Shameless self-promotion

There's no website I can find for this event - I think it's just in one of the galleries that participates in the Long Beach Artwalk.

Anyway. I'm playing an hour-long set in Long Beach during the Artwalk (or after or something. I'm not sure.) Here's the information.

Feb 12 at 8pm

Catalyst

430 E. 1st Street

Long Beach, CA 90802

For more information about Catalyst, check out this website at http://www.gocatalyst.org/. This is my first time getting involved with them, and the evening will also be featuring an artist, Joey Paytner, and another band, SHE (not to be confused with the Taiwanese girl group of the same name...) - here's the write up on...um...us:

Cynthia Wang is part singer-songwriter and part graduate student. After teaching herself guitar in college when she realized she couldn't fit a piano into her dorm room, Cynthia started writing songs, although her first public performance took place a good 3 years after she started down the road of music creation and GAS (Guitar Acquisition Syndrome - she owns nine guitars), at Komuzika's Fall Residency Program in 2006. Cynthia's demo album,which was recorded and engineered at Big Brother Studios in Simi Valley, was released at the end of 2007, right before traveling and graduate school took over her life. After spending the last few years in New York City, where her singer-songwriter side laid dormant while grad-schooling, she recently moved back to Los Angeles and is currently writing material for a new album, while performing as time allows. She has played at venues such as the Ventura Majestic Theatre, the Derby, Cat Club on the Sunset Strip, and Bar Lubitsch. She has also performed at Five Star Variety Hour in New York City, and Tuesday Night Cafe in Los Angeles. You can find Cynthia's music at http://www.cynthiawangmusic.com

SHE is a Long Beach based all girl band consisting of 3 musicians: Kris Suafilo (lead guitar/lead singer), Tina Stephenitch (bass guitar/vocals) and Carole Maducdoc (drums). The three have played together off and on in various bands for the past 5 years. About 9 months ago their passion to play music brought them back together to form SHE, an alternative rock band performing covers and originals. Influenced by groups such as; Pearl Jam, Green Day, Offspring, Joan Jett, U2 and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Their mission: to engage people with music that is meaningful, entertaining and fun!

Joey Paynter has traveled to 33 countries volunteering her time to help prostitutes and lepers in Thailand, provide services to aborigines in Australia and volunteered in medical centers in the Solomon Islands. She has worked in Orphanages in Bali, Surabaya, Thailand and South Africa. She has counseled refugees and those with HIV/AIDS in South Africa and ran groups for children that have been victims of sexual abuse. She has provided relief trauma therapy to those in Haiti and has spoken to thousands of people in high schools, Universities and churches about injustice and awareness. She has worked on several photojournalist projects in the Middle East, Bali, South Africa, Panama, Brazil (Amazon), and Haiti. Joey helped create a 30 day devotional: “A Voice for the Voiceless”, which has been translated into 6 different languages with over 100,000 copies distributed world wide. Her photography from the Amazon is published in the book, “A Voice for Life” and her photography has been displayed overseas in Australia, as well as in galleries and shops in Oregon, South Carolina, and California. Joey received her Masters of Science in Clinical Psychology from Vanguard University and has worked in a variety of therapeutic settings. She currently resides in Newport Beach, California and her passion is to empower others to discover and connect with their soul.

One more for today

My best friend from college is in the original Anything Goes Revival Cast, and is in rehearsals now. He's Korean, but plays one of the Chinese men in the cast (I know, I know, I'm going to leave it at that).

Anyway, because he needs to intermittently use Chinese phrases, he's been asking me to teach him Chinese phrases. Thank god for audio recording technology, because I've been recording short files on my iPhone for certain phrases he needs, and sending it to him. Aural language is a funny thing. Chinese is so tonal that I can't just give him written pronunciations of the words. It's much easier to just record myself saying certain phrases and sending it to him.

Switching gears, I love this song. It was playing at the end of this Mad Men episode, which reminded me of its existence.

