transientem

A call to rock on 8 years too late

May 3, 2008 – 3:27 am

Maybe 8 years is nothing in the grand scheme of things, but I feel so old regardless. Why 8 years?

Whoo! That’s why.

Contrary to unpopular belief, my Hikki-tardation has limits, and one of those lines in the sand was Bohemian Summer 2000. It was something that I actually kind of avoided, and the ridiculous looking cover art had something to do with it. But I also heard way, way back that it bordered on sub-par, while her Unplugged performance just one year later was held up as one of her best recordings at the time, studio or otherwise. I’m listening to the audio stream right now, and it still is up there.

I’d better stop that. So firing up the performance at hand, maybe I’m just watching through Hikki goggles then, but it’s not nearly as bad as I was expecting. Oh sure, balance problems at the mixer board lead to instances where the band overpowers her voice; little things like inconsistent pitch control on the edge of her range and the tendency to just belt things out lead to an overall concert that isn’t as polished as her later ones.

And then there’s the occasion where she totally faked her high note in Wait and See, delegating it to pre-recorded vocals.

Yet it’s also the most entertaining. I don’t like having to choose between performance or perfection, but when presented with a barrel of fun, is it possible to say no?

You don’t see any of her other concert DVD’s featuring aerial footage of a baseball stadium. There’s just something about the scale of the event that makes it worth noting. Her backing instrumental section is probably second only to her Unplugged performance, but only because that had a string section. This was also the only time she had dancers, which generally just drove home the widely accepted fact that Hikki can’t dance.

Sound balance dissatisfaction is mitigated a bit by the fact that there’s some great drum work going on by John Blackwell and a 15 year old Tony Royster Jr. Many of the songs are percussion weighted and for good reason. Blackwell would later give the Unplugged performance its strong drive.

Highlights include the guest appearance of the arrangers of Wait and See towards the end, the drum duel between Blackwell and Royster, the best rendition of Amai Wana ~Paint it Black as well as pretty good performances of Take on Me, I Love You, Playback part2, and Living on My Own —

But none of the last four are her songs. In total she had 4.625 covers, if you count the John Luongo remix of First Love as a half, and her Shiina Ringo impression as an eighth.

Hilarious image of her jumping down as if holding a broken pogo stick aside, these covers are the reason for me lamenting about the good ol’ days that I never experienced. She exudes more attitude covering Freddie Mercury and Yamaguchi Momoe than she does in most of her own songs. The devil inside could be spotted four years prior.

The irony is that since 2000 her performances have retreated from the “I’m going to sing/do whatever the heck I want” attitude even as her songs incorporate more of it. You get the more tightly controlled performances as a result, but an equally controlled image comes with it. Bohemian Summer Hikki would step out swinging; by 2001 she was already beginning to pull her punches.

No more covers, no more crazy cosplaying band. In Hikaru no 5 she looked very much the diva; Utada United two of her elaborate costumes bordered on stuffy and immobile. About the only element that pressed forward unchanged was Kawano Kei, and his antics along with his presence were noticeably absent in 2006.

I think Hikki is one those artists that has always had their trypants on, it’s just that they’re a lot more apparent these days. Even when she’s trying to act casual, it comes across as forced more often than not. She’s fairly transparent, and there’s little reason to doubt that she’s holding back, for reasons that only she knows.

Paradoxically, she is better because of it. The same self-consciousness that makes her awkward on stage puts polish in the studio and fresh sounds on the staff paper. Can’t stage and studio peacefully co-exist? I suppose not: it was a struggle for Prisoner of Love — a product of a distant era (or DISTANCE era) — to be included into HEART STATION. My guess is that we will never see something quite like Bohemian Summer again.

But I hold out hope that one day she’ll devote a block of time to reclaiming a less obfuscated image of herself, forgoing the technological wizardry that propels her along today.

Kawano Kei would approve. That ought to be enough for anybody.

