Travelog or Photoblog or Time-Travel (Part One)

Mix for 1/26/11 - Transient Transients' Transience

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This was taken en route to the main campus at Kansai Gaidai, a wonderfully circuitous alley full of oddly trimmed bushes, Shinto temples, and signs warning of vampiric sexual predators. Walking to class, I often found myself being stalked by a gaggle of these uniformed munchkins who would either chant a bizarre videogame-themed mantra or yell "tsukebe", which is sort of like "dirty whore". Callin' it like they see it, I guess.

Atop Kyoto-Eki (presumably the largest train station in Japan) sits a glass dome spotted with various sight-seeing devices proclaiming "360 Degree Panoramic View!". There was an old man who wanted to know if I had come to Kyoto specifically to see this view, being that it was a full san-byaku-roku-juu degrees. I told him "of course". It's easy to lie in foreign languages.

Reflected imagery is one of my favorite photographic themes, perhaps a continuation of my fascination with other forms of duplication, reiteration, and recurrence. Strangely at odds with my musical interests, obsessed with linearity, improvisation and asynchrony; a division in my left brain. Yoyogi-kouen was one of my favorite places to relax while in Tokyo, one of the few outposts of natural beauty scattered throughout the dense metropolis, but one often populated with family picnics, sax-playing hobos, and greasers engaged in a wild dance-off set to Joan Jett tunes.

Curses

Mix for 12/19/10 - Subtly Unsuitable / Suitably Unsubtle

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For the past few days, I've been trying to stave off an impending yuletide malaise; early to bed, early to rise, run a couple miles against a bitter wind. It's a terrible time of the year, though I'm thankful for the lack of snow as of yet (knock on wooden legs, if you got 'em). If it weren't for the promise of Yorkshire Pudding, I'd happily choose hibernation over humanity for the next few months.

Teaching put-put-putters to a halt as families abscond to their Swiss chalet, leaving me to review reams of unfinished Brand New Curriculum, doing my best to hunt down misguided semi-colons, consistently dumbfounded by the quantity of arcane fart jokes and sexual innuendo woven into the text. Apparently all the perverts and miscreants that neglected priesthood and positions with the TSA chose careers in the Educational Textbook industry.

Which indirectly brings me to the theme of today's mix! Imagine that. I recently picked up Authenticity, the latest album by The Foreign Exchange, upon fervent (impersonal) recommendation by Gavin Castleton. It's an excellent record, full of great melodies and those warm synth textures that I grow to appreciate more and more each day. But as it's quite explicitly a "break-up" album, I was struggling with how to fit it into any of the typical abstract thematic structures that I usually mold my mixes by. So I said fuck it, imaginary break-up mix it is.

Sad thing is, while I was working on it, one of my good friends had the unfortunate luck of having his girlfriend of 9 years break up with him. Ouch.

Music is just that powerful.