(it's Ella Fitzgerald's "Manhattan" - amazing how references to certain streets and areas in New York feel so nostalgic...)

Tick Tock

My clock is LOUD. It's one of those I got for $3 at Target. And it ticks and tocks...I hear it even over my TV. And it's comforting. But one thing (this is what happens when you pay attention too much) that I notice more now is the silence between ticks. Probably has something to do with my line of thinking during my Soundscape reaction paper, and how sound only exists with the passage of time...

In other very random news, I notice these new songs I've been writing use the GMaj to BMaj7 chords a lot.

I've been on a Mad Men bent. The beginning of the 4th episode of the 1st season is a bunch of people sitting around in the character Pete Campbell's office listening to a vinyl record of some comedy show. And there's a shot of the record spinning, with reaction shots to the men laughing. Makes us forget, sometimes, that the proliferation of TV and the moving image in American homes really didn't happen until the 1950's at the earliest, but radio dominated the way people got information for decades before that. Information was gotten through audio.

My friends and I tried to catch an open house for a condo in Beverly Hills. It was this beautiful street with trees overhanging and lots of green. Don't see that a lot in LA. In any case, it was nice and sunny, glinting off the streets, when all of a sudden, we hear pit-pattering. It was still sunny, but it was raining, with the rain hitting the leaves of the trees. Very serene.

Unrest in Egypt - a timeline - Hindustan Times

http://www.hindustantimes.com/Unrest-in-Egypt-a-timeline/Article1-655881.aspx

************
Sent from Cynthia Wang's iPhone
cyndaminthia@gmail.com

On the way to san diego

I'm in san Diego right now and quite without Internet, so I'll do my best with this post. There was a bad accident on the southbound 5 as I was driving down to sd, effectively turning the freeway into a crawling parking lot. I rolled down my windows. And enjoyed the sounds of traffic around. And I'm not being facetious. Being in a car all the time mutes out sounds from the world, making us detached from the space we're in. The simple act of rolling down my windows on the 5 seemed to connect me back to the world. Like the feeling you get walking around a city with no walls between you and the next Human being. Everything felt clearer. The crunch of tires on the asphalt, the engines of the cars around me, the occasional motorcycle brave enough to ride between the stalled lines of cars, and sometimes the muffled sounds of someone else's stereo blasting a rhythmic beat (and yes, sometimes I could only hear the bass).

Also, I noticed that the radio stations I listen to cut out somewhere around san Juan capistrano. Some before that. Kusc actually lasted the longest, but dissolved into static in proximity of SD. I'm posting with CNN playing in the background about Egypt and organizing via social media.

Soundtrack for New York City

I've lately been missing New York City a lot. In class today, we talked about Arkette's idea of audio enclaves, where it is different per location (ie: In LA, you sort of want people to hear the bass you're pumping through your car, where as in NYC, your audio enclave extends to your own ears buried in headsets or earphones).

There are certain songs that I listened to incessantly when I was living in NYC - and listened to particularly while walking around the city or on the subway. Some are standalone songs, some are albums of artists I like. One is even the Jersey Boys album.
In any case, two artists I particularly associate with NYC are Alfa (http://alfa-music.com/) and Jennifer Lee Snowden (http://www.jenniferleesnowden.com/). I'm listening to her song "Drowning in Bright Lights" as I'm blogging this.

Musical Stairs

The musical road clips (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QWKljfV9qc) that we watched in class reminded me of a project in Stockholm to attempt to get more people to take the stairs rather than the escalator:

A (way too philosophical) response to Schafer's "Soundscape"

Schafer’s book, “Soundscapes,” is not only an insightful and enjoyable read into the history of sound and music, but is also written beautifully and poetically, drawing not only on the works of previous academic scholars, but from the arts, music, literature, and mythology. The narrative of sound from the rural and pastorale to the modern and urban not only told the story in terms of time, but also in terms of sound layers and the transition of sound as modernization progressed, and how rural sounds were replaced by urban sounds. And sadly, it does not seem like we can reverse the effects of the urbanization of sound in a city - we cannot turn New York City back into the rural place it was, the hi-fi place it was in the early 1800‘s. It is not as if we can strip away the sounds of modernization and find the layer of hi-fi pastorale sounds of nature underneath. The sounds of nature has effectively been eradicated by the citification of urban spaces.

