A new episode has been released. You can find both the podcast audio and the full text of the original short story Sunrise Set on its episode page.
In terms of the podcast itself, it should soon be available on Spotify!
As such, before applying to submit it there, I made the decision to retire a large number of past episodes: those that were readings of old fairytales and children’s stories. While all of those old works are in the public domain, the specific versions I read in the episodes were translations and retellings that are still copyrighted, and so I have no right to reproduce them for the podcast.
If, at some point, I decide to write my own retellings and record those instead, classic tales will return to this podcast. Otherwise, I may simply link to retellings that I enjoy and discuss the stories’ underpinnings.
This was the first morning I haven’t woken up in a cold sweat in at least a week.
Also, it was my birthday yesterday.
Ah, the little things we take for granted.
I couldn’t get this Friday, my actual birthday, off work so I took Monday off instead, and I have every intention of using the long weekend to get more words in and do some much-needed cleaning up in the apartment. I celebrated my birthday by having a private crying spell (a yearly tradition), and feeling silently grateful that I am still alive — a feat that manages to seem both miraculous and nondescript.
I received messages from family, friends, and acquaintances, wore a favourite outfit to work, and afterwards, went grocery shopping with my parents. When I got home, after having given a very excited Scout his supper, I noticed that I’d just missed a phone call from my grand-mère and so I quickly called her back, hoping she would pick up. She did.
We had a short, but really heartening conversation, laughing a lot about nothing, really. It feels like a privilege to have conversations with her now, because for a very long time, I hadn’t been able to.
When I was really little, before the age of six, maybe earlier, I spoke French quite readily. I am told that French had been my first language, the language that my papa and I spoke to one another in, the only language his side of the family understood and spoke.
I have a crystal-clear memory of being in my grand-mère’s vegetable garden behind her house, and explaining to her that a coccinelle, in English, was a ladybug. She’d been showing me how they were nibbling on the leaves of some of her plants, and I’d been excited to share the word with her. I must have been three or four years old, and we would have been visiting my grandparents on their farm in Québec for summer vacation just before heading on back to Gander, Newfoundland, where were living at the time. She still has that memory too. Because it was the last time I truly spoke to her until I was well into adulthood.
I spoke English with my mom and with her side of the family (who only understood and spoke in English) but I had favoured French in my early childhood, apparently. That changed for some reason (or maybe a host of them) around the time I turned six.
Whereas before, I had spoken in French with both my papa and my other relatives, I suddenly became terrified of speaking in French around them. I understand French, and particularly the thick, Québecois country dialect that my relatives speak, very well. I went to a French school and was completely fine speaking in French there, but in the presence of my close family members or relatives, I could no longer utter a word. I would merely nod my head yes, or shake my head no. After many years, I was able to start saying the words oui (yes) and non (no). Then in my teenage years, I became able to add s’il-vous-plait (please) and merci (thank you) to my yes/no utterances when I wasn’t too anxious.
I always knew what I wanted to say, and the words would form in my mind, but I couldn’t get my mouth to open — or if it did, no sound would come out. And when it did, it was limited to the phrases above.
I couldn’t say je t’aime (I love you), so I’d give my grand-mère a hug instead when she said so to me, and hope she recognized the sentiment being returned in my expression as well.
Though I was never formally diagnosed, I had likely developed selective mutism as a child.
In my late twenties, I began speaking a little more. Just a little, and only when I was one-on-one with a relative, which I had avoided as much as possible as a child and as a teenager, because it had made me feel too anxious, knowing I couldn’t hold a conversation with them.
Knowing they couldn’t understand why.
I… couldn’t understand why.
A couple of years before I turned thirty, after a long, slow decline in health and mobility, after going from being a hardworking, hands-on farmer, to a person receiving round-the-clock hospice care, my grand-père passed away peacefully. The last time I’d visited him, he’d regaled us all with some stories (including one about a time he’d taken my grand-mère on a date), and had been trying to make us all laugh, as he usually did. Just before it had been time to leave, he’d taken my hand and exclaimed, c’est si p’tite! (it’s so tiny!) and started crying through a laugh. Everyone else was crying. I couldn’t, not until later, privately.
I just held his huge hand. Smiled warmly back at him.
It’s how I wanted him to remember me.
So many people packed into the church the day of his funeral, so many more people than I had expected, so many people that I didn’t know. As one of his immediate family members, and as his oldest grandchild, I’d been one of those lining up along the pews to greet each guest who arrived, each one of them stopping to offer their condolences and to shake our hands as they filed in and took their seats. It felt strange, like I should be offering many of them my condolences instead, because some of them had known him far better than I did, even though I only exist because he once lived.