By introspect | Posted in music | Tagged hikki, music, surveys | Comments (2)

Needs a third edge

May 2, 2008 – 2:50 pm

Is it strange that I haven’t seen the first broadcast episode of Macross Frontier, but I’ve listened to Triangler? The brand is strong with MS, and YK to a lesser extent, so while spare time is…spare, a bit of multi-tasking keeps me tuned in.

Feelings about the song are mixed. A bit of movement in the verse and a nice contrasting bounce in the bridge are pretty much negated by a chorus that is typical (as in middling) and tight (as in uptight). Given that the song opens with the chorus, the first thought was that Maaya was trying to do energetic rock, which for me has been a dicey hit-or-miss proposition in the past.

After the song was over not once, but five times, that impression still remained. Triangler is an imperfect trinity at best. But at least the lyrics rhyme at the beginning of both bridges.

Kotomichi is not a Yoko Kanno track, if that is a factor in anything. I think it’s been hammered into my head that airy voices are something to avoid, and there are a number of passages where Maaya’s voice is a weak whisper. But there are other places with signs of ~~life~~ strength, and on balance this is a decent ballad. It’s just that there are so many decent ballads, all very noticeably similar in style.

By introspect | Posted in music | Tagged asides, Maaya Sakamoto, music | Comments (3)

[SSA] On links and incidentally, synchronicity

April 7, 2008 – 2:00 pm

This is more for my own assurance than anything else. In short, I see very few outgoing link hits when going over stats. Like, zero. Okay, on average one for text links, and a couple clicks on images. It may be FeedBurner not being able to track most cases or something else, but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t bother me.

I’m not here to order people to click them (do what you want), nor to solicit feedback (this is a site service announcement after all). Some only serve to punctuate a statement, and these can usually be seen by looking at the destination address. The rest are generally background reading, which one might have no interest or time for and I understand that.

I just want to let everyone know that links do exist just in case, and at the risk of insulting your intelligence, they’re the ones highlighted blocks that get underlined on mouseover.

With that off my chest, the next order of business is to highlight a misuse of jargon. Synchronous doesn’t imply anything beyond running on a common clock. If anyone has fiddled around with S/PDIF coaxial back in the day, you’ve seen a synchronous standard.

It’s also serial. It presents data one bit at a time. So bits are coming in at a standard rate with fairly low deviation. Industry likes to call such a standard an SSI, short for synchronous serial interface.

The only thing one can surmise by the claim that arcs are being presented synchronously is that presentation is organized based on a fixed time slot. Things start at the beginning and, say, 3 episodes later, everything is wrapped up. It could be one character (serial), it could be many characters (parallel/concurrent), but the concept of a time slot implies neither.

So synchronous shouldn’t be confused with concurrent, or simply parallel. The way KimiKiss is described, it’s best to replace “synchronous” with a more recognizable “simultaneous” and leave it at that. Indeed, clocks are rather stodgy things that seem to be at loggerheads with organic development in general. A lot of things happen in the brain at the same time, but people will look at you funny if you were to claim that everyone’s brain ran on a clock.

Describing Clannad as hyper-threaded, or even multi-threaded, might be fair given the WRR / interleaved progression of events in Kanon 2006, but I haven’t progressed very far into the series so I can’t consider it at the moment.

By introspect | Posted in admin | Tagged admin, asides, asshatery | Comments (1)

Fllng n th blnks

April 6, 2008 – 7:08 pm

I think that I have a new metric for evaluating a series. It’s not a practical one by any stretch, but there may be a lesson or two in it, and I would encourage everyone to apply that metric at least once in their viewing…careers.

Go through the dialog of each episode of a series, line by line.

At least twice.

Actually, the more the better.

If you come out of it still liking the whole thing, that show is a good match for you. I’m not claiming that it will have earned a special place in your heart, but there has got to be something keeping you watching.

