Refraction

Soooooo I’ve kind of been listening to Hikaru Utada’s new album, Heart Station. I don’t like it anywhere near as much as ULTRA BLUE, but there are still a few repeat-worthy songs on this one. Among them:

• “HEART STATION”
  

  心の電波　届いてますか?
  罪びとたちのHeart Station
  神様だけが知っている
  I miss you

  This song reminds me a lot of some of the songs on ULTRA BLUE, but a tad more melancholy. I also like the punning (or possible punning, I haven’t really looked at the lyrics) on heart/hertz/station. That’s mostly just a language geek thing, though. 😀

• “Prisoner of Love”
  

  I’m gonna tell you the truth
  人知れず辛い道を選ぶ
  私を応援してくれる
  あなただけを友と呼ぶ

  This wouldn’t sound too out of place on Exodus. Actually, who am I kidding? This song is better than most of the songs on that disk, but I’m kind of at a loss to explain why I like it so much.

• “虹色バス” (Niji-iro Bus)
  

  愛する人へ　想いを寄せて
  Everybody feels the same
  Everybody feels the same
  虹色バスで　虹の向こうへ
  みんなを乗せて　青空PASSで

  Although it’s upbeat, the melancholy that permeates this whole album (except for “Boku wa Kuma”) seeps into this one too. I almost dismissed it as “too cute” on first listen, but there’s such a good beat! As the last track (next to the bonus track), it actually lifts my mood a bit. 🙂

I lately have fallen in love with the Japanese vocalist サガユウキ (sagayuuki). Unfortunately he’s one of these up-and-comers and so I haven’t been able to find much. I’m thinking pretty seriously about ordering his album, but to tide me over until then, I’ve been listening to the stuff on his MySpace page.

I hadn’t realized the extent to which artists use MySpace. (I hesitate to say “indie” because some, like サガユウキ, are actually signed to major labels.) So…. all those artists I always wanted to hear more from? MySpace’d.

So, I now recommend for you:

Josée Allard: Bilingual singer-songwriter. Her music’s fun and light (most of the time). On her page she’s only got the French stuff, I think, but they’re worth a listen even if you don’t understand the lyrics.

Bevlyn Khoo: A multilingual singer from Singapore. Some of her music reminds me a bit of Ariane Moffatt; it’s a very soothing, pleasant sound. In the mood for French? Mandarin? English? Bevlyn does all three.

Ellery: Mellow pop-folk sound here. Nothing groundbreaking, really, nor too challenging, but good easy listening.

So randomly today I started reading about the poet Rilke, and I stumbled across this poem:

“Woman in Love”

That is my window. Just now
I have so softly wakened.
I thought that I would float.
How far does my life reach,
and where does the night begin

I could think that everything
was still me all around;
transparent like a crystal’s
depths, darkened, mute.

I could keep even the stars
within me; so immense
my heart seems to me; so willingly
it let him go again.

whom I began perhaps to love, perhaps to hold.
Like something strange, undreamt-of,
my fate now gazes at me.

For what, then, am I stretched out
beneath this endlessness,
exuding fragrance like a meadow,
swayed this way and that,

calling out and frightened
that someone will hear the call,
and destined to disappear
inside some other life.

Translated by Edward Snow

Now, I’m aware that this is a translation, but it’s still the first time I’ve ever seen “undreamt”… organically, shall we say. Without really looking for it.

(It’s still a lovely poem, isn’t it? Rilke wrote French poems as well as German, so I’ll have to dig those up sometime and just enjoy them.)

(Yes–I am procrastinating. Yes–I will pay for this later. No–I probably shouldn’t be doing this. And no–this will probably not make any sense. At this point I am just SICK of “reflecting on my writing process” in French.)

I’ve been listening to mink’s Shalom album a lot lately. I like mink a lot, but for some reason I always feel extremely guilty when I listen to her music. I think it’s because I find some of it rather formulaic and almost Celine Dion-esque.

僕は、何をするだろう？何を見るだろう？
何を聞くだろう？何を語るだろう？

And then some of it just makes me think of the 80s, and not in a good way: think heavy synthesizer and sugar-coated bubblegum hooks. I’m thinking specifically of “Automatically.”