The act of reading Schafer in itself was an act of active listening. The book seemed to rupture the veil we place between our conscious thought process and what we subconsciously hear every day. It turned what we hear into an act of listening, but ironically the act of listening was not done in the moment, like how experiencing sound actually is, but was done through the process of remembering, for example, what cicadas sound like. Through reading Schafer, we recall the sounds of cicadas, or birds, or the flow of water, and assign significance to those sounds from within our memory - significance that probably would not have been assigned had it not been analyzed and called to our attention in Schafer’s writing, which, ironically enough, are visual symbols of the English language - words and letters - rather than auditory signals. Hence, the assigning of significance to these sounds occur through time and space. Unlike the *real* act of experiencing sound, which emphasizes the present moment in which the sound occurs, the simultaneity in time and space, the reading of it assigned significance, but not in the here and now, but what we remember.

Ok, I think that got a bit too philosophical. But my point, to put it in simpler terms, was that Schafer’s discussion of the sounds of nature, of the flatline electric sounds of modernity, makes the readers more conscious of these sounds, even if they are not hearing them right at this point. This meta-level perspective of the reading illuminates the difference between audio/sounds and visual/writing. The visual can be transferred through time and space, but sounds cannot (unless they are recorded).

I found the part about how sounds of the city indicated time, with the town crier and the bells, particularly resonate for me, given my current interests in questions of time and how time has become structured in our modern-day society. Even now, the tick-tock sound of the mechanical clock is a trope for the passage of time. Because sound is so tied to the present, sound only occurs with the passage of time. Sound can only exist through the movement of time.
Another interesting bit that Schafer illuminates is that the authority to decide what is noise and what is not privileges certain kinds of power, while those who are able to make noise and get away with it also have power. Would it be accurate to say that the concept of noise only arose through the process of modernization and socialization? It seems like flatlining happened through technology. Is this when we started thinking of noise as a nuisance, a subliminal positioning of power, rather than the previous obvious and upfront display of power, with church bells or the town crier, or a king’s trumpet or hunting horns?

Backstage with Castle

In the Behind the Scenes feature for Castle Season 2 (on the DVD), Nathan Fillion interviews Joe Foglia, the sound mixer. Joe has an interesting something to say about sound in movies...on how it's really important:

"I just wanted to tell you, though, how important sound is to any motion picture or movie or TV show, is when you go on the airplane, the movie is free, you have to pay for the headsets."

is youtube bad for music?

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/01/is-youtube-bad-for-music/

Tiger Mother

You know that whole Amy Chua "Tiger Mother" scandal? Check out Jen Kwok's take on it. http://jenkwok.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Jen-Kwok-Tiger-Mom-Rap.mp3

"real" acting?

I had dinner with a close friend of mine today who does voiceover acting work, and one of the interesting points of conversation that came up was that when she told people she does voiceover acting, people would say, "oh, that's not REAL acting." "Real" acting in this case as on-camera acting, where the actor's body is visibly present.

Another example of the hegemony of vision. You're not a "real" actor unless your body is visibly on camera. Because your voice, your SOUND just isn't enough. Just isn't authoritative, or legitimate.

sounds of campus and stuff

On Thursday, Josh instructed us to go outside on campus for 20 minutes and just listen. I agree with Chris in that we should be doing this exercise every day. It's relaxing, meditative. And made me realize how much of our listening life is passive listening, where we really don't listen (something Classical Albums Sunday is attempting to rectify). Even in music, we always multitask. We're studying, or driving, or using it for background music during dinner.

During those 20 minutes, I noticed, well, many things. But one thing in particular was how some people would walk scraping their feet along the ground, and some people wouldn't. It's not like I didn't notice this before, but this was the first time I actually consciously noticed it, and started thinking about why that would be? Was it the kind of shoes? Their mood? Just their natural gait?