I still spoke very little at that point, but my grand-mère had made a request of me a few days earlier; she had wanted me to read a prayer in French, aloud, during the ceremony. I didn’t know how I would manage it. I didn’t know if my voice would fail me. But it was important to her, and I’d given her so little over the years, given my grand-père even less, maybe, so I accepted. The night before the funeral, my grand-mère handed me the prayer which had been printed on a sheet of white paper, then folded twice. It was long. It took up the entire page. She took my hands and thanked me for agreeing, told me how much it meant to her that I would read it. I believed her. I didn’t know how I would do it, just that I needed to. Just that I wanted to.
I read it over several times, but didn’t memorize it. Couldn’t.
There were butterflies in my stomach.
I had an accent now when I spoke in French, my first language.
It was sad, but it was reality.
Partway through the ceremony, the priest called me up to the front of the church, and I held the paper in my hands, stood up, and went up to the microphone, smoothing the paper out on the little stand in front of me, holding my tears in check the way I had been the whole day, while everyone else cried.
I began to recite the prayer, and my voice worked.
It was amplified by the microphone, echoed throughout the hall.
I said the words for both of my grandparents, and then I returned to my seat, shaking, finally.
My relatives all expressed their gratitude afterwards for my having recited the prayer, my grand-mère most of all. I was glad — am glad — that I could do that for her. That small-huge thing.
.
The weather that afternoon was perfect. Sunny, warm, but with a nice breeze.
We went back to my grandparents’ house, to their farm with its little mountain view in the distance, and stayed outside till supper, most of the cousins (and some of the aunts and uncles) playing catch and football on the lawn near the vegetable garden, while I sat under a tree in front of the house and read a book, my close relatives stopping by in ones and twos to comment on the book I was reading in Japanese, and to talk to me a little, while I did my best to respond in shaky French.
I like to think that my grand-père was gifting us that perfect outdoor weather as a final goodbye.
It’s such a good memory, and incredibly bittersweet.
After that day, I started being able to have conversations with my grand-mère, even ones over the telephone — which is saying a lot, because for most of my twenties, I couldn’t even have conversations on the phone in English.
I initiated a ten-minute conversation with my grand-mère on the phone yesterday.
And we laughed, and caught up, and chatted, as though we’d been doing it all our lives.
That does still sort of feel like a small miracle.
I don’t remember the true beginning of the events that followed, but I have a sense that I had spent the previous day at work. Where I worked was a strangely vertical, cramped area above someone’s rather gargantuan living room. I recognized the living room. It was either a very strange imagining of the living room of someone I grew up with, or it was a living room that I used to dream about as a child. Either way, my workstation was above this living room, which had a chasm in the centre of it. I never saw the chasm, I just had the very profound sense that it was there, and that that was why we kept our gazes high or level, and had to use things like ledges, bridges, and rope-swings to get from one side of the living room to the other. When I was in that lower, living room space, I felt like I was a kid again, interacting with other kids. Moving around and across the living room with trepidation, gravity, and a paradoxical ease that I may not felt as an adult. There, I played video games with the other kids whenever we reached the TV — more than likely, we were playing on N64, Dreamcast, or PlayStation, but I don’t remember any specific game or console from the dream. Up some steep, carpeted, curving stairs, was my cramped, carpeted workspace, with other coworkers. I didn’t recognize any of them, and maybe that is simply because I didn’t truly interact with any of them in the dream.
It was a new day.
It seems that I lived with my parents, or at least near enough to them that I could go over in the morning before work and ask if I could drive one of their four cars to my office. This is strange for two reasons: I do not currently and have never had a driver’s licence, and they have never had more than one car at any given time. To make matters stranger, after accepting, my parents told me to take the car “at the end”, a vintage vehicle, newly restored and looking pristine.
I protested, but they insisted.
Off we went to work — and I do mean “we”. My parents also insisted on coming along. I’m not certain what the rationale was, but when we arrived, my mother wanted to have a look around and, of course, chat with anyone in the vicinity. I felt very stressed, knowing this, but for whatever reason I had truly needed to borrow a car to get to work that morning, so I mustered up patience and tried to get on with things. Sure enough, as soon as we’d parked and gotten out of the car, she began chatting with everyone we passed, though thankfully, it seemed, not with anyone I worked for or with directly. From the outside, my office appeared to be a trailer, a truck, or a luxurious shipping container — that was the sense I had, even though I never looked at it directly during the dream. It seemed to have some sort of vertical protuberance, like a tower, jutting out of it. This small-seeming exterior of course belied the fact that the fully-carpeted interior contained an upper floor that served as an office for who-knows-how-many workers or companies, an enormous split-level main floor that served as the house of someone I had been friends or acquaintances with as a child, and in the centre of all of that (of course) a fucking abyss.
No big deal.
My mother wanted to come into the office and attempted to do so, despite my protests.