僕は、誰に会うだろう？誰に触れるだろう？
誰を愛すだろう？誰を許すだろう？

mink’s English is not bad, although it’s not as good as either LOVE’s or Rie fu’s. Her English lyrics, though, wow–some of them are quite beautiful. Take this excerpt from the English version of “Blessing of Love”: “How can I live without the hope that we/Might touch the edge of heaven’s light”

きっと、すべて愛おしくて、すべてきらきらして
でも寂しくて、そばに居て欲しくて

I picked up a mink single and a mink album from Book Off about a month ago. I’m not super-keen on the album, although I do love the single (which also has karaoke tracks for you aspiring divas. ;D)

世界で一番奇麗な場所: あなたの側で

Things I am annoyed with right now, in no particular order:

• A certain associate director at work. My supervisor is on vacation at the moment and so I was told yesterday to compile the work I’ve done over the last three weeks for a meeting tomorrow. I do so, send him the files, and then sit down to a meeting where we go over said data and come up with slides (!!) for this meeting. Meanwhile, I’m thinking, “WTF slides? I hope you’re presenting this.” I re-send him the slides for editing, he hacks and slashes them, and then sends me off with “So, you’re going to do this, right Catherine?” AGGGGGH.

  Let me emphatically state ONE THING: I DO NOT LIKE HAVING PRESENTATIONS ON SCIENTIFIC MATTERS SPRUNG ON ME. Especially scientific matters I don’t know an awful lot about. (I could rant about this, but then well we might step into confidentiality issues…)

  Suffice to say I had a bit of a nervous breakdown after that meeting (why does this sound so familiar?) and um, the same lady who found me in nervous breakdown state last time found me again this time. As my surrogate supervisor, she offered to present for me. “But Catherine, it just doesn’t feel right taking credit for work I didn’t do.” It was seriously all I could do at that point to stop myself from saying, “That’s funny, that never stopped [my supervisor on vacation] from presenting my data.”

  I really should not be taking this so hard. However, I have several issues with my whackload of slides, the foremost being that the director has NO BLOODY CLUE what I’m talking about. The work I’m presenting tomorrow is a month old. I need time to refresh my memory of things.

  I also have new, perhaps more pertinent data to discuss. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to process it because I’ve been working on these damn slides all day.

  I don’t like the way the director has instructed me to structure the presentation. As it stands, it really has absolutely no flow. Things jump from one thing to another without really being connected (and now you kind of see why I’ve hated the last eight months of work.)

• Myself, really, for breaking down and letting the idiot win.
• My supervisor on vacation, S—-, for several things: 1) calling this meeting (apparently it was his idea, or maybe I heard this wrong–after all, who calls a meeting while they’re on vacation?); 2) being on vacation and leaving me to flounder; 3) not telling me that this meeting was going to happen and that I was going to need to prepare for it; 4) leaving me to clean up a whackload of his stuff; 5) never having brought me to ANY of these meetings and therefore leaving me COMPLETELY IN THE DARK ABOUT WHAT TO EXPECT. S—-, sorry, you are seriously NOT COOL and that parting gift you gave me? Also not cool. Am I the only one who thinks that you should give gifts for your giftee and not really for yourself?
• The group at work, for PILING WORK ON ME in my last two weeks. HELLO PEOPLE! I AM GOING TO BE GONE IN LESS THAN TWO WEEKS! NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO START NEW EXPERIMENTS!
• Myself again, for taking work home with me. I work enough overtime as it is.
• My mother. I really need to move out. Unfortunately, I need money to do that.
• S—- at work, who seems to have absolutely nothing to do and therefore spends her time distracting other people. It’s not easy to tune her out when she sits next to you.
• G— at work, for–I don’t know. This one’s more complicated than the others, and I’m not really annoyed with him. In fact–

I am currently quite fond of this game, “Hikkoshiboroboro“. It’s a rather standard dodging game, but the creators have done a wonderful job injecting some human emotion in there that isn’t related to anger or fear: this, my friends, is a game about love.

Okay, so basic story, according to the Google translator:

Step beauty of the girl friend became to move to the Saitama new city center. Step beauty under the sweetheart above the friend as for the running man, step beauty was waived without conveying the thinking which is concealed in the chest. The lonesome face of the step beauty which was shown separation occasion, the thought [hi] coming out of that day. The word which you could not say. The running man who is regretful, if the air is attached, chasing step beauty, had produced to run the self recklessly on the one road of countryside!

Not that you really play a game like this for the story. (“Step beauty” is a literal translation of the girl’s name, I think: it could be read “Ayumi”. I don’t really understand the part about attaching air, although the kanji used there is 気, which is “emotion” or “mood”.)

The game itself isn’t particularly novel–although I kind of question a girl who doesn’t notice chests and television sets flying off the back of her truck–but there’s humour in there, and a wonderful piece of background music.

I had heard, once, long ago, that Nami Tamaki had performed a CORE OF SOUL song for her initial audition. I Googled this and found nothing, so I let it drop for a while.

This was, of course, before YouTube got as big as it is now.