It's like reading Soundscape (by R. Murray Schafer -- a more in-depth response to the book will come later). Ironically, reading about sound makes me consciously think about sounds I have heard and stored in my subconsciousness (like insects) whereas before, I would simply gloss over them.

On a more personal level, I finished a new song. Something about running between raindrops. It's way too long (7 minutes), but I don't think it's going to be cut down any. And no, I'm not trying to be Don McLean. I haven't found a good way to record music on my computer. A trip to get a good mic might be in store. Or I may settle for an MP3 recorder to record rough cuts (and make sure I'm not forgetting anything). I find that writing music is very present. And I don't write musical notations down. I write the lyrics, which means every time I sing it and play it (at least when I've first written something and am in the process of learning it), it's different. Sometimes (on bad days), I would completely forget how a melody goes. This is why, I think, an mp3 recorder would be useful not just for the sound mapping project for this class. I've been thus far, been using my iPhone.

It is interesting, though, how words (lyrics) can trigger a melody. Even if I can't exactly remember a melody, I still remember sort of how I wanted it to sound. It's also frustrating when you can't recreate the same melodic line because you didn't write down musical notation. I used to (back in undergrad...and once or twice at NYU) have bursts of song that pop into my head during the most inopportune times (ie: during class). In those moments I would either jot down some quick musical notations (my background in music theory still comes in handy sometimes, surprisingly!), or I would use numbers. 1 for do, 2 for re, 3 for mi, and so on and so forth. That worked ok, but didn't capture the rhythm or length of notes. Which would confuse me later when I sat down to try and elaborate on it.

This is the most disjointed post ever. I'm sorry. My brain isn't functioning at even 50% right now.

Classic Album Sundays

It's fantastic what one hears on NPR at 12:30am. After an enjoying evening at USC's Visions and Voices (http://www.usc.edu/dept/pubrel/visionsandvoices/) event - The DNA Trail reading (http://www.srtp.org/productions.html) by Silk Road Productions with Dawen (http://dawen.us/), I drop Dawen off, and hear about Classical Album Sundays on the radio.

Classical Album Sundays is this event at a space in...London (?) where people come in and listen to albums in silence (http://londonist.com/2011/01/classic-album-sundays.php). They cannot text, multitask, even go to the bathroom. They must sit in complete silence and do nothing but listen. How many of us multitask while listen to music nowadays? How many of us will spend the time listening to a full album of songs, in our day of iPods, iPhones, Pandora, and multitasking, and do nothing but listen?

Definitely food for thought about how "listening to music has become a passive activity" in our day and age, as Talia in the Londonist (link given above) says. And what it means to really actively listen to music, to understand it, to experience it on a deeper level than just something that fills the silence as we go about doing other stuff.

Visions and voices

I am actually blogging from the q&a session of the DNA trail, which was performed at USC tonight. A quick thing I noticed was that the production, which was more a reading than a play, was that, whereas there is sound, no composer or sound person was credited in the program. Maybe it goes under stage manager. Someone just mentioned that the pieces should bs published into a book, which was followed up by a statement that it should be put on DVD so people would hear the actors' voices. Ok, more later. It's hard to type on a small device. There was someone sitting behind me who kept laughing right in my ear. Piercingly.

thumping and ticking

There's been a lot of thumping going on in the apartment above mine tonight. And the occasional incomprehensible sound of voices muffled by the layers of dry wall and carpet. My apartment tends to be pretty quiet at night, but there seems to be more activity tonight than normal. Other than the thumping, the only other sound I'm hearing right now is my clock (yes, I still have an analog clock) ticking away, reminding me that I must get a response paper (for a different class than this one) in before I sleep tonight. Even my fridge is quiet.

