![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Tonight is the New Year Parade but we didn't go to it. We did go to the City, ostensibly to check out the art school for Emma, but she didn't last to the interview before she was sure it wasn't right for her. It's very much a Voc. school -- and vocational ed. is right for a kid who knows what they want to do, is in a hurry to get started, and wants to do something that can be taught in the voc.ed. milieu. Emma doesn't know what she wants to do, isn't in a hurry, and wants to take a broad range of subjects. And it was a little school, and she wants a big school. So we went to Chinatown for New Year tschotchkes of which we only got lucky envelopes and ran into the New Year street fair but no lion dancers, and then headed over to the Palace of the Legion of Honor because her art class require three gallery visits. I renewed my acquaintance with Rodin and also the French 18th century guys while the nice fellow managed to see everything in the building and Emma wrote up three pictures at tremendous great length.
At the New Year fair it hardly smelled like gunpowder at all, I guess because the lion dancers weren't there and also it was raining. Instead of the New Year toy stick things we used to buy when I was a girl, they had these different ones with pinwheels and flags and peacocks. They were okay. But the old ones used to gave gold plastic charms dangling from red and gold cord, and the charms were, of course, junks, fish, gourds, turtles, that sort of thing. They were like fishing rods who had gone to Heaven and Hell and come back to tell us the way of red and gold.
I have always loved the Chinese stringed instrument which I have today learned is called the erhu, but that was in a sort of distant way. Today there were guys bowing away on every other street corner -- which I have never noticed at New Year before -- and I kept hearing this one tune over and over again. I will track that tune down. I need to listen to erhu music all the time now. Every day, until it worms its way into my brain the way that Muszikas did when I was writing Esperanza Highway. Hmm. I wasn't listening to anything specially when I was writing The Conduit. Lately I've been mostly listening to this group of samples from the Piranha record catalog (hello, personhead pleonastic, I don't know the code for making that the way it's supposed to look and I don't want to go chasing it down in the middle of things), and I have to say that a couple of the songs have gotten so wrapped up in my brain that the earworm situation has gone to earmonsters and I can make myself sick hearing the echoes of "Chiri Chiri Bam Bam" or these Dalmatian waltzes all the time, day and night.
I found an erhu file at http://www.geocities.com/risheng99/instruments/erhu_sound.html but it's only 18 seconds long. But it loops really nicely. But I have to find something better.
No words today. Probably no words tomorrow. I will do something useful and something fun with the nice fellow.
At the New Year fair it hardly smelled like gunpowder at all, I guess because the lion dancers weren't there and also it was raining. Instead of the New Year toy stick things we used to buy when I was a girl, they had these different ones with pinwheels and flags and peacocks. They were okay. But the old ones used to gave gold plastic charms dangling from red and gold cord, and the charms were, of course, junks, fish, gourds, turtles, that sort of thing. They were like fishing rods who had gone to Heaven and Hell and come back to tell us the way of red and gold.
I have always loved the Chinese stringed instrument which I have today learned is called the erhu, but that was in a sort of distant way. Today there were guys bowing away on every other street corner -- which I have never noticed at New Year before -- and I kept hearing this one tune over and over again. I will track that tune down. I need to listen to erhu music all the time now. Every day, until it worms its way into my brain the way that Muszikas did when I was writing Esperanza Highway. Hmm. I wasn't listening to anything specially when I was writing The Conduit. Lately I've been mostly listening to this group of samples from the Piranha record catalog (hello, personhead pleonastic, I don't know the code for making that the way it's supposed to look and I don't want to go chasing it down in the middle of things), and I have to say that a couple of the songs have gotten so wrapped up in my brain that the earworm situation has gone to earmonsters and I can make myself sick hearing the echoes of "Chiri Chiri Bam Bam" or these Dalmatian waltzes all the time, day and night.
I found an erhu file at http://www.geocities.com/risheng99/instruments/erhu_sound.html but it's only 18 seconds long. But it loops really nicely. But I have to find something better.
No words today. Probably no words tomorrow. I will do something useful and something fun with the nice fellow.
no subject
clearly i have to check out piranha records.