I didn’t say that it was a good metric, and there are host of obvious reasons as to why it’s pretty bad. It’s time consuming, for one, but that can be mitigated somewhat by obtaining a script, although a bit of a technical or logistical hurdle in itself. Doing so may also simply ruin your enjoyment of an otherwise decent series.

true tears is one such decent series. Stepping back, it was fairly conventional right down to any lessons that might be derived, but the alchemy job that P.A. Works did was anything but.

So did applying this metric ruin my enjoyment of true tears? Nope, and therein lies perhaps a better metric, something that a lot of people know in the back of their heads but maybe haven’t articulated. I only got to thinking about it myself after staring at blocks of dialog. Doing so enabled me to take some thoroughly unscientific observations which resulted in the following thoroughly unscientific self-diagnosis.

Basically, I got through true tears, interest intact, because of line count. There are bad outliers where the line count spikes up, but a reasonable ballpark figure is about 270 lines of dialog for an episode. Is that low? It certainly feels comfortable. Like others, I have noticed the stretches where nothing gets said, and those stretches weren’t booked for fight scenes where nothing ought to be said (lame trash talk included).

So low line count is good, high line count is bad? Am I not pushing this metric because I’m lazy and the less things to read, the better? No, and maybe. Line count is just an observation; weigh it in consideration with other factors, one of those being that the mind can sometimes be very active on relatively little input.

This comes from out of left field and several years back, but do you remember I Love Bees? There was a story, but it was not told by the game [1]. It wasn’t even shown, going beyond show don’t tell, a fact that would have continued to be lost on me were it not for BoingBoing, and this crystallizing quote in particular:

…[I]nstead of telling a story, we would present the evidence of that story, and let the players tell it to themselves.

I think the players did a darn good job. But it goes to show that there is a more powerful technique than show don’t tell, and perhaps one that we are innately comfortable with, because our survival as a species may be underpinned by it.

A simple approximation for cognition is that of a model builder. We might not always be building the best models, but we are always building them. The hope is that at some point, that model is close enough to a hidden truth [2] that one can make accurate predictions with it. Or maybe just tell the story behind the pieces of evidence scattered on the floor.

Dialog is often the uncorrupted truth. It is damning evidence, lecture material. Dialog makes model building redundant, and from that standpoint, dialog is lazy. So a reduction in line count tends to imply that the story has been shifted around to less accessible areas.

One thing about lots of dialog, though, is that it can be easy to tell if there is nothing substantial. The process of discovery requires a bit more effort, even if only to come up empty-handed.

Filling in the blanks, even intentionally placed ones, keeps us in the game. And to the credit of P.A. Works and true tears, the game is afoot.

Afterword

[1] It may go down in history as one of the greatest podcasts that wasn’t, a series of puzzles that quickly evolved into a weekly radio drama that had its initial distribution over hundreds of pay phones across the United States. As described by one of the game’s designers, it was also an incredible logistical effort on both the part of the creators and the audience.

[2] Yes, I called a hidden (Markov) model a truth. No, I don’t really know what that means, either.

By introspect | Posted in anime | Tagged anime, connections, surveys, True Tears | Comments (4)

Take 5 and God Speed

March 31, 2008 – 1:33 am

[Lyrics/Translations]

Take 5 is one of those tracks that I can loop over and over again. It tempers irrational exuberance some days and raises the spirit (or spirits) on others, both with a ghostly, dignified poise. Does life and death exist on a continuum, or does a line have to be drawn somewhere? Perhaps the latter.

That the line is drawn at 42 seconds is a point for mysterious coincidences and reading too much into things. After all, we should just enjoy the art of life.

But speaking of loops, a certain rainbow coloured bus is pretty loopy in an analog way. Whenever it comes on, I have a hankering for bubble gum. I can only wonder why.

More later on a great album.

By introspect | Posted in music | Tagged asides, hikki, music | Comments (1)

Better later

March 11, 2008 – 2:10 am

But not this entry.