Ihde Response...addition

I have an addendum to my response to "In Praise of Sound." At the end of the piece, Ihde mentions that there has been a “suspicion of the voice, particularly the sonorous voice.” (pg. 14) There seems to be a fear of sound undermining the reason and rationale of the visual. The timbre of sound has the ability to go beyond the mere words of the speaker and convey much more than the mere words - it conveys emotion, it galvanizes the masses. Being Martin Luther King Jr Day earlier this week, I heard two old MLK speeches. It was not the words he said, although those were powerful as well, but his passion within his voice, and the sound of the crowd cheering along with him that drives the message home. Arguments have been made that point to Obama’s baritone when he orates to be the factor that draws people in, conveying his message more readily than if his voice did not sound as such (http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2008/02/28/obama_clinton_voices). Likewise, good sound in a film will go largely unnoticed, helping buoy the audience up in inspirational and happy moments, while providing a space for melancholy when the story calls for it. Bad sound, on the other hand, will ruin even the most beautiful visual composition in a movie. So is sound a powerful force in guiding and nudging how people think? Absolutely. What can be dangerous about sound is because it is linked so closely to our emotional states, it possibly overrides rationalization or cognitive thinking in epistemological processes, handing the reins over for people to base decisions and actions on their emotions, creating social and conditioned norms that the Powers That Be that wield the sound we hear can later exploit and control.

Response to Don Ihde's "In Praise of Sound"

Don Ihde’s chapter, “In Praise of Sound,” provides a comprehensible outline of visuality’s domination over sound in the gathering of knowledge and information, and the proclamation of truth in Western culture since the ancient Greeks. Ihde efficiently summarizes the arguments for obtaining truth and knowledge through the senses, weaving an enjoyable story reaching back to the ancient Greek philosophers and making the reader think about something as “natural-feeling” as using vision in order to ascertain information as a socially constructed way of viewing the world. The tension between a reduction to vision and a reduction of vision is an interesting one. After all, seeing is believing, but people see/sense differently. Just biologically, someone could be near-sighted, far-sighted, blind, colorblind, have cataracts, or any of the other numerous ways that differentiate how different individuals perceive the world through sight, sound, or the other senses. The arguments Ihde highlighted and presented in the piece insightfully laid out the different positions and progressions between the two philosophies, even touching on the fact that modern metaphysics remained cynical to the senses, instead relying on reason, the unsensed, that transcends the senses. Following this argument, how Ihde would reconcile the idea of relying on the unseen with the existence of God. Science and religion has frequently been at odds with each other in the modern age, starting with Galileo and Copernicus coming down on the bad side of the Church by espousing their scientific findings (even though that was not their intention). Even in today, we so quickly accept science as truth and remain cynical of religion and faith. In this case, both science and faith (or God) are relatively unseen. How many of us have physically seen the composition of a hydrogen molecule, an electron, or a neutrino? How many of us have seen, with a naked eye, a black hole? And yet, science tells us they exist. Is this not the same as believing in an unseen superior being?

Ihde states that “by living with electronic instruments our experience of listening itself is being transformed, and included in this transformation are the ideas we have about the world and ourselves.” (pg. 5) Indeed, placing it in context of technological advancements and the way the visual and the aural have been intertwined with each other (and with other senses, although Ihde did not travel as much down that path). After all, it is through technological advancements that we are able to record and reproduce aural signals. Prior to the phonograph, the only way information and knowledge was recorded was through the written. Take a look at music. In order for music to have been passed through time and space, it needed to be written down. We will never know exactly how the Turkish March sounded when Mozart played it, because Mozart’s life predates the phonograph. But we have the Turkish March as a visual representation of the aural, and we are able to (at least technically) replicate Mozart’s intention for how a song should sound.

Ironically, in today’s electronic and recording heavy world, we have lost the practice of putting songs into the symbol of the musical language. We have lead sheets and chords and tabs for pop songs today, yet there are rarely written musical notations readily available to the public to reproduce exactly how a song like Britney Spears’ “Oops, I Did It Again” was played on the album. Instead, electronic technology has enabled audio editing in order for a performance to be created piecemeal, then pieced together to create one composite and seemingly singular auditory experience.

