There were eight people in ballet class today. "I figured that in this class there were enough grown-ups that I needn't cancel it," said the teacher while we were putting on our pointe shoes. "I don't like Vappu myself. It's like you have to celebrate. I don't like the 'have to' part." I concur with this completely; in fact, you could say the failure of my brain-clock to coincide with the national holiday calendar is a driving force behind my recently-completed PhD, Given and News: The Creation of Community in Media Discourse on National Holidays.

So our proud little nonconformist band of Vappu resisters did our pointe work and then, since it was on the way back, I went and stood through the statue capping, which actually turned out to be a particularly good show this year. Photos to come.
. . . posted by Diana 4/30/2005 11:34:00 AM

Saturday, April 23, 2005

Academic conference, noun phrase: the exercise of taking a flight halfway around the world to a meeting where you will learn what the people in the next office are working on.

Actually that's more like what I will be doing in July. This time I only took a train an hour and a half away to a meeting where I learned what people in other departments think we should be working on. Among other things. And several of us got our pictures in Kouvolan Sanomat (mine, which shows me holding a hand next to my face in an effort to block the photographer, doesn't appear online). It was good to get out of Helsinki. I hadn't been out of town since January and didn't realize how much the walls were closing in on me.
. . . posted by Diana 4/23/2005 02:00:00 PM

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Miguel interviews Apocalyptica. Slightly condensed tidbit:

Perttu Kivilaakso is a tall, slender young man with some fancy dye work in his hair, black fingernails on his left hand and a can of Red Bull connected to a vein in his arm by IV drip. When he pronounces the word "knife" he doesn't let the letter "K" go to waste.

Paavo Lötjönen (pronounced "Paavo Lötjönen") is a bit shorter, stockier, athletic, with short black hair and a little thing growing on his chin. Maybe he's more hyper than Perttu, maybe he just got more sleep.

They show me their cellos, they tell me which rosins they use, they explain their pickups and their earplugs and why they use new Chinese cellos. Basically, new Chinese cellos are cheap. When a baggage truck runs over one at Schiphol Airport, they merely laugh derisively and say, "Schiphol is as hard on cellos as we are."

Whole interview here, concert notes here.
. . . posted by Diana 4/20/2005 07:46:00 AM

Monday, April 18, 2005

Why is rhythmic juggling (to music) not an Olympic event? Meet the Galchenkos. You'll need a video player to get the full effect. Circus skills went out of fashion as a geek hobby shortly before I was an undergrad but they seem to be coming back; for the first time since the early '80s, I saw a teenager riding a unicycle just the other day.
. . . posted by Diana 4/18/2005 07:55:00 AM

Friday, April 15, 2005

After eleven years in Finland I finally got to a kantele concert last night at Sibelius Academy. The kantele is the Finnish table harp or zither (fretless, one string per note) and these days it is played not by windblown sages but by meek-looking girls with long ponytails and downcast eyes. The first one messed up and had to start again, poor thing; she must have been a first year student. The second one was like a Windham Hill recording: pleasant enough in the background, not enough substance for a concert. The third one did a rather impression of French ballet music (it was an Ibert transcription) with actual dynamics, which the first two had missed. There were a few more varied and technically challenging new agey pieces, one with a singer for distraction. And then, thank god, Hedi came on and did the Bach chaconne from my favorite Segovia album, grabbing handfuls of notes out of the strings and letting them fall in perfect arrangement. All right, technically I have been to a kantele concert before; I was at Hedi's recital last year. But technically she does not play the kantele. She plays the kannel (Wikipedia folks: you might want to fix the links in music entries that automatically point there).
. . . posted by Diana 4/15/2005 01:19:00 AM

Saturday, April 09, 2005

The Unitarian Jihad meme that's going round would strike me as a lot funnier if I had not been asked, at the age of nine, by another little Jewish girl in my hometown, why my family didn't go to the Unitarian church the way her family did. Nonplussed, I replied that we liked to sleep late on the weekends. She thought that was a poor excuse.

This was in the town where the Unitarian minister was named Mendelsohn and the Baptist minister was named Katz, by the way. So I guess it was somewhat radical that we were unconverted, unrepentant, and out of the closet.
. . . posted by Diana 4/9/2005 08:23:00 AM

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