Mesdames et messieurs, je vous présente:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRnn1zqAFCQ

Sarah, tell me that it’s okay for me to keep wincing during this thing. Tell me I’m not doing it just because I’m a horribly loyal COS fan (still). Tell me it’s not just because I don’t like Nami Tamaki very much! (Okay, so I know I can’t do better, but still…)

As you might be able to tell, I think the original is much, much better. I think part of it is the piano–some songs just aren’t piano-driven, and sound awful when transposed there. I think the unplugged version of “FULL MOON PRAYER” on One Day, One Love, One Life! is still guitar-driven. I think it’s guitar, anyway. It could be banjo, for all I know. Except I bought the CD, and have the liner notes. Okay, no, it is guitar. There’s a hint of piano in the background but it is a guitar song.

Actually, now that I think about it, the thing I’m most reminded of is Hikaru Utada’s cover of “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, another piano-accompanied cover. ACTUALLY, I think the opening chords are the same.

(Sarah, I’m starting to see your point about pop songs all having the same chords.)

Well, my research on artificial sweeteners has led to some people spouting very bad chemistry indeed. For my amusement, I present some questions from Splenda Exposed and my responses as a chemist 8D (that’s how I look with lab goggles, by the way).

Is chorine present in Splenda?
I have no idea what “chorine” is. I don’t even think it’s a word.

Ah, but chLorine? Well, there are chlorine atoms in the sucralose molecule.

Will the chorine in Splenda harm human health? Who says “yes” and who says “no”?
Again, what is this “chorine” business?

Does chlorine cause cancer?
Not according to some people. If chlorine caused cancer, wouldn’t swimming pools use ozone instead? And what about chlorinated drinking water, should we worry about that too?

Is the chlorine in Splenda natural or manmade?
What does this question even MEAN? If you find somebody who can create matter, please let me know.

Also, what difference does it make? If I make water from hydrogen and oxygen, is it any better or worse than water that I’ve distilled from a stream?

Does the chlorine in Splenda break down in the human body? (At least fifteen percent does—read on!)
I think this question wants to ask, “Does Splenda break down into ‘chlorocarbons’ in the human body?” Anyway, I have no answer for this–more research is needed on my part.

Is chorine a chlorocarbon?
(I still don’t know what they mean by “chorine.”) No. Chlorine is chlorine. (Duh.) There is no carbon in chlorine. There is carbon AND chlorine in chlorocarbons.

What is a “chlorocarbohydrate”? (Is there such a thing? Highly questionable.)
Why not? Chemists make up names for molecules all the time. Why does it matter what they’re called? Molecules don’t conform to, or draw their properties from, our names for them; names are after-the-fact pronouncements.

If we can have “chlorocarbons” or “chloroflurocarbons” (CFCs), why can’t we have the label “chlorocarbohydrate”?

Today marks one year to the day that CORE OF SOUL broke up.

I’m still working on that discography. The trip to Quebec last summer delayed my acquisition plans a bit, and then there was that whole surgery thing. Of their albums, I’m still missing Natural Beauty and RAINBOW; as far as their singles go, I still need “Make Me a Woman”, “Purple Sky”, and “AGEHA”. Then there’s the DVD, of course.

And when I get there

How did I manage to stumble across this group which enjoyed only a moderate success in their home country? An mp3 rotation, of course. “FULL MOON PRAYER” and another song—likely “Angel” or “Natural Beauty”— had been offered up for download. For whatever reason, I resisted listening to them for a while—possibly, I’d had other things to do, but when I finally did, I couldn’t help but think, Why did I wait so long?

Volume 上げて歌うよ

It’s hard, even for me, to understand why COS affected me the way they did. Their music would not have been extraordinary by any music critic’s standards. It was a safe, mainstream alternative pop-rock style. I happen to be a fan of that style of music, but there were a ton of other bands that had a similar kind of thing going: Do As Infinity, F.I.R., maybe even Garnet Crow.

夜の月光と共にあなたの窓に届け

None of those groups, though, had Fukiko Nakamura on lead vocals. Her voice encapsulates youth, energy, and joie de vivre more perfectly than any other singer I can think of. From what I’ve read, the girl has a real stage presence (and I believe it!) Even though I don’t understand the songs the first time through (or the second, or the third, for that matter), she sings with such intensity that I’m compelled to translate them.

過去の罪をお許し下さい

Those lyrics have nearly always drawn me in. I’ve often found that the lyrics of the song I’m translating echo sentiments of my life at the time, so that in effect COS songs could make up the soundtrack of my life. Yes, I probably need to listen to more music, but there you go.

私から声を取らないで命を持って行かないで

There’s hope for me yet, though. Fukiko is starting a solo career under the name “LOVE”, and she’s due to release a digital single soon (or has already released it; there seems to be disagreement on a forum about this, probably since none of us are fluent in Japanese)—there’s even a preview of it up on her official site.