The history of the visual as a modality for information is longer than that for audio. The written allows information to be passed through time and space, the aural exists in the now and is temporally bound. Even today, we ask that important information be put “on paper” so it can be referenced at a future date, or at a different location. The visual becomes equated with evidence, with truth. However, as technology has advanced to give us sound recording, and ways to analyze the sound recordings, aural signals have slowly started becoming a basis for evidence. New details in Robert F. Kennedy’s shooting came to light through an analysis of a sound recording taken the day of his assassination (). Here, sound is the key player in uncovering the “truth.” But this would not have been possible before the advent of sound recording.

Ihde closes his argument eloquently by stating that the examination of sound is not to replace the visual with the aural, but to “move toward a radically different understanding of experience, one which has its roots in a phenomenology of auditory experience.” (pg. 15) This leads me to question, though, if there is a push for the understanding of experience rooted in the phenomenology of the aural because of the visual’s domination in the way our society comes to knowledge. Can we ever talk about sound without reference to the visual because the visual has been dominant? Is it like trying to talk about race without reference to white superiority, or queer studies without bearing in mind the reality of heteronormativity?

Flabbergasted

I just spent the better part of three hours in the car listening to country music - Go Country (KKGO 105.1) and KHAY (100.7)...I know, I know, keep your snide comments to yourself for now. But, this is what is flabbergasting.

On my way from LA to Thousand Oaks (my hometown), I listened to KKGO, then KHAY once KKGO got too staticky. I heard ONE woman singer, singing the worst song ever (Carrie Underwood's Mama's Song - Carrie, you disappoint me. A lot. That song is awful. What were you thinking?!). On the way back, I listened only to KKGO, which was doing commercial-free Mondays (jarring in and of itself to hear country music with no commercials), and went thru about 9 or 10 songs all sung by a male singer, until I finally got another Carrie Underwood song (All-American Girl), followed by 6 more songs by male singers before I reached home and had to get out of the car because these stats were depressing me to much. On the way back, I was in the car for close to an hour, listening to the same radio station.

Yes, ladies and gents -- two hours worth of music, and only TWO female singers were aired the entire time. Granted, I did get out of the car at a couple points, and changed stations, so I suppose female singer songs MIGHT have come on the station I wasn't listening to, but I think that still makes a point in that randomly switching channels will also get similar results - that if you're listening to country music, you're most likely listening to a male singer. A white male singer (I'm not going to even get into THAT)...

I'm no gender studies/feminist theory person, but even I know there's something...not quite...right...about this...

Sounds at Disneyland - Club 33, Aurally

I've been thinking about the project I would like to do for my Audio Cultures class...and I think I might want to examine a section of Disneyland (although I still need to run this by my professor first). So, I was at Disneyland today, looking at some of the different areas that might be interesting for such a study. I've narrowed it down to somewhere along Main Street (where, when we were there, playing something from the Music Man, metaphorically welcoming visitors to Disneyland into middle America -- I'll find the song later), or right in front of the Sleeping Beauty Castle. I suspect sounds in those spots would be interesting because of just how many people are around in those areas, figuring out where to go, traversing through, not to mention how Disneyland cast members clear Main Street before each parade, and during the fireworks display, people are standing out on the streets, but few are walking around. So, interesting. But not urban, so not sure my prof will go for it. We shall see (and plus, he's reading this, as part of the class assignment is blogging).

Josh (my prof for this class) talked in class last week about how silence and class are closely interconnected. The "higher" class/wealthier a community, the quieter the area tends to be. My friends and I had the privilege of eating dinner at Club 33 tonight - a secret dinner club located in New Orleans Square. Right next to the Blue Bayou, there is an unmarked door with an intercom. If you have a reservation, you ring the bell, and someone answers on the intercom. You give this someone the reservation name, and they let you in through the door.

