Paragraph -節- Live Stage! House of Rocks Yotsuya
8th July 2010: First night in Tokyo and we took a chance on a random live stage to see what's up. Joe bargained our way in at a small basement stage in Yotsuya (House of Rocks - Outbreak!) but really had no idea what we would discover.
Turned out we stumbled upon the 国吉亜耶子and西川真吾Duo, and one of the most inspiring performances I've seen in a long time.
Ayako is an amazingly talented fruitcake of a piano player with unbelievably strong vocals that waver between haunting classical Japanese and Jagged Little Pill. Somewhere in the middle she evokes Wong Faye 王菲, and would possibly be as depressingly maudlin if it wasn't for Shingo laying down a solid groove on drums. Together they are a treat to see and hear.
The live performance is really LIVE, and they come over well on CD (Paragraph -節- is their latest), even if I do miss the quirkiness and humor of the live set. Like the poetic diatribes inbetween numbers that make you laugh even if you do not understand a word that is being said.
I don't know where you can buy their albums (the CD is mine!) and have no idea how to find them performing ... but look out for them, and if you do manage to catch them live, you won't regret it!
The Freeze by Phrase is a nice ohrwurm to get you started..
NB: I am retro-blogging Tokyo which is why this post is a little delayed
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Yokoso Tokyo!
My Nexus One and the Japanese telcos had a 'lost in translation' syndrome over the past week, but I am back home now in Singapore with all the broadband that entails! I think I'll be retro-blogging for weeks to make up for the few fantastic days spent back in Tokyo. Big props to my uncle and his family who were great hosts and helped us make the most of a short trip..
After stumbling off the Airport Express bus and checking in early, what else to do but hunt down the lair of the famed Godzilla (ゴジラ, Gojira) near Ginza (銀座). She's HUGE! (No, that is sarcastic. Artistic camera angles are required)
Blogarythm for this post: Back in Black (Tokyo 1981)
See other posts in the Tokyo series:
- Tsukiji Market
- 三鷹の森 ジブリ美術館 Ghibli Museum, Mitaka
- Paragraph -節- Live Stage! House of Rocks Yotsuya
- Shinjuku Pit Inn
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iPhone, smiPhone
Looks like DBS have decided that iPhone is now the official generic name for any kind of smart phone!
Click on their Win an iPhone ad and read the not-so-fine print (it's an HTC HD mini ;-)
iPod has arguably already attained genericized trademark status for any kind of MP3 device (taking the mantle from it's predecessor, the Walkman).
And it seems Main Street has long since given Apple another category winner with iPhone joining the likes of Escalator, Zipper, Butterscotch, and even Heroin(!)
Which can really piss off pedantic technologists and the people who have to sell the phones - as brilliantly captured in the iPhone vs HTC animations by the guy that Best Buy wants to fire.
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kalinka: Google Calendar Link-maker and Any+Time jQuery demo
Any+Time was one of the more interesting options I covered in my Quick Review of jQuery Date/Time Widgets the other day.
Any+Time had a lot more functionality than I got to investigate at the time, and there were some specific features I wanted to checkout in more detail - in particular timezone handling - so I built another little demo called kalinka.
kalinka is a simple tool to construct Google Calendar Event URLs without needing to publish an event in your own calendar. You can then put the link in an email or a website. Other people can then use the link to create the event in their own Google Calendar.
kalinka mimics the basic functionality of the Google Calendar Event Publisher, except that it also demonstrates using Any+Time to offer specific control of the timezone.
Try out kalinka here, and feel free to pillage the scripts.
Blogarhythm for this post: kalinka malinka - The Red Army Choir (a.k.a. Alexandrov Ensemble or Дважды краснознаменный академический ансамбль песни и пляски Российской армии имени А. В. Александрова)
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