I thought to liken Moyashimon to something else that got better with age, but we’ll never know if that was just a 3-episode blip or the start of a trend. By now, the consensus is 11 episodes feels like an arbitrary and tacked on best before date.Although, better ought to be qualified. Something that is well aged is usually not so much effervescent as it is mellow, which seems to be an acquired taste outside the domain of ethanol. Moyashimon‘s inviting bar setting(s) would have rivaled Bartender‘s given some more screen time.

But while things weren’t as light in the end as they were in the beginning, the series could always be counted on to induce strong reactions, and a conduit that worked pretty well happened to be the strong reactions of the ~~victims~~ characters themselves.My curiosity caused me to miss out on one of the strongest ones, since I couldn’t shake my suspicions and went looking for cast information after the second episode. Despite that, it was made up for with healthy amounts of physical violence and bawdy humour (or literally toilet humour).

Stepping back, I wouldn’t say that I was educated, but it’s not like one can stamp “Mission Failed” on the show because of that. As with other shows that have aired in that time slot, it was a glimpse into other spheres, exposure to campus life of a different sort, but not at all dissimilar. For what it was worth, Moyashimon was illuminating, fresh, with a nose of nostalgia.

Anything but stale.

By introspect | Posted in anime | Tagged anime, Moyashimon, surveys | Comments (0)

Purveyors of quality expressions

February 16, 2008 – 12:00 pm

I think that True Tears is well executed, but I’m no good at finding animation short cuts, except maybe recycled scenes. Someone pointed out the following the other day.

By introspect | Posted in anime | Tagged anime, asides, True Tears | Comments (0)

After the roflstomp

February 15, 2008 – 7:52 pm

Before getting started, JAXA’s Space Solar Power System reminds me more of SimCity 2000′s Microwave Power Station’s than some War To End All Wars But Won’t. After all, the ensuing widespread fire is infinitely more compelling than watching cannon fodder being mowed down like it’s another day at the office.

This isn’t strictly about Gundam 00 in much the same way that the series isn’t about Celestial Being. Just like how the narrator and token characters are only mouthpieces for the writers, beating us over the head with the Serious Stick from a flimsy pulpit of credibility built upon extrapolating trends at most 50 years into the future and calling it 300. Just like how power blocs exploit it for political and technological gain. Just like how the members hijack it to deal with their own issues.

And just like how I’m commandeering it for fun and profit.

Referring to the other day, my own conspiracy theory about ripping the UN logo is that there is no room for such an organization in a world ruled by three superpowers. So they took to the stars, and returned with a military not effectively owned by one country.

Early on, there was no disputing that they brought the beat down in style, and while there have been short and medium term gains, at no point should anyone believe that they are witnessing anything approximating an empire rising, let alone the Second Coming.

Violence might have been the answer a couple hundred years ago. Or even about 63 years ago, but let’s go with a couple hundred. When a lot of combat was still hand to hand, one needed a lot of soldiers to get anything done.

The side effect was, a fighting force could be a decent occupying force on conquered land. Fresh from defeat, now army-less, generally demoralized, and with more enemy soldiers walking around than any citizen could take in a bar fight, whatever terms and ideas the other side had suddenly became a lot more appealing.

Since then, we’ve gotten pretty good at doing more with less, to the extent that relatively few resources have to be committed to just ruin an entire military’s day. Chalk it up to the march of specialization, but as armed forces got really efficient at blowing stuff up and killing lots of people using less of their own, they became increasingly bad at policing and maintaining hegemony.

Put another way, one can make peace with cruise missiles, but one may find it difficult to keep the peace with cruise missiles.

If history has any say in all of this, the correct way to get any power to disarm is to destroy their military in its entirety, kill a decent chunk of the population, and leave them in a state of such destitution that they can’t even afford weapons, let alone manufacture them. Maybe it’s a lesson that everyone sort of knows but just seems totally barbaric to act upon. The civilized way to fight a ~~war~~ military engagement is to blow up the other side’s toys, then essentially go home with crossed fingers and the hope that aid money will not go towards buying more arms.