Our reservations tonight were for 9pm -- right as the Disney water show, Fantasmic, was starting just across the way. It was very loud - not to mention that a group of people were gathered around Blue Bayou to wait for seats. So when we rang the bell, we could not hear an answer. Finally, we made our way into Club 33 as others were leaving.

The difference between the outside and the inside of the club was drastic. It was completely silent in the club once the door closed. Ok, not completely silent, but one could hardly make out the cacophony outside. We were then taken upstairs, where the main dining room is located. It has, I think, some of the more unique acoustics I've ever encountered. And I'm not sure how they do it. It felt very quiet. I'm not sure if it was because the room looked so austere, or because people were talking in hushed tones, but there was a weighty sense in the air, and a quietness that was nice, if not a bit unnerving.

We were seated at a round table, which concerned me, because I did not fancy raising my voice to speak to my dinner companions. However, we soon realized that we could speak relatively quietly to each other, yet still hear each other perfectly. Perhaps it is because the atmosphere was such that hushed voices were used at the other tables, and the ambient sound was low, so all verbal cues were easily picked up. What is striking, though, is that once you're positioned in that space, you interpolate yourself into the mannerisms that the space requires. We didn't speak loudly, because it seemed improper. Which really follows the manners of high class culture, where speaking softly and with reserve indicates someone who is more highly educated and mannered than someone who speaks loudly and abrasively with no concern for their neighbors' comforts.
During dinner, we also enjoyed the music and sounds of Fantasmic, which had started outside, that penetrated the silence and added a nice touch to the soundscape for the evening, yet seemed intrusive to the mellow silence that existed before. The entertainment, presumably, were for those who could not get reservations to Club 33. So here, again, we see a built-in class difference, with the "lower" classes' sounds penetrating the "upper" classes' silence.

I should make a disclaimer that I use these terms "higher," "upper," "lower" loosely to reductively talk about sound and silence. I am not saying that because were able to get reservations to Club 33 that we are in any way in the "upper" class of Disney society (we are most decidedly NOT). I simply use it as a metaphor to talk about the positions in which we found ourselves this evening possibly in a way Disney intended - a space in which the rich, elite Disneyland connoisseurs gathered (Club 33), versus the space of the lower to middle Americans who came for a day of enjoyment (the park itself). It is a deliberate, constructed separation that I use simply to talk about how people are interpolated into spaces, rather than the classiness of the people themselves.

Goodness, I hope that made sense...

Driving the wrong way

On the way home tonight, I caught the second and third movements of Pinchas Zukerman playing (and conducting!) Beethoven's Violin Concerto in Costa Mesa on KUSC. And I drove myself 2 miles out of the way in order to finish listening to the piece. Because it was broadcast live (I think...maybe time of day has something to do with radio quality), there was a good amount of static, but it was still great.
Which gets me thinking about classical music. I was supposed to go to an LA Phil concert tonight - Dudamel conducting Mahler's 9th---which, BTW, apart from Beethoven and Schubert, is not the only 9th symphony after which the composer died, as the LA Phil seems to insinuate in this posting (http://www.laphil.com/tickets/performance-detail.cfm?id=4374) -- Dvorak also only composed 9 symphonies. But we ended up not able to get rush tickets because the concert was sold out (really?? Mahler's 9th?)

Anyway. In other news, I was listening to the country radio station, and realized the proportion of men to women singers is like, 9:1 or something ridiculous. There were 6 songs in a row that were all male singers. Hrm. And country music does all sound the same. In Hong Kong, a Taylor Swift song came on in a restaurant, and even though I had never heard the song before, I knew it was Taylor Swift. Because the music sounded like her other stuff.

I also had brunch in the loudest restaurant ever. Talk about sound pollution. This was at the Griddle in Hollywood - fantastic place that serves much larger dishes than is absolutely necessary for mid-day caloric intake. My friend and I were positively screaming across the table at each other.

In other news, I've been obsessed with this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZZSsHQmz0E (Mads Langer: Fact-Fiction) Heard it on Castle Season 2.

