Milestones of the past week, a new blog
Oct. 2nd, 2005 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tarigwaemirLowell House, on the Feast of the Holy Guardian Angels
On Thursday, Nan and I went to the Silk Road Ensemble concert at Sanders Theatre. In other words, I saw Yo-Yo Ma! Listened to him perform live! The premise of the Silk Road Project is to research, compose and perform ethnic music from nations along the historical Silk Road, and the Ensemble performs the works composed for its repertoire by native musicians using Western string instruments. Imagine listening to Chinese folk songs from a string quartet! What dazzled me was the creativity of orchestration required to reproduce the timbre of traditional instruments, and of course, the versatility of the performers themselves. Yo-Yo Ma is an amazing cellist. I know that shouldn't come as a surprise, but nonetheless it's true; you can tell there's this vibrancy of tone that's unique to a truly great musician.
During "Mugham-Sajahy" (from an Azerbaijani composer), an artist on stage used some sort of Islamic calligraphic pen to paint in ink, in response to the music. They set it up so that we could observe the process--he would draw lines of ink and smudge them with his thumb, in a seemingly careless manner, until the picture resolved into the figure of a dancing Sufi or an Arabic inscription. Once, he drew a woman in profile and then the screen transitioned to play an animation of that woman dancing (I imagine he must have drawn at least a thousand "freeze-frame" images in advance to make that work), and it was quite the most amazing thing I've ever seen. The concert finished with a performance of "Blue as the Turquoise Night of Neyshabur" where the string quartet was expanded to include several Harvard students and three Iranian musicians with traditional instruments, one of whom was the composer himself. He had tears in his eyes at the end of the performance. Oh, and they gave an encore, which was rather different in style but equally brilliant. I need to go and buy these albums if I ever have money.
Yesterday, I met up with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ayatsujik to go to a dinner hosted by The Concord Review in honor of the New England Regional History Challenge, a new competition to encourage the writing of history research papers in public high schools. We were invited as authors who had been published before in the Review, but really, for me, it was a chance to hang out with ayatsujik and eat good food. And oh, was the food excellent. We stood around the Old State House, surrounded by plexiglas museum cases, chatting about this and that as servers brought up platters of delicious hors d'oeuvres. ^_^ And then the dinner! Soup, entree, dessert and coffee...that crème brûlée was divine. I was seated between a columnist from the Boston Globe and a lawyer who worked for some sort of wireless network corporation. I actually really enjoyed listening to their conversations, and it was kind of amusing to attempt to explain to various people what sort of research I was doing (having been introduced as a biology major) and why I chose molecular biology. A very rarefied atmosphere, this group of successful, well-educated, middle-aged professionals, who are just beginning to raise children and share a set of certain assumptions about life and society. They are also all very American, by which I mean that few of them are immigrants or children of immigrants (which I suppose isn't very American at all, technically speaking), which is why I found it particularly interesting that so many of them had adopted children from overseas. Anyway, I enjoyed myself.
Oh, and I finally had an opportunity to wear a dress, which I haven't done in over a year and a half. The dress in question has only been worn a grand total of three times in the past four years (I intended to wear it for junior semiformal all the way back in high school but of course I never ended up going to semiformal). I have to admit that I do like dressing up, even though dresses themselves are awfully uncomfortable.
In other news, I've...created yet another blog. Well,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
worldserpent posted recently about Japanese blogs and whether anyone blogged in Japanese, and it occurred to me that it might be interesting to attempt blogging (regularly, I mean, and not on LJ) in Korean. >_> Korean sites all require national ID numbers to register for any service (I found that incredibly annoying when attempting to send an e-card in Korean to my mother on her birthday), and for the case of overseas users, they ask for a photocopy of a passport, driver's license, citizenship certificate, etc. It used to be that you would have to mail or fax this to the place within one week of signing up for the service in question, but apparently these days, you can just upload an image file, and you're set to go in less than a day.
