Overthinking the apocalypse

Instructions unclear, produced ura sounds.

I was talking to someone about how frustrated I am with the lack of attention given to the Samurai Shodown OST, which was so influential to my development. It's lowkey is the reason I'm a shinobue player today; I've been longing to understand and play those strange, exciting, seemingly rhythmless flutes for longer than you can imagine, and I cannot being to describe how disappointing it was to go to a regular music school and be given a recorder and a metronome.

Because like, samsho wasn't just my first contact with traditional Japanese music, it was my first contact with any sort of musical tradition outside the hegemony of Western/postindustrial globalised music theory brain, at all.

To keep excusing myselves with constantly saying “sorry I'm bad at this”, “I'm bad at music” etc. is kinda noceboing oneself, isn't it. I'm self-taught; I'm my own teacher. Imagine a teacher who keeps telling the student “wow you suck, you have no talent for this.”

It's certainly more beneficial to think: This piece is beyond my ability for now, that is a thing that can be fixed; and then think further: What am I missing to play this piece, and how do I practice that? And then set out to do deliberate practice, the way one would chase the requirements to unlock a skill tree in a videogame.

No not the shakuhachi, the other Japanese bamboo flute. The shinobue. The easy one they give to children. It's already plenty hard for me =)

One flute I use every day, and two others I never use. Mistakes were made.

Min'yō: Folksongs, often working songs, shanties etc.

Koten-uta: A generic word for “old songs”. Often used for “city songs” (miyako-bushi) like Sakura Sakura, Edo-period koto compositions and the like.

Jiuta: Edo-period, urban ensembles of koto + shamisen + shakuhachi.

Warabe-uta: Children's folksongs.

Komori-uta: Lullabies, a surprisingly productive genre.

Tsugaru-jamisen: A distinctively fast shamisen genre from the Tsugaru peninsula, kinda power metal shredding on the shami.

The thing hidden in the sword.

Is it, like, samurai zen meditation or something?

The notes in the Japanese folksong Sakura, Sakura, namely E F A B C, form a rather sombre scale (1-4-2-1-4) that's about as iconic as the song itself; to the point where both the song and the scale are downright stereotypes. Play anything in these notes and it sounds “Japanese”. But what is the scale called?

It's not this one either.

Flower Diary: The lost diary of a young lady. Advanced magical theory mixes seamlessly with youthful ponderings.

Been thinking a lot about luddism lately, in part because the social media addiction synergises so competently with the mental fatigue I was left with after my last bout of covid. and I have been thinking about things like:

The other day I was reading Emily’s Inheritance, which deeply disappointed me because it's that bait-and-switch where a story that looks like fantasy ends up getting sci-fi rationalisations, and as a fantasy enjoyer that ruins it for me.

But in addition to that it's also straight, like not in any particularly invasive way, just by default. And thinking about that as I read, I understood why I obsess so much about that sweet sweet rep ever since stories with lesbians in it became a thing that I can access.

I was describing to someone the way that charming little European cafés are absolutely the ideal environment for me to write my thesis (as long as I leave cellphones and other devices home), and how I was getting a hell lot of text written, until I budgeted and realised the degree to which my family very much cannot afford me going every other day to charming little European cafés. And how silly I feel at my inability to replicate, at home or in public libraries or parks or anywhere else, the whatever-it-is that makes the café environment work so well for me.