Testing Posterous

I'm taking Josh Kun's class this semester, and we're told to blog a lot a lot. I'm also linking this post to my main blog page, and fear that if I post something every day, my friends on Facebook and Twitter might completely disown me.

Josh's class is a sound studies/pop music culture class. We had our first (short) class today, after reading James Joyce's "The Dead" (which I had never read before), but thought it was very interesting to see how the audio becomes translated into the written when audio recording or other portrayals of the audio were not possible during Joyce's time.

In other news, my fridge is humming and my stomach is growling. The humming of the fridge, though, blocks out most other sounds. And as quiet as my apartment gets at night, I'm often reminded of how close I live to a busy street when sirens go screaming by late at night.

Oh, another quick thing I've noticed. Classical KUSC played Dvorak's Carnival Overture on the radio the other day. I'm sure I can look this up, but I think they adjust the volume during to make sure that the levels are high enough so one can hear the music in the car. Because when I play my version of Carnival Overture on my iPhone or computer, the pianissimos can barely be heard, and if you turn up your volume during those time, the fortes and the fortissimos that come later blow out your eardrums. So, this is my suspicion that the radio station messes with the volume as they play a piece, but I'm not sure. Of course, we all know that radio dead air time is, well, deadly.

On Chinese Mothers (the now-infamous WSJ post)

OK. I've gotten this WSJ article about Chinese mothers multiple, multiple times from people. I really only have a couple thoughts. It's incredibly stereotypical (the bad - to generalize I think is always harmful), but it does bring out detrimental points about "Generation Me" in which "self-esteem" and "being special" out-weigh quality of work and effort. On the other hand, I think we need to be careful not to conflate high grades with success.

Edit: I can't speak to what Chua intended to write, but I do place responsibility on WSJ for being the publishing institution that allowed it to become public, and for allowing it to be framed in this way. The title makes me sick because it does two things - it reaffirms the stereotype, while reinforcing the constructed differences between races and cultures. It also undermines the Chinese Mothers "superiority" (really, the non-American superiority it purportedly lauds) because by placing it as the title, it invites the reader to take part in the spectacle of the "Chinese mother," treating her as an "object," and reinforces the fact that America is really not intimidated by "Chinese Mothers" (extrapolated to include all "Others") because of an ingrained sense of white hegemony and superiority.

I think the only possible illuminating thing to come from it, as I said, is to question why we think "self-esteem" and "doing your best" and "being special" has become par for the course for our child-raising culture, and to ruminate on how detrimental it can be to society (see Jean Twenge's "Generation Me") and America's standing in global competition.

Edit: From George Wang (this was originally a comment on my post on Facebook):

"Hear it from Chua herself - this is all on WSJ and their white lust for Asian female stereo-typing.

"As far as child-rearing goes, they absolutely ...should be pushed to be their best. Our culture routinely coddles kids too mich these days, producing lazy, incompetent, entitled whining citizens. We desperately need good old fashioned discipline, and personal responsibility and personal accountability."

Angry Mommy!!

My mom got very very addicted to Angry Birds this holiday season. After she finished all the levels, I downloaded the Seasons version for her (the one with the Halloween and the Christmas versions). I got this email from her today:

From: Jenny Wang
Subject: Angry mommy!!
Date: January 7, 2011 10:08:11 PM PST
To: Kenneth Wang, Cynthia Wang

For 3 days... I have not been able to get through level 3-5 of the holiday- Halloween. >:O

Mama

On pain (again)

I don't get why people who have mild to moderate physical pain - like, twisted joint, pulled muscle, pained back - take pain medication (I get it for when the pain is so bad you can barely stand it and are, essentially, immobilized - I'm not talking about that). Because...wouldn't you want to feel the pain when you do something so you know not to do it anymore?

(BTW, I had posted a blog about pain last summer, when I pulled a muscle in my...ahem...groin... You can read about it here, if you so feel inclined.)

Oh, why did this come up? A) I sort of want the cane I spoke about last summer because B) something happened to my lower back. I think I hurt it. Cuz it hurts.