The next thing I remember is that I was just outside the back of a Winners, and that it was winter — or at least cold enough for me to have shrugged into what seemed to be a new coat before walking over. I didn’t work there. Nevertheless, I went through the back door — me and a couple pushing a cat in a coat in a stroller. I found the sight both endearing and bizarre. Though I did not seem to find it unusual to be entering the store from the nearly-unmarked back. The room that we found ourselves in was well-lit, but had strange dimensions, with a winding foot path cut through piles and stacks of children’s toys, mainly. The couple wheeled over to a miniature aisle (child-height) in order to look through new clothes for their curiously-calm cat.
In the top-left corner of the room, there was a very small flat escalator, moving in an oval around that small section of the room; a loop with no apparent purpose other than perhaps to entertain children and keep them in one place. I got on it and when I did, I was at such an angle that I could look through a large window set into that back corner, looking down into the rest of the store, which strangely seemed to have been built continually downward, below ground level. From that vantage point, I also noticed that down below the window there was a separate conveyor belt that you could get on in order to be taken down there.
So I got the hell on it.
Down below was a large, mostly empty atrium of sorts, with a few patrons passing through it, mainly crossing from doors and hallways at opposite ends of the room. I turned away from the conveyor belt and followed a rather dark corridor leading back from where the upper-level window had been.
The next thing I remember was being in my aunt ’s living room, though a very strange version of it. She’s the one that used to babysit me and make me Delicate Cookies when I was a kid living in Newfoundland; still one of the best recipes in my collection. I don’t get the sense that she looked like herself in the dream, but I knew instinctively that it was her. I was with at least one other person — my brother, maybe, but I can’t remember who it was. In her house the living room, dining room, and kitchen are all on the same level, with a door separating the living room from the two other spaces. In the dream version of her house, the living room and darkened dining room were on the bottom level, and then walking up a small set of stairs took you to a small, purposeless landing, where you could take another small set of stairs to reach the kitchen at the top. It was all open plan.
In reality, she is still sound of mind and reasonably healthy, physically, but in the dream, she seemed confused and kept putting things in unusual places. At one point, she startled when I came near her and explained that she’d actually been sleepwalking the whole time. I felt unnerved. The house was very dark, all the curtains drawn; the only light that had been on had been the one above the stove. She led me and whoever I was with away from the kitchen, over toward a set of double doors. Beyond them, it was broad daylight, and other relatives were sitting on the patio chatting and laughing as if nothing had been amiss.
I sat and stayed for a while, but then suddenly I was walking out into another large atrium, brightly-lit and far more cavernous than the one at Winners had been. I recognized this place; much like the living room abyss, this was a location I had dreamt of more than once in my childhood.
It was the McDonald’s corporate headquarters, it was the 90s again, and a gaggle of families were there with their children, sitting at the heavy, restaurant-style tables scattered throughout the atrium, eating cake. Some sort of celebration was underway, but we had likely arrived just as it was winding down.
My parents led me and my brother through that carpeted main hall without stopping for cake.
We were little kids again. Six and three.
One section of that main hall had been walled off in glass or plastic barriers and filled with child-size tables and chairs so that kids could mingle freely on the inside while their parents watched on the outside.
For some reason this detail stuck out in my mind: one kid in a dress, sitting on a chair, shoes just barely touching the carpeted floor, eating cake.
I don’t know what my parents were looking for, but it clearly wasn’t cake.
They led us all the way over to the other side of the atrium, where barely anyone had chosen to sit, and then into a corridor. It was carpeted too, and felt both too-clean and still-grimy, the way old airports tend to when they don’t get the foot traffic they used to. It was too quiet back there, and I started to feel uncomfortable.
Then my little brother and I were alone.
I don’t know why, just that we were.
So we had to be brave — I had to be brave.
I took my brother’s hand and started to walk back through the corridor we were in, though I had no idea where we were going, or how to find our parents again. I tried not to let my fear show. A few people passed us, but we weren’t to talk to strangers, and curiously, they paid us no mind. Finally, after wandering through several corridors without success, we came upon a glass door that led into a unlit room. My little brother opened it cautiously, and together we stepped just inside, the both of us holding the door ajar. The light from the corridor gave us some sense of what was in there. To our left were pools of water, the water running and overflowing gently into each one. I didn’t like being in the dark, but there was something strangely calming about the dark pools of water, like they were the beginnings of an aquatic garden.
My little brother tightened his grip on my hand, and I looked over at him quizzically.
Which is when my eyes caught on the sight that had alarmed him.
Eyes.
Countless eyes flashing back at us from the other side of the room, the humanoid figures that belonged to them shrouded in shadow.
A cry caught in my throat, and holding even more firmly to my little brother’s hand, I pulled him back from the room into the hallway, the glass door shutting behind us as we broke into a run, going back the way we had come.
Or at least I assumed we were heading back the way we had come.
We were utterly lost, fear sharpening our reflexes and making our panicked minds go fuzzy.
At last, we ran into another room, this one lit from above by pot lights and filled with rows of large, oval tables, some sections of the room fenced off with plain chain-link panels. But there they were: our parents.
