Voyage Junkie

If you're tired of seeing my videos all over the place, this is it for awhile, I promise!  I just finished my current backlog with this installment for my sister Clara.  It's a lonely piece set against a backdrop of autumn trees and a city skyline.  For this piece I listened to the music and took the feel of it to the set, where I improvised in relationship to the various physical structures.  I didn't want to get caught up in the 3/4 time and play into the song too much, so I kept things loose.  My only pet peeve: youtube, why did you choose such awkward thumbnails for this piece?  In post, it made sense to use fades with this dance.  Up until now I've used only quick cuts (or no cuts, in the case of installment two).  However, this dance needed more flow, to go with the 3/4 time.  But every thumbnail is during a fade!  Oh well.  Sorry, it's neither as super cool or as annoyingly ghostly as the thumbnail suggests, whichever you wer...

We went to the Mino Lantern Festival for the second time last weekend.  Matt and I went with two teachers from my school.  First stop: a very beige dinner at a beautiful traditional restaurant.  It was all very delicious and I didn't get sick off of it, which was a nice change.  Still, I don't really like it when all my food is beige and soft.  Something about that just doesn't sit right.  There was, however, a great rice soup with special rice made in a traditional stove, and kaki  for dessert.  The kaki , or persimmon, were crunchy and bright orange, so I ended the dinner with some color and texture, at least.  After dinner, we headed to the lanterns!  They were beautiful, and very different from last year's .  The only down side?  It rained a ton that day, so there were rain smudges all over the lantern cases. The streets this year were very quiet.  We ran into a few other pedestrians, but nothing compared to last y...

Hot on the heels of the last video comes number 3, made for my friend Steven Kwan.  This was actually filmed before number 2, but it required a lot more editing so it took a backseat in post-production.  The song Steven picked seemed to call for more than one performer, so I chose a place I could film from one continuous angle and edit into a duet.  I don't have super high-tech equipment, so there's places I had to deal with wind blowing the camera around and other such nonsense, but at least the project stays true to its indie roots. If You Give a Girl a Camera, Installment Three "I Have Something to Discuss" Music: An Argument With Myself  by Jens Lekman   Note: I earn no money from this blog, nor any place this video has been shown so far. Also, this song has strong language at one point, so parents beware!

Here's video number two in my new series!  This one is special because I filmed it entirely in one take.  I wanted to channel the genius of music videos like Christopher Walken's performance in " Weapon of Choice " by Fat Boy Slim, which if somehow you haven't seen because you've been in a hole, please watch it now!  In any case, it took some interesting communication between Matt and myself.  I was up on a hill and I obviously couldn't be listening to the music.  So he's down with the camera, calling up at me when things were changing in the music, and where he was pointing the camera.  I think we really pulled it off in this take, which is only the second full run-through.  Enjoy! If You Give a Girl a Camera, Installment Two "Go West, Young Man" Music:  Black Moon  by Wilco   Note: I earn no money from this blog, nor any place this video has appeared so far.

Chisato, me, and Masumi. Two of my favorite girls invited me to a dance performance of theirs last weekend.  The style is called buyou , a generic term used for traditional Japanese dance forms.  As we know it, modern buyou  is based on traditional performances by  kabuki players.  Those kabuki  players (all men, by the way) lifted the dances from the geisha  of the time, popularizing them in the theaters.  It's a classic example of the relationship between female prostitution and dance, as historically, dance forms done by women were relegated to brothels, brought to the stage by male performers, and finally reclaimed by women.  Today, women of all ages learn and perform buyou .  This honors the beauty of the history and serves to elevate the geisha  to the level they deserve: that of artist.  (To read more about the relationship between dance and prostitution, read "Something In The Way She Moves," by Wendy Buonaventura.)...

Last weekend Matt and I attended an ikebana exhibit as part of the many celebrations surrounding the annual "Culture Day" holiday.  One of my English teachers mentioned she went to this exhibit in her (rare) free time, and upon realizing that I enjoyed ikebana  also, she promptly gave me two tickets.  Of course we were both thrilled, because we haven't had a chance to see an exhibit like this yet.  All of the arrangements were lovely, and some of them were spectacular.  What follows is a pretty well-rounded summary of the exhibit, so there should be something for everyone's aesthetic. The first part of the exhibit was very cute and touching.  A few tables were set up to showcase young student work, and I mean very young students. To the left is an arrangement made by a first-grader, and to the right is one made by a third-grader.  I wouldn't have guessed that elementary school children made these two if the name cards hadn't been there to tell m...

My friend Audrey and I go bananas at purikura in Okazaki.

On a whim, I decided to start a new dance for camera series inspired by the musical choices of my friends.  It can be difficult for me to develop projects on my own, especially when my hands are tied by factors like lack of space, lack of dancers, etc.  So on the birthday of a longtime friend, I asked him to tell me his favorite song of the moment, and I made the video below to that song.  It turned out much better than I imagined, and I'm currently working on the next four installments of the series.  Enjoy!  If you like it, there will be more coming soon. If You Give a Girl a Camera, Installment One "You're Invited to a Tea Party" Music: Holiday  by Weezer Note: I earn no money from this blog, nor any place this video has appeared so far.

For our group Halloween party, we decided to go to Nagoya.  We dressed up and headed to a soba restaurant, which ended up being extremely traditional and as such not amenable to doing something gluten-free past plain 100% buckwheat soba and tofu with salt.  The cook actually told me that if he made vegetables without panko (bread crumbs), they wouldn't be delicious, so he wouldn't make them for me.  I was halfway through the food they would bring me when the irony hit me: salt tofu and plain soba was definitely much more delicious without non-breaded veggies than it would have been with said veggies.  Oh well, I'll just stick to making my own soba from now on.  The party was still great fun! Matt went as Harry Potter, which you can see close-up to the left.  He dressed up for school on Monday, too, and his kids went nuts for the costume.  My costume requires a bit more explanation: I dressed as the titular role from the ballet Giselle . ...