Unsolicited Advice

I mentioned before that Miyavi has a tendency to fold, spindle and mutilate language to suit his purposes; a lot of Japanese musicians do, particularly when they speak decent English. Gackt likes to spell things funny and use the LEGO method of building his own verbs, for one, and Amuro Namie flips back and forth between rhyming English words with either their native or their Japanese pronunciation. Miyavi is one of the worst -- or one of the best, depending on how you look at it. Below are the lyrics to a song of his called "Señor・Señora・Señorita". Right off the bat, you may notice that A) the title of this song is not technically in English or  Japanese, and B) those dots in between the words do not exist in your boringly standard alphabetic font. (They're part of the full-width katakana character set, in the Windows IME.) This happens a lot. Miyavi is not actually incomprehensible, but he believes that typographical conventions are for boring people. The people who t...

Another of the weird not-English people you'll see popping up on my scrobble list from time to time is Miyavi. Miyavi -- also credited under such typographical variations as Miyabi and MYV and 雅-MIYAVI- and Miyavi Ishihara, and probably others I've forgotten -- started out as the guitarist for a visual kei band called Dué le Quartz. When the group broke up somewhere around 2002ish, he wandered off to start what's become a rather successful solo career involving something like seven or eight studio albums plus other stuff, multiple world tours, and right now, the adventure of getting two very small children out of bed, into their clothes, and off to day care in a timely manner. Miyavi is a cheerful personification of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Chelsea boots. I mention the boots primarily because they accentuate the fact that he's rather pigeon-toed. He knows this, which impresses me. One, he doesn't care. He is in fact convinced (correctly, IMO) th...

Now that I've been forcibly reminded that I have a Last.fm account and should probably be scrobbling things to it, those of you who've been watching it have probably noticed a lot of weird stuff coming up on the list. My music collection is eclectic, to say the least. I spend a lot of time with my earbuds jammed in, either walking to and fro in the city or trying to do something at home which requires me to block out the noises of roommates or be perpetually distracted, and I find pop music to be one of the more convenient ways to habituate myself to the sounds of a new language, or practice ones I already know. I wind up with kind of a weird vocabulary that way, but it comes in handy more than you think. Whenever someone hears I speak X language, a good 50% of the time the next question is, "What does [song] say?" One of the artists that's been on my playlist lately is Gackt. I happen to like a lot of Japanese music. This makes people cringe, because a lot of t...

Still snowed in! The streets are being slowly cleared, but this is resulting in piles of snow over my head on the local sidewalks. Makes me nostalgic for college. The state-wide driving ban was lifted as of 4pm, but nobody's bothering, because nothing's working yet. The T is shut down until Monday. Cape Cod is apparently scheduled to be frozen again tonight, but up here on the mainland we're housebound but fine. My weird Aura of Protection Against Power Outages seems to still be working; nothing even flickered here, not even the telecomm. My house is reasonably calm. One flatmate is from Quebec City and the other grew up in Alaska. I think some of the neighbors are flipping out a bit, though -- I saw someone making frantic efforts to dig their car out of three feet of snow earlier. I laughed. I was bright enough to go to the supermarket on Thursday and stock up on the four college food groups (cocoa, caffeine, ramen, canned soup) and top off the first aid kit (Band-Ai...

Pointless rumor refutation for the day: Beyoncé was not lip synching the entire halftime show. Why we actually care about this is beyond me -- seriously, guys, the stage was a giant video screen, did you really think they were going to be production-free otherwise? -- but there were multiple points in the show where I can definitively say the lady's voice channel was in fact faded up. She could have gotten away with lip synching the initial acapella bars, but when she starts into the proper vocals to "Crazy In Love" and when she's doing all the random yodeling with the guitarist, there are multiple points where the sound is cut off early or comes in too quiet, when she's moving her handheld mic around too much. It may be back to synched while they're dancing to "Till The End of Time" and "Baby Boy", but she's live for the segments of both where she's asking for shoutouts from the audience. The vocals are also live for at least t...

Apparently I started snarking about snow just in time. The weather service has issued a blizzard warning for Friday and Saturday. Skipping over the part where New England seems to think that 24" of snow will bring civilization to its knees -- two feet of snow was considered to be an illegitimate weenie excuse for missing class in Flagstaff -- I'm actually kind of excited. I have quite a nice view of one of the infamous seven hills of Somerville from the living room window, and I'd like to see it properly blanketed. One of the non-traumatic memories I have of family holidays was many, many years ago, when my parents had an HO-gauge train set running around the base of the Christmas tree. It eventually crumbled, on account of two small children, a large dog, a small dog, probably a good dozen cats, and the desert climate making all the adhesive disintegrate, but I used to spend endless hours lying on the floor, examining all of the tiny workings. At the time, I thought the...

Noel Fielding is doing a thing again. Looks pretty flash, and I am unambiguously in favor of basically anything involving David Bowie. He's also doing press  for the thing, and once again I am probably finding this way  more interesting than I have any right to. The first thing that kinda cracked me up is that the interviewer has decided to ask him if he's a transvestite now. Despite actually trying to give an answer to that, Fielding has no idea. 'Well, I like dresses, so I guess?' is the kind of logicking-out-loud you get from someone you've just taken by surprise with a question to which they have not devoted two seconds of thought, although now that you've asked it seems obvious that they should have. People who know this stuff will just give you the answer and then  explain if they think it's required. I also find it amusing that they're only bugging him about this now , since he's started turning up to things in garments that are obviously d...