Sitting at one of the tables and eating some sort of meal — though not cake.
The rest of the room was conspicuously empty, and my hackles rose.
My parents seemed rather relaxed and unbothered, and somehow I knew that their food had been laced with a drug of some kind.
We needed to leave, all four of us, as quickly as possible.
Something told me that the eyes that had stared back at us from the depths of that darkened water-garden had been adults like our parents at some point, having been whisked away to be experimented upon after having ingested the tainted food. I kept urging our parents to follow us and leave, but they didn’t have any real sense of urgency. They were humouring me.
I kept hold of my little brother’s hand, and we led the way, but the hallway was darker coming back out of the room than it had been going in, and we slipped off into a side passage where I hoped we could avoid notice so that our parents wouldn’t be captured. This new corridor’s walls were made of curving glass, and utterly dark; I thought there might be some sort of liquid on the other side of them, but I couldn’t be certain. The floor was a wooden boardwalk suspended in water and lit dimly from below. Water sloshed up over the wood, the walkway bobbing and swaying, as we made our way across.
My brother and I were so busy looking at our feet to make sure we were walking on the planks of wood and not getting our little feet caught in the watery spaces between them, that we didn’t notice the researcher’s approach until it was too late.
From the depths of the snaking, eerily-lit corridor, a figure wearing a full diving outfit, complete with glass and metal bubble helmet came lunging toward us, and —
I woke up.
I woke up to Scout giving me a quizzical look from the end of the bed, because I’d just emerged from a frankendream and probably seemed rather flustered and sweaty. I’m not actually certain when I fell asleep, but given that the dream-turned-nightmare went four levels deep, I have to assume I was under the influence of the stranger parts of my subconscious for a good hour or two.
Not long after that, I made myself presentable, gave Scout and early supper, and headed out to my brother’s house for a family dinner.
A dinner that featured a roast expertly-prepared by my brother’s girlfriend, sweet corn shucked by my brother and I (inexpertly, according to our very amused and somewhat exasperated father), and fried cod tongues, a belated birthday present for our mother, whose favourite food is exactly that.
As soon as I got in the door, though, I was greeted by two cardboard boxes: one filled with some LPs from my mom’s twenties, and one filled with tons of not-for-sale singles from her days as a radio DJ and morning show host that she’d been allowed to take home from work and keep. My father didn’t have any records, because instead of those, he’d been collecting 8-tracks and cassettes, all of which he’s long had converted to mp3 files. He seemed particularly delighted when we unearthed a single by The Alan Parsons Project (Side A: Eye In the Sky / Side B: Gemini), one of several bands, apparently, whose works he’d collected almost entirely on cassette.
I felt a little indignant about the fact that my parents used to listen to those sorts of bands but would always just put on soft rock radio stations at home instead of playing cassettes/records of albums that they personally collected. What gives?! Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the music on those stations. I just. Could have had more exposure to rock and albums made to be listened to as whole works of art much earlier — rather than simply listening to individual songs in isolation the way I did for most of my childhood.
The important thing, I suppose, is that I’m trying to work through a backlog of cool sonic journeys now, as an adult. And enjoying all the new ones that are coming out currently.
ALICE NINE.‘s as-yet-unnamed album will be one such epic sonic journey, I’m quite sure, especially given how cool the lead track Funeralis, and the passion that Saga currently seems to be pouring into the recording of said album, if the following tweet is anything to go by:
Half of the album has bass solos, I’m playing acoustic guitar the whole way through on I dunno how many songs, And I’m singing the chorus, rapping, growling, chanting, and doing backup vocals, so 😇 What’s my part now? 😇
I love Saga deeply. Reading that update made me so very happy. Let your passion and musical talent be unleashed even more! My ears, my mind, my heart, and my imagination are in for such a treat on release day! 楽しみだよ！♥
Ahem. Back to discussing the family dinner.
When my mom noticed the gold pearl ring on my finger, while we were chatting between supper and dessert, she expressed how pleased she was that I still wore it, because she was the one that gave it to me when I was twelve (it used to be hers), but then my father chimed in to explain something about it that I hadn’t known. Apparently it had originally housed a ruby (mom’s birthstone), but the ruby had fallen out long ago. When they’d been living in San Diego as newlyweds, they’d repaired it by having a pearl set in the ring instead. My mom insisted that the pearl had been chosen from a clam “at a Japanese garden”, while my father had insisted that the pearl had been bought “at Sea World”; maybe they were somehow referring to the same place. My little heirloom just got more mysterious.
