Taiko @ Fox Theatre

I went to see Yamato, a taiko group, with fannishly and yuneicorn on Friday.

I've seen taiko twice before; the first time I was helping out with an event sponsored by my university's Japanese program. The senseis had gotten assorted Japanese students to help out (I was there to turn pages for the piano program) with the event, which had performers from Kanazawa, where the university's homestay program was located. I can't remember if I was getting paid or not, but being able to see a free Noh performance was the real incentive.

The Noh was very boring. I think I dozed off during it several times. And then out came three taiko drummers, all female, didn't look like much. I had no idea what taiko was and figured I'd be bored -- how exciting could drumming be?

They put on quite a show. Lights, drumsticks in the air, jumping around, everything. It was so cool that I tried to get all my friends to go to the showing the next day just to see them.

Anyhow, this show was even cooler, given that it was a troupe of about 10 people or so. All of them were in black tank tops with pants that looked somewhat like hakama tucked into boots, crazy mop hair on each of them. Some of them tied it up so that it shot straight up or out, some just had hair everywhere. It reminded me of something like a cross between heavy metal drummers and Muppets.

And they had a wonderful sense of humor! The second piece felt like something out of Stomp! -- there were three guys up there, all with very distinct personalities, even though no one said a word. They had these teeny hand cymbals, which was fun to watch after the giant opening piece with drums everywhere, and they ended up sort of "throwing" the sound around, playing catch with it with the cymbals, tossing it up and down and watching it zip about the stage.

All mimed, of course, but they did it so well, and as fannishly noted, they were using the direction the sound was actually travelling in so that you could tell where the sound was every second.

I especially liked the guy in the middle, who was smaller in build than the first two and had this wonderfully cute shimmy.

Before that, there had been a drum-off between two of the guys, complete with posturing and one-upsmanship, and then afterward, a really great piece with people on the drums and four women sitting up front playing the shamisen.

I've heard the shamisen before, mostly in recordings, and seen some video in museums of people playing it in performances, but I don't think I've ever seen the shamisen played like an electric guitar before.

I think that may have been my absolute favorite part of the show, watching these four women kneeling up front with their crazy Muppet hair, first holding the shamisen like a geisha or musician would. And then the drums came in, and they started playing, and I can't even describe the incredible energy of the performance, of how much fun you could see they were all having, and of the four strumming away like mad on the shamisens with the plecturns, leaning forward with fingers flying on the strings, playing like they were at a rock concert.

It was great.

There was just so much energy on the stage in general; they had the audience clapping to drumbeats at one point, much jumping up and down, drums of all different sizes.

I kept being afraid that the very large drums mounted on stands would fall off because they were wobbling so much when they were hit.

There were cymbals, small drums about the size of a very large dinner plate with sharpish but mellow tones, larger barrel-sized drums that seemed to be the mainstay of the performance, even larger drums with ropes tied round them that were particularly sharp, especially when they were hit with longer, thinner drumsticks instead of the usual large wooden rods. And then there were the monster drums, two very large ones probably about four feet in diameter and one even larger. You could hear the deep bass tones whenever they were hit, but under that was an even deeper bass rumbling that underlay all the performances.

During the larger numbers, I could feel the floor, my chair, my ribcage, all throbbing to the drums, heard the rumbling punctuated by cymbal tinks and sharp rat-a-tats and even more large booms.

I'm still amazed by how physical the performance was. I don't usually think of music as being a performance art in terms of the body; I know things like posture and breathing and hand and finger positions are important, but these guys, they were ripped.

I suppose I did know before from the first performance I saw, but it just struck me again. Plus, I couldn't help but notice how it felt like a martial art in parts. There was one part where they had three of the guys situated between four two-sided drums, around waist-level. To reach the drums, they had to partially crouch on the floor, and to beat them, they had this beautiful sequence of movements where they shifted from foot to foot. It looked quite a bit like a kata.

And there was just something very ritualistic or stylized in they way they beat the drums, from picking up the drumsticks (drumsticks held together, raised above the drums, then slowly separated and positioned) to the simple act of striking (one arm raised high above the head, pause for a second, then strike). I especially love how they would wait before they hit the drum; the pause is such that there's a wonderful moment of anticipation right before they let their arms fall to hit the drums.

I am so, so glad I went to see this.

Probable heresy

fannishly and I wandered over to Kepler's this weekend, in part to provide both moral and financial support (if you can count my measly $10 as financial support). As you know, Armadillo Bob-san, Kepler's is an independent bookstore in the area that abruptly closed last month and was saved thanks to a grassroots effort. It's now reopened.

I wasn't a frequent patron. I am, however, a frequent patron of Amazon and Borders (there are two of them which are closer than Kepler's). There's another indie bookstore down the street here that I do go to fairly often, and I am a very frequent patron of the local used bookstore(s).