But even on that count, Celestial Being is doing it wrong, the first step being destroying whole branches of a military instead of some slap on the wrist of a battle. So while 10 minute steamrolls are pretty, that’s all they are.

By introspect | Posted in anime | Tagged anime, Gundam 00, surveys | Comments (3)

The power of representation

February 11, 2008 – 3:06 am

My lack of a recording device is more than made up for by pretty much everyone else in attendance. I hope.

I think that being in the fourth row in the presence of an orchestrated Simple and Clean aka Hikari made my month, making this bleak February weather just a little less annoying. I’m going to put in a request for an orchestrated Passion next time.

I may eventually get around to describing more of VGL TO 2008 elsewhere, but two things stood out in their contribution to the fan-made feel of the show. By nature of its integration with music, the performances were all VGMV‘s. And what would VGL be without the typical rabble rousing?

The struggle for cultural recognition is something that strikes a chord for video game fans and anime fans alike. Whether either constitutes art, I’ll defer to others. But I can take a stab at the topic of music.

Back in 2002, having just finished Escaflowne, I called anime one of the few bastions of classical music, most of it Romantic era influenced. This was a bit premature – I only had a sample size of one – and my view has since been tempered. Certainly OST music is plentiful, there (usually?) being at least one OST disc per series. But while pieces take harmonic and melodic elements from the past, it is customary to leave sweeping scope and sheer length at the door.

When looking at the myriad of sub-2 minute tracks available, I’m constantly reminded that a soundtrack does not imply a score. I don’t know if it’s an incidental mindset, where composers write with a moment in mind, and don’t aspire to a more developed ideal. Here, games have a leg up because music is an integral part of the playing experience for RPG’s and RTS’, and longer is better. A more passive experience with pervasive music would be called an opera or musical, although an anime musical may be an experiment worth attempting.

But should length matter? A piece founded on repetition of a pretty theme is no different than just having an abridged version on loop, right? Right? I don’t think so, 4’33″ not-withstanding. One of the most important questions that should be asked of a piece is, “Where are we heading?” There is something to be said for conciseness, but an answer that is 2 minutes in utterance can only span so much colour, emotion, and texture, even if it’s being uttered by the Warsaw Philharmonic.

In two minutes and change, there is barely enough time to squeeze in a theme, a contrasting section (maybe), and another run at the theme in typical ternary form. And while that in itself can and is quite enjoyable, the standard that we are trying to hold it up to can consume ternary for breakfast, although instead of breakfast, it calls it exposition. If you’re looking for real development, it has a section all to itself.

Maybe it’s just a matter of united we stand, divided we fall. What I find myself gravitating to are longer pieces, from which snippets are taken to produce the incidental music we hear in an episode. These are strong enough to stand on their own, while serving the purpose that they were created for.

There has to be a critical mass of composers rolling moments into towering works. I don’t know that magical number, if it will ever be reached, or even if it should be. It probably is more economical to write multiple short segments than it is to drop a giant tone poem. The question then is, is music being written for the express service of another medium? Too often the answer is yes, which is why there exists few monuments amidst a mass of lesser structures.

By introspect | Posted in anime, music | Tagged anime, Escaflowne, hikki, music, surveys | Comments (3)

Olive branches cradling the world

February 7, 2008 – 2:22 am

Wasn’t it supposed to represent all that’s good on this planet? As opposed to a dysfunctional bunch of peacemakers (how’s that war on war going?), or some conspiracy device that showed up 17 episodes too late. The future is bright!

In related news, I have no idea how or why, but the red planet got a whole lot redder circa episode 17.

By introspect | Posted in anime | Tagged anime, asides, Dragonaut, Gundam 00 | Comments (2)