After dessert (an incredibly rich wild blueberry custard pie that my brother’s girlfriend had picked up from the farmer’s market), me and my brother’s girlfriend exchanged an inordinate number of cat photos (…okay, I admit, it was mostly me showing her a ridiculous number of Scout photos), as well as some recommendations. She advised me to listen to Lizzo’s newest album Special (I did so while doing dishes this morning and it elevated the entire experience into something playful and joy-filled), while I advised her to listen to Beyoncé’s RENAISSANCE in full because, where Lemonade was an album imbued with a confidence born out of anger and hurt, RENAISSANCE is an album filled with confidence couched in ease and trust — both powerful for different reasons. I also recommended she listen to the latest Billy Talent, Crisis of Faith (a rallying cry for social justice and compassion wrapped up in a truly hard-hitting, excellent sound), and to my brother, I recommended OFF-TRACK, Steve Neville‘s first solo album, created and recorded while he was undergoing cancer treatment, and you can hear all the humanity and raw emotion of that experience in the sound on the record. His sister Jacquie Neville and former bandmate Liam Jaeger participated in the creation of the album as well.
As an aside, the Neville siblings and Liam Jaeger were the founding members of The Balconies, one of my favourite bands, which happens to have been formed in my hometown of Ottawa, Ontario. I never actually attended a show when Steve was part of the band (he left shortly before I managed to see them live), but I did attend the very last concert they played for their 10th Anniversary on February 3, 2018. It was stellar. They also released a final album at that point, “Show You“, that boasted recordings from 2012 — compared to their last two albums, Fast Motions and Rhonda, the sound on Show You was a lot more ‘garage’, and it featured earlier arrangements of songs that had come out on later albums. It was a great surprise release at the time, is what I’m saying, and I recommend it.
Just after dessert, my father made a big announcement: he’s going to be interviewed for an internet security podcast this week (he’s a big name in the white hat/security world). As someone who listens to a lot of podcasts during the workweek especially, I thought that was pretty cool and I’m looking forward to listening to the episode, even if a lot of the shop talk goes over my head.
If you’re curious, some of the podcasts I listen to regularly are ones like RISK! (since like 2014 or 2015 — incredible cross-section of true stories that are moving, hilarious, filthy, shocking, and thought-provoking), Getting Curious with JVN, Writers Ink, The Secret Room, What Was That Like, The Dark Paranormal, Financial Feminist, Hiroto’s Voicy, Kei’s SYNERGY twitcast, and lately, the back-catalogue of Supercontext, which I can already tell is going to become a bit of an obsession for me. I’m currently listening to a detailed examination of David Bowie’s Blackstar album, and then I’m on to an absolute treat… an in-depth analysis of one of my very favourite comics: volume one of the incomparable space opera, Saga (art by Fiona Staples, story by Brian K. Vaughn).
And no, it’s not a favourite just because it shares a name with Saga (though I love that link). It definitely delivers on the “space opera” front, has a diverse cast of characters (including plenty of queer ones), incredible art and witty writing, is steamy and filthy in all the right ways as well as being perfectly fluffy and romantic when the mood calls for it, will move you to tears, and then later make you laugh with its often dry and irreverent sense of humour.
It’s a favourite because the comic series itself, both visually and narratively, is stellar.
And I was today-years-old when I realized that they actually started releasing new issues of Saga again this January after a long hiatus; their 10th volume is going to be published this October, so I might wait to buy that and then start buying single issues after that. Yet another thing to get very excited about.
Okay, I’ll stop waxing lyrical about Saga2. （´・ω・｀）
It’s a long weekend, so I get to stay home and do more creating tomorrow. Back to writing and editing TE9…
According to a few commenters and a translator in another piece of coverage from another network, this singer wasn’t singing O Canada, but rather a very old Cree song that could be put to the melody of the national anthem.
In spite of the Catholic church and the Canadian government’s efforts to tear apart indigenous families with the goal of extinguishing the many indigenous languages and cultures nationwide, she sings. They failed. She will not be silenced, she rejects the shame these institutions tried to force on her and on thousands of other children, so many of whom did not survive the ordeal.
I highly recommend listening to the following two podcasts, both of which are investigations into the atrocities carried out in two different residential schools in two different provinces in Canada. Each podcast centers the stories of those who survived, in the survivors’ own voices. They both also highlight the effects of intergenerational trauma, as well as how the indigenous communities draw upon, protect, and revive their own cultures in order to continue to heal.
As a primer into how the Canadian government’s attempt at carrying out this cultural genocide culminated in the establishment of these long-running residential schools, I recommend this quick but incredibly informative read:
At the very least, we need to understand what happened, to bear witness both to the truth of the horrific abuse that occurred, along with the true beauty and complexity of the indigenous languages and cultures that have survived and now flourish despite colonial attempts to quash them.
The weight of shame and silence is not for survivors to bear.
The Cree singer gave voice to so many.
You don’t need to understand a word of Cree to understand the spirit of her message.