So I opened an account with Naver (which would be worthwhile even without a blog because Naver is a portal for about a million useful services which I never had access to before). The system is actually not all that different from LJ. For example, there's a "neighbors" feature that's kind of like the friending system here. On the other hand, there are, shall we say, uniquely Korean "netizen" culture quirks, like the option to set background music for every page and every post. -_- (I think background music is the most annoying thing ever.) Also, a guestbook, a "photolog" and "memolog", the ability to update not only posts but pictures by cell phone. All extraneous features that I don't really want or need in a blog, but it's interesting to observe these differences. But they also do have everything that I do want, like a trackback system, a XML feed, a categories feature, and enough customization to keep me happy. It remains to be seen if I'll actually update the blog and if I'll have anything meaningful to say in Korean other than "Why do I waste so much time on the Internet?" but if you want to take a look, it's here.
Yours &c.
On Thursday, Nan and I went to the Silk Road Ensemble concert at Sanders Theatre. In other words, I saw Yo-Yo Ma! Listened to him perform live! The premise of the Silk Road Project is to research, compose and perform ethnic music from nations along the historical Silk Road, and the Ensemble performs the works composed for its repertoire by native musicians using Western string instruments. Imagine listening to Chinese folk songs from a string quartet! What dazzled me was the creativity of orchestration required to reproduce the timbre of traditional instruments, and of course, the versatility of the performers themselves. Yo-Yo Ma is an amazing cellist. I know that shouldn't come as a surprise, but nonetheless it's true; you can tell there's this vibrancy of tone that's unique to a truly great musician.
During "Mugham-Sajahy" (from an Azerbaijani composer), an artist on stage used some sort of Islamic calligraphic pen to paint in ink, in response to the music. They set it up so that we could observe the process--he would draw lines of ink and smudge them with his thumb, in a seemingly careless manner, until the picture resolved into the figure of a dancing Sufi or an Arabic inscription. Once, he drew a woman in profile and then the screen transitioned to play an animation of that woman dancing (I imagine he must have drawn at least a thousand "freeze-frame" images in advance to make that work), and it was quite the most amazing thing I've ever seen. The concert finished with a performance of "Blue as the Turquoise Night of Neyshabur" where the string quartet was expanded to include several Harvard students and three Iranian musicians with traditional instruments, one of whom was the composer himself. He had tears in his eyes at the end of the performance. Oh, and they gave an encore, which was rather different in style but equally brilliant. I need to go and buy these albums if I ever have money.
Yesterday, I met up with
ayatsujik to go to a dinner hosted by The Concord Review in honor of the New England Regional History Challenge, a new competition to encourage the writing of history research papers in public high schools. We were invited as authors who had been published before in the Review, but really, for me, it was a chance to hang out with ayatsujik and eat good food. And oh, was the food excellent. We stood around the Old State House, surrounded by plexiglas museum cases, chatting about this and that as servers brought up platters of delicious hors d'oeuvres. ^_^ And then the dinner! Soup, entree, dessert and coffee...that crème brûlée was divine. I was seated between a columnist from the Boston Globe and a lawyer who worked for some sort of wireless network corporation. I actually really enjoyed listening to their conversations, and it was kind of amusing to attempt to explain to various people what sort of research I was doing (having been introduced as a biology major) and why I chose molecular biology. A very rarefied atmosphere, this group of successful, well-educated, middle-aged professionals, who are just beginning to raise children and share a set of certain assumptions about life and society. They are also all very American, by which I mean that few of them are immigrants or children of immigrants (which I suppose isn't very American at all, technically speaking), which is why I found it particularly interesting that so many of them had adopted children from overseas. Anyway, I enjoyed myself.Oh, and I finally had an opportunity to wear a dress, which I haven't done in over a year and a half. The dress in question has only been worn a grand total of three times in the past four years (I intended to wear it for junior semiformal all the way back in high school but of course I never ended up going to semiformal). I have to admit that I do like dressing up, even though dresses themselves are awfully uncomfortable.
