Hit the Weekend
Another glorious Saturday has arrived. Normally I spend much of my weekends playing games, although the past couple of weeks have been a little bit different. Since we decided to officially put our house on the market and see what happens, we’ve been making some changes throughout just to make sure everything is in top shape, in case a prospective buyer happens to come by. In fact, I spent almost the entirety of last weekend — from 6 p.m. Friday on — doing household work, furniture rearrangement and so on. Both Apple and I have been fairly busy with all of the cleanup and polish tasks.
We’ve been in this situation before, but back then, the process of selling our home almost immediately turned into an absolute clusterfrak. Our real estate agent was largely MIA, and when she did call or show up, she spent the whole time complaining in a patronizing voice that we should do this, do that, do some other thing. We nearly broke our backs trying to gussy up the house, redecorate everything and on and on, and what did we get for it? Jack. Shit. The market had only just then taken an absolute nosedive, and we should have realized that there was no chance in hell of us selling our house with 35 other cookie-cutter clones of it also on the market right here in our community. Our agent wasn’t interested in telling us such things, though, so she let us sit and spin until I just about fired her down into the fucking yard.
Our situation back then was largely the market’s (and our own) fault, but the real estate agent you choose to help you sell a property certainly makes a big difference. So far we’ve had a lot less stress and worry from the agent we chose. She works for the real estate agency that’s based right here in our community — and in fact is one of its most senior employees — so she knows the area inside and out. She gave us some suggestions on how we should dress up the house a bit, but it was all pretty sensible stuff, and none of this “Rearrange your closets!” and “Completely change the purpose of this room!” garbage that our previous agent stuffed down our throats. The market is also much better — prices have been fairly stable (if not slightly increasing) and we have only about a dozen homes competing with us instead of three times that figure.
Best of all, though, we don’t have some ridiculous, overpriced house being built that we’re gonna need to start paying for the instant it gets done, and absolutely no deadlines pressuring us into anything. I can’t believe how much bigger our eyes were than our stomachs (or our wallets) on that last house we contracted to build. Walking away from the down payment on that home cost us a lot of money that is making our current move difficult even today, but the alternative would have been the total ruination of our financial and possibly marital lives. On occasion I do have spurts of optimism, and I like to think that those actions merely opened the door for the opportunity that now lies before us, for had we gone ahead with our move in 2006, there is no way I would be in a position to move now — or ever, probably. We’d be trapped in this town for all eternity, either that or broke and destitute. (Or worse…both.)
SHO-CO-REVIEW 15: Sweet Serenity
Sweet Serenity Album Cover
Released September 10, 2008, Sweet Serenity was Shoko Suzuki’s 20th anniversary album. Also, for the first time since Love, painful love in 2000, Shoko released an album distributed by a major record label — Sony Music Direct, a subsidiary of Sony (with whom Shoko began her career under), released the record as (presumably) part of a one-off deal (seeing as how every Shoko release since then has been an indies release). Beginning in 2007, Sony Music Direct began releasing Shoko’s older Epic/Sony material, culminating in the three box set (6 CDs, 3 DVDs) collection SHO-CO-SONGS series, featuring everything Shoko released under Epic/Sony between 1988 and 1999; in that time they also released this album.
I also should point out here that Shoko had another release between Suzuki Syoko and this album; a vinyl-only live EP release, titled Syoko Suzuki Absolutely Alone in Kyoto Jittoku 2007.12/30,31. In fact, that EP saw the first official release of both “Father Figure” and “5 years,/And then…”, both of which are also on Sweet Serenity. The Absolutely Alone… EP also had two other songs as its B-side — a new recording of “Itsuka Mata Au Hi made” (originally from Atarashii Ai no Uta) and another version of “Celluloid Heroes” (originally done by the Kinks, and first covered by Shoko in 2002 and first mentioned in this review). The EP was produced in limited quantities, though, and is no longer in print.
Interestingly, Shoko is very much a proponent of the vinyl format. In addition to the Absolutely Alone… release, Shoko’s next single after the Sweet Serenity album (which I’ll get to in the next review) would be made available only on vinyl and cassette formats; additionally, she often writes and talks about her vinyl collection (like her autographed copy of Sweet Baby James by James Taylor, or her copy of Alive II by Kiss). She will also occasionally host record listening parties at various clubs, focusing entirely on vinyl LPs. As someone who still retains a fondness for LPs, I think this is pretty nifty.
But I digress. Sweet Serenity is dedicated to Shoko’s father, who died before the album was released; this is also reflected in some of the song titles, such as “Father Figure” (the parental theme is explored further in “Rose Pink no Cheek (my mama said, so)”). Also, for the first time since Love, painful love, Shoko plays a majority of the instruments on the album — she tackles drums, various keyboards, and even guitar (making this only the third studio album ever on which she plays guitar). Longtime acquaintance Shinobu Kawai shows up on a couple of tracks, while there are a bunch of other cameo appearances by the likes of Seiichi Yamamoto, Tokyo Local Honk, and members of Moonriders and Sentimental City Romance. Additionally, Shoko produced the entire record, and arranged everything save for “Sweet Serenity & Chocolate milk-tea” and “Father Figure” (the former was co-arranged by Hirokazu Ogura, the latter fully arranged by Ryuji Yamamoto).