From their fourth studio album GEMINI, the song birth in the death is performed not only during ALICE NINE. concerts with Show on vocals, but frequently features on THE ALTERNATIVE’s setlists as well, with Saga doing the vocals (if you are subscribed to their note, Nao posted footage of one of THE ALTERNATIVE’s performances of the song here). For their 15th anniversary concert in 2019 they played a beautiful rendition that resonated through the atmosphere of the outdoor venue. During their 17th anniversary concert in 2021, ALICE NINE. played all of the songs from the album GEMINI (including a really emotional, uplifting rendition of birth in the death); in anticipation of that concert, they also put up a video on their official note with all 5 of them reminiscing about the making of the album.
You can find a translation of the song’s lyrics here.
It’s always best to get a feel for the creative process from the artists themselves. Here are a few excerpts from magazine interviews, mainly featuring composer Saga and lyricist Show (though everyone had plenty to say about it for SHOXX), discussing the song and how it fits into the album’s overall concept.
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Gekkayo 2011.03 (Photography: 徳間) Show: Personally… I find that the characteristics of the first track I. and the last one, birth in the death, are largely different, and that’s a point I was very conscious of. Saga: If I were to expand on that in a simple way, the former and latter halves of the album are frankly different bands. I would think that a band that were to play the songs in the former half wouldn’t play those in the latter half. In that fact, you can really feel the dual nature of the album. It’s not simply a difference in nature between pop and rock. We’re doing two things together that wouldn’t be done together.
Neo Genesis vol 52 (Photography: Susumu Miyawaki / Text: Hiroko Yamamoto) Saga: birth in the death has for me what is the closest to being a personal section I would say, and is a very profound one. I think it’s perhaps the same in terms of the lyrics. Show: It is. Actually, among the members, this is the song that garnered the most voices saying “I want to do this”.
B-PASS 2011.03 (Photography: Takashi Hirano / Text: Yuichi Masuda) Show: As you’d expect, we’re human, so we want it to be understood, this core aspect of ourselves. In order to have that understood, we intend to have put in our maximum effort. I think, if you looked forward to getting in touch with that nucleus of us as a band as a listener without forcing it, that would be enough. Because if we do things the right way, we’ll say everything we need to with this one album.
Fool’s Mate 2011.03 vol. 353 (Text: Yuka Sugie) Saga: In birth in the death, Shou-kun takes up guitar for the first time. Hiroto: Saga-kun is also on guitar in this one, so there are 4 of us on stage in front, all of us holding guitars.
What’s In 2011.02 (Text: 杉江由紀) Show: The first song I., fourth song 4U, and thirteenth song birth in the death feel like they are primordially connected in some way. This time the songs that we’ve come to include were really deep and so I think there are a lot of words in the lyrics that came up as a result of a profound part of me feeling an impetus from the music. birth in the death, a song that allows you to see love and hope while facing sadness, is actually also one that has I. on loop during a part of it.
SHOXX vol 217 (Photography: SUSUMU MIYAWAKI / Text: NAOKO TAKEICHI) Saga: For a couple minutes from the start of the song, Nao-san, well, we don’t need him (laughs). I’m wondering what he’s gonna do during lives (laughs). Hiroto: In the middle of the song, he could even suddenly appear on stage, and start drumming naturally. I think that would be totally cool. Nao: A great idea. I think it’d be extremely cool. Let’s go with that! Tora: This song is unexpectedly hard. In terms of the guitar, it’s not that you’re doing anything all that complicated, it’s hard because the monotone phrase you’re playing is in a loop. It’s not a song where you’re all high energy and putting in a lot of effort. You play the same arpeggio over and over, and in the middle of that, it’s like, you ask yourself where you are in the phrase you’re playing and end up not knowing. Hiroto: Exactly. But personally, out of all the many album songs we’ve had, from the demo stage, this is the song for which I most felt, “I absolutely want to do it!”. It suits the frequency of my body. A song that requires physique, you might say. Saga: Also, for this song, there’s a shocking fact! Surprisingly, I wasn’t playing bass in it. This song’s bass was programmed. It’s not that I planned to do that; I recorded the bass live at the outset, but as a result I figured I didn’t need the live take, and I ended up trying to see if I could program it in. So… I wonder what I’ll do in our concerts. Show: When we’re doing this song in concert, what do you think of Saga-kun and Nao-san appearing in a live film for us? Hiroto: Great idea. During the performance of the song, would we be able to get the two of them to play the roles of “life and death” for us? (laughs) Show: The lyrics are on the darker side. They’re of a subject I can’t speak on forthrightly. GEMINI-0 to GEMINI-II are the same, but if I were to speak deeply on all these songs, even a personal interview wouldn’t end up being long enough. It’s like, the self objectively watching human lives twinkling and disappearing like shooting stars. They’re the lyrics that concentrate most on what I’ve always been singing about. Listening to this album’s songs live as well as through the studio recordings lends different impressions so I’m very eager to play these in concert. Saga: Right now, for us personally as well, these moments of coming to get to know our new selves are really enjoyable, so of course with this album, I think I’d like you all to put your hopes in what’s next for Alice Nine.
