michael lambe's scrapbook

I’ll be leaving Kyojo in the Spring and starting a new job, fulltime at Heian High School. It’s good to start something new after three years at Kyoto Girls’… but at the same time I’m going to miss a lot of the students. This week I’ve been saying goodbye to my first year students. I really liked these students and really enjoyed teaching them. I taught a lot of them before, when they were 2nd Grade Junior High and I was just starting at the school… so in a sense we’ve grown up together (ha ha). Here they are in the order I taught them this week. You can click on the pictures for a closer look. First 1:11:

Then 1:9:

1:8

1:10

And finally, 1:7

Goodbye girls! And good luck to you!

Every year in this season I admire the blossoms on the plum tree behind my apartment.

I particularly like how their natural beauty is complimented by the pylon and traffic cone beside them.

As I was admiring this scene two little Japanese White Eyes came along and began to hop about from blossom to blossom.

They were doing a lot of flitting and darting here and there, and here again – and so were very hard to snap.

I thought at first they might be drinking nectar from the blossoms, but perhaps they were after bugs.

Regardless, I was in a melancholy mood after saying goodbye to my students earlier in the day. These two little birds really cheered me up.

There’s only one thing better than plum blossom and that’s little green birds in the plum blossom.

Just a quickie before I pedal off to Omiya for my private class.

This idea is awesome in its awesomeness: Rechargable Solar Batteries.

65%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Funny. I thought it would be more than that.

Last Tuesday, we went to see Benjamin Button. Apparently it’s front runner in the Oscars. I wonder why. I think the best review I’ve seen of this movie came in the form of this parody video. It is indeed similar to Forrest Gump in structure but seems to lack any kind of point. And it’s ass-achingly long.

Wednesday night we went to Metro for ’80s night. Good times. You can read about that up on Deep Kyoto here.

Finally, here are some expendable (yet entertaining) links:

Have you ever wondered what the backside of Mt. Rushmore looks like?

Asian Teen Has Sweaty Middle-Aged-Man Fetish

Some glorious pictures of London from above at night.

Couple thinks dog rose (literally) from the ashes.

And David Attenborough in the Guardian on how he responds to creationist hate mail:

I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator… LINK

This house in Sakyo Ward looks very much like a robot…

Last December I went along to see the 軽音部 live performance at my school. 軽音部 (kei-on-bu) translates as “light music club”. Actually that’s a misnomer. What they are is a rock guitar band club. And they were pretty good too. I don’t know how many bands I saw play over the 3 or 4 hours I was watching (12? 15?) but I was really impressed. Even more so when everyone present started headbanging on mass. But there was one song that stood out. I liked the guitar riff. This song is pretty cool, I thought. Yet, though it’s in Japanese – it’s strangely familiar. I finally caught one of the guitarists in the school corridor today and asked her – what was that song at the start of your set? “How Do I Survive ?” by Superfly, says she. And this is it:

Sounds like the Stones, right? Actually, what it sounds EXACTLY like is the Dandy Warhols copying being influenced by a little bit of  the Specials copying being influenced by a little bit of the Stones’ Brown Sugar, with this song (which I won’t show here because this is a nice family blog but which I’ll link to for those of you who really want to see a chap getting his langer out in a bar): “Bohemian Like You” by The Dandy Warhols. Alternatively, if in Kyoto you could just go to Ing.

And yes that last sentence was deliberately ambiguous.

I went to see the Robert Doisneau exhibition at the Kyoto Station Art Gallery today and it made me want to live in Paris AND become a black and white photographer. Robert Doisneau really knew how to wait for the perfect moment and he knew where to wait too. Pure genius. Every picture is a fascinating character study of a person, or place, or relationship… or dog. Wonderful stuff. I was sorely tempted to invest in the book of the exhibition but didn’t have ￥10,000 on me. Probably a good thing. I’ve got too many books as it is. Anyway, I recommend seeing it if you’re in Kyoto. It continues until February 22nd and you can find it on the 7th floor of the Isetan building.

This month sees Deep Kyoto‘s debut column in Kyoto Visitors Guide. I’m hoping some of those 15,000 a month readers will be interested enough to come back and check out my site. Anyway, I’m getting name recognition and the editor has agreed to do a monthly guest column for Deep Kyoto in return so everyone’s a winner.

A short while ago, another Kyoto blogger Ted Taylor, told me about a music event at TakuTaku, a pretty famous live music venue I’ve been meaning to check out for ages. You can read about TakuTaku here. The event was Soul Flower Mononoke Summit and their guest Ainu musician Oki. Soul Flower Mononoke Summit is an acoustic offshoot of rock band Soul Flower Union developed after the Great Hanshin Earthquake. At that time SFU decided to help keep people’s spirits up by playing for them in the streets, and because they were in the streets they swapped their electric guitars for Okinawan sanshin and supplemented them with old-fashioned chindon style street-band percussion. They are obviously very popular in Kyoto, TakuTaku was packed, and everyone (young, old, families, babies…) seemed to know the songs, singing along, swaying, dancing, waving their hands in the air… A great night with good community feeling. Many thanks to Ted for letting me know about that one. You can read more about the gig and specifically Oki’s performance on his blog here. Here is a video.

If you like that there’s another one here.

I liked what Neil Gaiman said in this recent interview about maintaining his enthusiasim for his work in defiance of what others may deem common sense:

I think you need to be mad. You need a certain amount of slightly focused madness that’s also belief in yourself in the face of all opposition. Without it, I would never have actually become a writer. I started out, sent things into the world, and the world sent them back explaining how they were not quite right for us. You need the kind of crazed, manic belief in yourself that means you can just keep going. LINK

Slightly focussed madness! Marvellous! Over Christmas I ordered and read in a very short space of time Neil Gaiman’s latest: The Graveyard Book.  This story inspired by Kipling’s The Jungle Books but with a novel twist (this boy is raised by spooks and ghouls in a graveyard) recently won the Newbery Award, basically the most prestigious award there is for children’s fiction. I’d say he deserves it. (You can read his immediate NSFW but exuberant reaction here.) It’s a nice book. A book about growing up, and about friendship, and about family but mostly about how people look after each other. I liked it a lot. I was pleased to hear Neil Jordan is planning to direct a film adaptation. Pretty soon we will be able to see a film adaptation of another work by Mr. Gaiman: Coraline. Having recently read that one (online for free!) I look forward to that too. Here is a most excellently creepy trailer featuring Mr. Neil Gaiman (himself) that is destined to be a classic in its own right:

The Graveyard Book available from:amazon.com, amazon.co.jp, amazon.co.uk

It’s Setsubun, the day when people throw beans at demons (who knows why?) so I wanted to see some guys in demon costumes getting pelted at Rozanji but unfortunately left it too late and got there in time to see a sea of umbrellas instead (shocking weather today). The matsuri at Yoshida Jinja was a different story though. They burn a big ole pile of charms and amulets there at Setsubun you see, so we got there early and got a front row eyebrow searing, slightly scary view of the raging inferno. Some of these pictures are mine and a few are by mewby. Bet you can’t guess which are which. Click the switches to move the pictures on.

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