In other news, I've...created yet another blog. Well,
worldserpent posted recently about Japanese blogs and whether anyone blogged in Japanese, and it occurred to me that it might be interesting to attempt blogging (regularly, I mean, and not on LJ) in Korean. >_> Korean sites all require national ID numbers to register for any service (I found that incredibly annoying when attempting to send an e-card in Korean to my mother on her birthday), and for the case of overseas users, they ask for a photocopy of a passport, driver's license, citizenship certificate, etc. It used to be that you would have to mail or fax this to the place within one week of signing up for the service in question, but apparently these days, you can just upload an image file, and you're set to go in less than a day.So I opened an account with Naver (which would be worthwhile even without a blog because Naver is a portal for about a million useful services which I never had access to before). The system is actually not all that different from LJ. For example, there's a "neighbors" feature that's kind of like the friending system here. On the other hand, there are, shall we say, uniquely Korean "netizen" culture quirks, like the option to set background music for every page and every post. -_- (I think background music is the most annoying thing ever.) Also, a guestbook, a "photolog" and "memolog", the ability to update not only posts but pictures by cell phone. All extraneous features that I don't really want or need in a blog, but it's interesting to observe these differences. But they also do have everything that I do want, like a trackback system, a XML feed, a categories feature, and enough customization to keep me happy. It remains to be seen if I'll actually update the blog and if I'll have anything meaningful to say in Korean other than "Why do I waste so much time on the Internet?" but if you want to take a look, it's here.
Yours &c.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-02 05:19 pm (UTC)Keep up the good work! Cheers!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-02 06:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-02 06:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-02 09:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-02 06:25 pm (UTC)(As for the friending, is there a 'friends only' security feature like LJ? Do they also have an RSS feed?)
Yes, with a lot of East Asian sites, there seems to be this tinny midi thing. -_-
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-02 06:39 pm (UTC)There are "friends-only" and "private" settings as well as a "mutual-friends-only" setting. I think you can set up groups as well, although I don't know if you can filter by group. It's pretty cool. I'm not sure about the RSS feed; the only feed link I can find is labeled XML but I think it might actually be RSS-compliant.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-02 06:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-02 10:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-02 07:34 pm (UTC)I know what you mean perfectly when you say "나에겐 감각이 없는 것 같다" about Korean. I used to write some things in Korean too--except now, I'm afraid that I may have lost that feeling of inspiration and "more than just words" kind of emotion. <-- I know, weird, confusing!
Perhaps I should get one too? XD
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-02 09:09 pm (UTC)No, it's all right; I know what you mean! ^_^;; Although in my case, I never quite had that "feeling" in the first place...::sighs:: Anyway, if you do get one, let me know! I can add you to my 이웃브로그 list. XD
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-06 02:33 am (UTC)I was going to respond to the challenge you made XD and click on your journal, but all thoughts flew out of my head when I read about you going to Yo Yo Ma.
Dude. I am so, frigging jealous. I would have paid muchly to go see live and in concert. I mean, I like listening to CDs and all, but to hear him play ... wow.
The Concord Review even sounds rather interesting and neat. ^_^ Congrats on being published there, from such a young age.
BTW: Your intelligence makes me seriously OMG!JEALOUS too. XD
But sincerely, wow.
Did I ever mention how much I like reading your journal?
-muri
pst: Dang it, now I forgot my line that I wanted to put in. *sighs* Oh well, I think I owe you a fic anyway, XD. Still. Good grief.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-06 02:35 am (UTC)I hope I made sense up there *points* But wow. You have such a cool life! ^_^
-muri
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-06 02:52 am (UTC)The Concord Review is actually a history journal for high school students, so I wasn't being particularly precocious by being published there. ^_^;; But I'm really glad to hear you like reading my LJ! It's a relief to hear that I'm not just boring people with my babbling. ^_______^ I love reading yours too; you always have such nice, thoughtful posts, especially about writing, and I only wish that you'd update more often so I can have the pleasure of reading more of your thoughts. XD Of course, that would be selfish of me, since you have a busy life and all, but I'm afraid we readers are a selfish lot. >_>;; Anyway, thanks Muri! <3