CD & DL Data 2011.02 (Photography: 草刈雅之 / Text: 赤木まみ) Show: This is a song in which shooting stars light up and disappear in the night sky that you’re gazing up at, and that is the scenery you watch while shedding tears over the ephemeral nature of human lives… that’s the gist of it. It also carries the message that, precisely because human life is so ephemeral, it’s precious. What’s more, the piano sounds in the song are wonderful and… bring you to tears. That’s something that Saga-kun put in during the demo stage, but when I heard those notes, I thought, this man we call Saga is a genius. I absolutely want you to listen to this on repeat, and afterwards, feel the love in it.
ROCK AND READ 2016.04 vol 65 (Photography: 山内洋枝 / Text: 東條祥恵) Saga: birth in the death. That was the first song I was satisfied with. In the band, I had a feeling of satisfaction that was like, “I made this”. I was way too picky about the details because partway through, I was told by the producer Okano Hajime-san, “Fine, man, do whatever you want!” (laughs). That song is my personal favourite, even now.
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Despite the fact that this song is now over ten years old as of writing this article, and that it has a bit of a cult following among fans, it still manages to cast the listener into an incredibly mysterious atmosphere. The original studio version has a very different feel from the version they play live as a band, as well as from the version Saga and Nao play live as the duo, THE ALTERNATIVE. I wonder what things, specifically, Saga was picky about. Did four of them truly play guitar for the studio version? Because the live versions certainly don’t feature four of them on guitar! Was there something personally significant about the piano notes that caused such a strong emotional reaction in Show upon hearing the original demo? Its lyrics are serenely beautiful, and Show hinted at there being a link between them and those of the GEMINI suite, but also mentioned a link between them and the intrinsically linked I. and 4U. What was the detail that Saga was so stubborn about that caused Okano-san to finally give up on trying to, well, produce the feel of our favourite bassist’s favourite composition?
I love the utter passion (not to say stubbornness) with which Saga approached this song, getting it from demo (I wonder how different the demo sounded!) to its completed version; I love, too, the ways that it has grown through being performed by them all on stage. Show’s lyrics take us to a deep, spiritual place.
There is beauty in the details, Saga; keep that passion for music aflame.
After a lengthy brainstorming session, I made the decision to let go of my original domain name jeaology and continue to expand my home under this new one, puncprosody.
In keeping with the aim of an old blog entry in which I explained what the original domain name meant to me (now, obviously, no longer relevant), I figure I might as well do the same for this new name.
My original name and impetus for making a site was to create a space where I gave myself permission to experiment and display my work, however rough it might be. It had been pushback against an emotionally rough (or at the very least stifling) situation; an overcorrection based on someone else’s mistreatment and my own inability at the time to stand up for myself. I am thankfully at a very different place in my life now, and so I wanted to change my site’s name to reflect that. Instead of pushing back against something, the name I chose embodies the way I want my creations to feel.
Punctuation helps create the rhythm and musicality of prose — its prosody.
Truncating the word punctuation made for one hell of a good pun too.
“Hey! What does that punc over there think it’s doing?“
“Creating an excellent flow, my friend.Shaking things up, gettin’ it just right.“
At a certain point, I updated the site logo to read The Anthologist instead of Jeaology as well. That, I plan to keep for the foreseeable future, as I think it works well with the feel of PuncProsody.
If I’d gone to Bluesfest this year, it would have been to see Crown Lands, Sum 41, and Rage Against The Machine (Sarah McLachlan, Alanis Morissette, and Garbage would have been high on the list too). Not going was a really hard decision, because I know it would have been pure badassery.
Crown Lands at Dragonboat Fest ’18; the guitarist started playing a frickin’ guitar-bass halfway through the set.
Part of the reason I made the decision not to was that I managed to get a ticket with a stellar view to see The Smashing Pumpkins in Toronto this October, and that will require me saving up for and going on a mini-trip. No matter what their setlist is, it’s going to be incredible.
I also plan on eating at least one penis waffle while there (it seems like their vag-shaped waffles are a summer-only special lol). I adore the fact that their shop name (Members Only) and entire menu is replete with filthy puns. Glorious.
It’s looking like that Toronto vacation (and time taken off work here and there to have extra long weekends for writing and web-developing) is going to be my only real getaway this year, because Japan still isn’t open for independent travel (tour groups only, for the foreseeable future). If I can’t go for concerts, then I’ll just be sitting tight for a little longer and exploring areas closer to home.
But I want to go back. I do.
I want to go see ALICE NINE. live again. THE ALTERNATIVE.
I must now face the reality that I have another work day ahead of me tomorrow.
Goddamn it.
Work this week has largely consisted of training four other coworkers in a fairly rule-intensive indexing job, so I’ve been doing a lot of getting up and flitting between desks in order to address issues and answer questions. Training employees is work that I generally enjoy, despite my shyness and awkwardness (and overabundance of quips and boring jokes). It certainly makes the work day go by faster.