It’s also not really important, but the disc itself is a Super Audio CD. Thankfully they are playable on standard CD players!
Texas Bound and Flyin’
Frisco Public Library
Although it was a horrendous and depressing movie, Smokey and the Bandit II is notable for its theme song: “Texas Bound and Flyin’,” performed by the Snowman himself, the late Jerry Reed. Although it was little more than an attempt by Reed to capture lightning in a bottle for the second time (it’s practically the same song as his hit “East Bound and Down” from the first film), it’s still a fun song — and is entirely apropos, I find, for what may become the next chapter of my life. You see, Apple and I may shortly be “Texas bound” ourselves.
As for flyin’, we’ve already done some of that recently with our fact-finding trip to Frisco, Texas last weekend. Since my company is relocating there and offered to pay each of its employees to go check out the area and see if they might like to relocate as well, we decided to take them up on the offer. If nothing else, it would be a free vacation. So we spent four days in the north Dallas area, seeing the sights, visiting family and hanging out with my boss (a.k.a. friend) and his family, who are all really great people.
We started by flying into DFW airport (which is as huge as a city in and of itself), picking up a rental car and heading north to our hotel. Thanks to the Price! Line! Negoti-aaaaa-tor! we scored a $55/night deal at a brand new, fairly upscale 3.5 star Sheraton right on Highway 121, which turned out to be good because it was centrally located near essentially everything we wanted to see. Not long after checking in, we met my boss at his new house, whereupon he then took us on a whirlwind tour of Frisco.
For the initial tour, we didn’t see anything in too great a depth, but we saw a lot of things. We stopped by the Frisco Public Library, which I tend to think of as “city hall” because it’s also where you do all of your tax, tag, registration, driver license and other affairs. Built in 2006, the five-story brick building sports a huge, modern library that spans four of those floors and looks really impressive. Apparently there is a new building being constructed behind the library which, if I recall correctly, will be a convention center.
Our rented Altima outside the boss's house
We drove through the heart of Frisco’s retail district, which includes the enormous Stonebriar Center Mall, complete with its 24-screen (plus IMAX) AMC theater and indoor ice skating rink. They had a really cool video game store there that specialized in classic games, including long-forgotten software and hardware from the Nintendo 64 to the Atari Jaguar. From there we saw the myriad of sports arenas downtown, including Pizza Hut Park (which hosts soccer, football, concerts and other events), Dr. Pepper Park (home of the Frisco RoughRiders baseball club, the Class AA affiliate of the Texas Rangers) and Dr. Pink Field (which belongs to the local school district). We even checked out the Frisco recreation center, a family-oriented gym with both an indoor pool and an outdoor water park.
That evening, we journeyed eastward into Plano, where there lives a huge Asian population comprised primarily of Chinese and Koreans. There was a big Asian supermarket there as well as a Sichuan-style restaurant that my boss and his family took us to; his wife and in-laws are from China’s Sichuan province and found the food at this place to be very authentic. Unfortunately, Apple wasn’t feeling too well so we took her back to the hotel to rest up while my boss and I went to see Iron Man 2 on the IMAX screen. Even though we ran behind and had to sit in the front row, I somehow managed to see the entire movie without getting a headache. (It was actually watchable, too — surprising.)
SHO-CO-REVIEW 14: Suzuki Syoko
Suzuki Syoko Album Cover
Shoko Suzuki’s self-titled album, released on January 25, 2006, was her first studio album in over five years (Love, painful love was released in September 2000), and her first studio album as an indies artist. The music within is often a bit more abstract than what she had released in the past, perhaps owing in part to her association with the experimental rock band (and then-labelmates) ROVO, which is lead by former Boredoms guitarist Seiichi Yamamoto (Yamamoto doesn’t appear on this album, but he does show up on Shoko’s next album). The violin of ROVO’s Yuji Katsui, in particular, is present on many of the album’s tracks.
Though Shoko had kept a low profile on the record release front since leaving Warner Music Japan in 2000, she was still touring extensively and occasionally recording. Indeed, the Suzuki Syoko album was in development for years before it finally saw release — “Keiyaku (Spellbind)” first appeared on Shoko’s previous release, the live I was there, I’m here, while “Ai no Namae” also dates from around that period (and first popped up as a demo on a free CD released in early 2003). Two singles preceded the album, each released a year apart — the double A-side “Blonde”/”Passion” single came out in April of 2004, and after staying away from the recording studio for a full year, recorded and released the “Love/Identified” (that’s only one song title, not another double A-side) single — which featured “Nani ga Shitai no?” as a B-side — in April 2005. Additionally, “Boukyaku” and “Love is a sweet harmony” were available as demo versions on a special CD available during Shoko’s tour in Spring 2004.
This means well over half the album was written and/or recorded at least a year (or more) before the album proper was finished and released. But amazingly, the record is not disjointed in any way; if anything, the album has a cohesive sound belying its lengthy gestation period (wow, that’s perhaps the most pretentious sentence I’ve ever written), mostly due to the fact that most of the songs are built around Shoko’s voice and piano playing. For the first time Shoko plays keyboards almost exclusively, leaving the other instrumentation (if any, as many of the songs are simply Shoko and her piano) to her musician friends.
