let's strap on the happy helmet

I've been writing about a lot of weird, bummer stuff lately, mostly the angst caused by the bizarre habits of my co-tenants in the nasty little boarding house I live in.

So, let's lighten up a bit, eh?

Besides, how can life be a bummer when when a Totally Super Awesome Concert™ is imminent!


Also, I recently spent some time hanging around the UW campus Art Building with my Ohio guitar pal JT.


There's a small student cafe called "Parnassus" tucked away inside the building, and while using the restroom before getting a cappuccino, I discovered this building has some of the most fascinating and artistic bathroom graffiti I've ever seen.


Amazing cosmic knowledge comes to light...


On Monday, I went to Seattle Center House with the Tuning the Air performance team to check out the Theatre 4 space.


Ultimately, the team decided to pass on Theatre 4. The space itself is wonderful, but getting there—up a flight of stairs, up an elevator, down a hallway, and then through a set of fire doors and down yet another even narrower hallway past the building circuit breaker board—proved a bit too much. Parking sucked, too, and there really isn't much ambient foot traffic from which we might harvest new audience members. We would be putting on the show in the evening, and most of the people hanging around the Seattle Center House at the time of night are a bit sketchy.

All the same, I got some nice shots of the Space Needle and other areas of Seattle Center after getting off the 74 bus and wandering around for a while.


I don't know if these arches have an official name, but they looked pretty cool in the evening...


Last Saturday evening, my pals S and AR from the boarding house invited me to a Chinese New Year celebration on campus, sponsored by the Chinese Student Association.

Welcome to the Year of the Rat!

The show featured a wide range of performances, including a traditional Lion Dance (featuring the guys in a long lion costume, sort of like the long dragon costumes most Westerners are aware of), martial arts forms, some Hunan Opera, Chinese classical music, a guy from the Beijing Opera, a drum performance, traditional Mongolian dancers with bowls on their heads, and breakdancing.

Most of my cell phone photos came out blurry, but this one of the Chinese classical musicians is at least semi-OK...


They had some technical difficulties with the sound system, so some of the performers were hampered from struggling to hear themselves and the music. The Hunan Opera performance, in particular, went wrong in a big way; not only were they struggling to intonate, but the male lead kept slipping on the stage. (All the same, I must say we were entertained to the max, and the show went on, as it must...)

I got the impression that even a lot of Chinese find Hunan Opera sort of cheesy and irritating; AR later told me that even native Chinese can't understand the lyrics (he lived in China for a while and is studying at UW), and that regular performances feature a teleprompter for the audience so they can tell what's going on.

What struck me was Hunan Opera's weird combination of strange intonation and ultra-cheesed out Western pop drum beats. It's like they took elements of Western music with absolutely no sense of whether a Westerner would consider it to have any actual aesthetic value, and just threw it in with their own traditions. It had to be totally arbitrary; they could just as easily have chosen something cool, I guess.

This makes me wonder if legit World musicians look at Westerners incorporating tabla beats, sitar, African drumming, and so on into our pop music and think, "Hey, check it out! What crap!"

The intonation of the classical instruments was strange, but also kind of compelling. Most of what I've read indicates a lot of music from the Far East is just-intonated on a Pythagorean formula of stacked 5ths. I've been checking out the Pythagorean 3rd a bit lately, and I think I could get a bit of that energy from the tuning of these instruments.

This music seemed to use mainly pentatonic scales, and I had this weird sense that the music was somehow only a little sideways step from sounding like Celtic music or even Appalachian Bluegrass, especially when the woman playing the hammer dulcimer-like instrument played a solo spot. I kept thinking it would morph into an Irish hammer-dulcimer piece I once heard called "Planxty Fluharty." (A lot of such pieces are called "Planxty Something.")

Maybe all they needed to do was play the same pieces in equal temperament.

In something related, I've been listening to an album of Celtic guitar duos, and there's one piece that starts out in a traditional Breton Celtic tune and then ends with a Bluegrass fiddle melody from the 1920s. You can hear the unequivocal kinship between the two streams of music, but by the end of the track, the music has clearly leapt the Atlantic Ocean to the hollers of Tennessee, and I'm not quite sure what specific musical elements meld together to make that happen, but there it is. My ear knows.

Now. Aren't we all so much happier than before?