My week’s been pretty alright, is what I’m saying.
I just wish it were already the weekend.
I sat down to do a bit of writing before bed tonight, and managed a couple of paragraphs before sleepiness took hold, but as is often the case these days, Scout simply had to add in his two cents before I closed the window. His contribution to this sentence-in-progress is as follows:
You know… it isn’t half bad.
I had a real titter over his good grasp of theme.
Which reminds me: earlier this week Scout gave me both a bit of a scare and a bark of a laugh when I settled in for a bubble bath. He started out very wary of the tub, and has gradually grown incredibly fond of hiding in it to ambush me from behind the shower curtain, as well as being incredibly fond of watching the tub fill with water or peeking around the curtain at the fountain of water when I’m taking a shower.
When I’m relaxing in the bath, he likes to sit by the door and supervise, peer over the edge of the tub, or else walk along said edge and touch the surface of the water with his paw.
Well, earlier this week it finally happened: Scout slipped and got a scare when half of his body got drenched with bathwater. He didn’t injure himself, thankfully! But he resented the tub for the rest of the night and slunk off (after I patted away the excess water on his fur with a towel) to lick himself dry.
He looked so miserable I didn’t want to laugh, but he was alright… and it was hilariously cute.
In case you’re wondering: he harbours no lingering ill-will toward the tub. The next morning, when it was again dry, he hopped in and proceeded to ambush me while I sat on the toilet. As usual.
Given that I have been on a semi-hiatus when it comes to The Side B Anthology podcast, I started to re-think what I wanted to make of it and decided, for starters, to switch hosts. I’d been with Podbean since the podcast’s inception, and they’ve been a great host, but at this point, switching to Acast just made more sense. It’s more cost-effective (especially in this semi-hiatus stage) and has a nice array of features to make upload and distribution of new episodes simple.
All the episodes of TSBA are still accessible through Apple Podcasts, and they have a new homepage through Acast as well. Once I edit current episodes a little bit and record some new ones, I aim to distribute the podcast on platforms like Spotify as well (the service I use most, personally).
All this being said, I have not yet finished replacing old episode links on this site yet. All episodes are ready to stream through the widget on the TSBA main page, but clicking through to individual episode pages may still result in broken links.
In the afternoon yesterday, I suddenly got an emergency alert on my phone warning residents to take cover as a severe thunder storm was about to blow through the city. I’d known that there was a thunder storm on the horizon, having checked the weather earlier that morning, but it had seemed odd to me nevertheless to send out that sort of alert for a thunder storm. Sure enough, it blew through the downtown area, and the downpour was strong, but it wasn’t particularly out of the ordinary.
If you’re wondering how Scout handles the sound of thunder, I’m happy to report that he is as cool as a cucumber.
So far the only thing that truly seems to scare Scout is his hairbrush…
But I digress.
The most interesting thing that happened in our abode was that the toilet began gurgling and bubbling, unnerving both Scout and I at first… but after it quieted again without the water overflowing (thankfully), it seemed more funny than anything else. Indeed, other than that, I just worked on the CSS issue I wrote about in the previous entry, and Scout napped contentedly on the bed.
Which is why I was puzzled when I got a text from my parents on the family group chat urging us all to stay inside and that they were sheltering in their basement. I was downright shocked when they sent us photos some time later of what it looked like outside their front door after the storm had finally passed in their area.
Our cherry tree had been uprooted by the wind and fallen over on the neighbours’ car. Two enormous trees across the road had been uprooted and fallen as well. In another picture they sent, the tree and entire sheet of grass that covered the front yard of a neighbour two doors down had been uprooted all together and fallen over. If they hadn’t sent photos, I wouldn’t have believed it.
A storm like this, the likes of which we never used to see in these parts, is climate change in action. Rightfully alarming.
Several people so far have been reported as having died in the Ontario storm (as it’s being called), and there were several injuries as well. Tons of uprooted trees, flying debris, and downed powerlines, the widespread likes of which we haven’t seen in this region since the huge ice storm of ’98 (I was in elementary school back then, but I remember it vividly). My parents lost power and as of my writing this, it still hasn’t been restored, because people have lost power all over the region. It’s incredibly fortunate that my area wasn’t hit with a power outage or the heavy wind and rain that my family members’ and friends’ areas were subjected to.
It took until late at night for us to get back in contact with my brother, who had lost cell reception, internet and power early on, but for whom the storm seemed otherwise fairly typical in strength (like it did in my area). His power was restored overnight.
I’m glad that everyone is okay.
I’m also sad that the cherry tree is gone… it had been growing in the front yard since before we moved in in ’97, survived the ice storm in ’98, had been home to countless bird nests over the years, and was just beautiful to look at, especially in the spring.