Right around the back of the store was a giant area for posters and flyers, all very cool (I like browsing posters and flyers, never know what you might find), and there was one for California Independent Bookstores. I'm not actually sure if it should be all capitalized or what, but anyhow, they had a column of statistics comparing California indie bookstores with Amazon -- author signings, events, donations to charity, tax dollars -- all of which were supposed to convince me to patronize indie bookstores.

I felt a twinge of guilt. Despite having worked in an indie bookstore and generally wanting to support indie bookstores, I actually very rarely patronize any that aren't either a) used or b) two blocks away. I make my occasional trip to the Really Cool Sci-Fi/Fantasy Bookstore with the Hairless Cat (aka Borderlands) in San Francisco, but that's about it.

So herein is my bit of grumpiness about feeling guilty. I like Borders. I like having giant rows and rows of books. I like having a ginormous selection.

But even more than Border, there is Amazon. I like Amazon. I like Amazon a lot. Amazon remembers my Wishlist and ships me things and gives me random recommendations, most of which don't make sense. I can use Amazon for research. Also -- and this is the most important bit -- Amazon stocks almost any book in print that I want. It can be something that maybe .05% of the population will ever buy, but gorram it, it will be there, and I can get my grubby little hands on it, and no one at the register will look at me funny for buying a romance, YA, manga and the latest McKillip at the same time.

I know that one of the benefits of indie bookstores is supposed to be a greater sense of intimacy and whatnot, but a lot of the general indie bookstores I've been to rarely have that sense. I highly appreciate the fact that most of the general indie bookstores I've been to around here try to give employee recs, but I've never really come away from a general indie bookstore with the sense that I've discovered something that I otherwise would have overlooked. The sci-fi/fantasy section recs tend to be for Robert Jordan and Ender's Game, Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. LeGuin, authors and books that I've read of or heard of or both by the time I graduated from high school.

Plus, I always feel like a bit of an intruder. I'm very sure that a large part of this is because I try very hard to avoid eye contact and not talk to anyone, but another part is that I don't feel like I belong there. I get an immediate sense of warm fuzziness when I go to my (many) local yarn stores, even though no one there knows me personally, and when I go to the farmer's market, but not so much at the general indie bookstore. There is, of course, the warm fuzzy surrounded by books vibe, which is always present, but I feel it should be supplemented by an additional vibe or something...

What generally makes me feel disgruntled is that because general indie bookstores can't stock half as much as a Borders or an Amazon (which is understandable), they stint on genres that I like to read. Usually the selection of sci-fi/fantasy, romance, comics and manga, and other "unserious" reads get short shrift. I realize I am generalizing horribly, but it really gets to me. Especially the lack of romances. Most general indie bookstores that I've ventured into have miniscule romance sections, despite romance being a very high-selling genre.

Plus, when I do get to my little genre sections, I find that they have very few authors that I like. The romance sections invariably have the big names -- Nora Roberts, Amanda Quick/Jayne Ann Krentz, etc -- and almost never have the romance authors that I want to read. Ditto with the sci-fi/fantasy section. Usually it's a little better there, but still, there isn't much depth. The manga/comics section will have the big, serious authors like Gaiman and Moore and Miller, with Tezuka Osamu and some Akira thrown in, but no shoujo. And the crafts section is teeny.

I don't read what the people who run the stores seem to be promoting, my sections are being slighted, how am I supposed to feel like a part of the store?

And I hate that when I walk in there, I feel faintly marginalized. I like romances. I like shoujo manga. I like fantasy and sci-fi that's not necessarily "hard sci-fi" or "dark fantasy." I knit.

I dislike the fact that I get the feeling that anything too "fuzzy" is looked down upon. I'm quite sure the people running these bookstores don't feel like they are doing this (and kudos to them for running the bookstores; just because I feel out of place doesn't mean everyone does); I am quite sure that they promote general fiction written by women and women's studies and the like. But there on the outskirts, in the wild jungle that is genre, I tend to feel that it's still the conventionally masculine that is prized and upheld as art, while anything too cute or crafty or romantic continues to be sneered at. (insert general disclaimer here about fluffy not having to be feminine and vice versa and that I use the terms "masculine" and "feminine" in the stereotypical sense for the purpose of discourse and that usage does not indicate agreement)

I would like to say that this is only the impression that I tend to get from general indie bookstores (my old used bookstore included). The specialty bookstores that I go to (aka, my happy sci-fi/fantasy bookstore and my happy romance bookstore) I adore wholeheartedly and try to support as much as possible. The used bookstore that I used to work at used to not sell romances at all, despite a very large demand for them, and when I was buying, I'd often hear sneers about chick lit and romance. Luckily, the demand for such things has increased the selection so that I can find a good deal of things there. But I hate that attitude.

Anyway, I am done confessing. That's why I don't buy very much from Kepler's or Books Inc. I don't deliberately avoid them and I do actually try to buy things there when I can, but too often, they just never have what I'm looking for.