-year-olds).
I'm on the fence with Amy Lee. I have mad respect for her vocal talents, and she captures Sally's voice perfectly, but...yeah, but. Fiona Apple. Her voice, and her music, gives Sally the little spark of moxie that we always knew was there, but gets drowned in the fatalism of "Sally's Song." I can listen to Fiona Apple's rendition and not feel at all guilty over it. In fact I'm going to go dig that up right now.
P.S. -- Dear Notre Dame Class of 2009: I hope your more conservative elements are at least mature enough to quitchyer bitchin' about having PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA as your commencement speaker. To those wet blankets who keep fueling what I imagine is by now a raging Viewpoint wank-fest: freaking loosen up and enjoy the most awesomest commencement in the history of ever. Oh, and have fun with your subsequent Bush-begotten lack of employment. Neener neener. Love, Nikki.
WHUT IT'S FRIDAY THE 13TH AGAIN??!? Wow, bonus round this year.
Today is actually a lot better than last Friday. Despite the fact that it is raining again, this time I have my new Tokidoki rainboots to keep my feet both dry and superfantastic. (Don't worry, I got them on Amazon for substantially cheaper than their October 2008 retail price. I think I can count on one hand the amount of times I've actually paid full-price for designer stuff...and I'm pretty sure that number is zero. I like having nice things, but I also like having more money left over when I get said nice things.)
AND I got chocolate and cookies for "White Day," an even sillier holiday than Valemtard's. The sole purpose of it is for Japanese guys to repay their chocolate-debt to the Japanese gals upon whose frail shoulders rest all of V-Day's gift-giving obligations in this country. But enough of my snark - free chocolate :D
Also, tomorrow I embark on another magical mystical journey to O-town. There are many, many good reasons why it is Chi-town's sister city and why I love it so, and this is just one among them. They have taken the concept of "baseball curse" and made it bizarre and amusing in ways that only Japan can really.
Oh, and in other news, Kim Jong Il has decided not to try and resume the Korean War until AFTER I get back from Seoul. I appreciate his consideration in this matter, but I still wish he would stop being a crazy mofo. Same goes for South Korea's president, too, honestly. Maybe if he and his buddies weren't such stingy bastards with the economic aid Kimmy would at least play nicer.
...I'm pretty sure the dood next to me just ate an entire bag of grape-jelly-filled rolls. For his lunch. Wow, Japan, you need an intervention for your bread problem.
Last weekend was pretty busy - Chieko, a part-time teacher who used to work at Shima & might be coming back next year (yey!) drove me all about Ise shopping for apartment things, and we visited Naiku, one of two grand shrines in the city dedicated to the highest Shinto god & goddess (Naiku is the goddess shrine). Monday was my epic smash-and-grab run to Nagoya, which left me pretty exhausted.
So I declared this weekend a write-off, and I feel pretty good about that. It's not that I haven't gotten anything done - AJ and I picked up stuff for our various Halloween classes at the 100-yen shop yesterday, and I found the last pieces to my costume at Jusco, the Target of Japan - but I've gotten stuff done at my own pace, and with a minimal amount of getting out of bed & leaving the apartment :b
Today I absolutely needed to do laundry; it's one of those two-weeks-and-then-some laundry days. So that was my work for today, it's been all PJ's & internets & books & idle crafts otherwise. Unfortunately the weather people lied and it still rained a little bit today, but not hard enough to actually get the balcony wet. It was a lazy kinda rain, the kind you're not even sure is there because you hear some leaves rustling, but it could just be the wind. Only there was no wind today. The world seems to be sleepy.
It FINALLY got chilly, too, which made me so happy I opened all my windows to welcome it ( > w < ) And I got to put on my brand new PANDA SLIPPERS ---> They are fuzzy little bear-cubes of happiness. I got them at this wonderful little local chain store called Party House, which is kinda like a K-Mart but about the size of a Wal-Greens. It packs an incredible amount of stuff into a small store, and it's all really cheap! As you can see, they have some pretty awesome finds, too, not just discounted crap. In fact those nifty-looking floor-cushions you see in the picture were also bought at Party House :3
Currently listening to: The Beatles ~ I Am The Walrus I wanna watch "Across the Universe" now . . . but I don't have it :c
This is what it looks like.
look at this magic right here (this is in Nagano Prefecture, just south of Matsumoto):
Then I spent most of Jan. 1 sleeping off the effects of New Year's Eve / travel weariness. Still got a sniffle and a cough lingering, but otherwise I feel mostly peachy-keen.
