Peony Saver, part 2

I think it's pretty amazing how these peonies change a little bit of their character day by day. Case in point: yesterday they were just in full bloom. Tonight, a little bit of their pink coloring has faded to a subtler shade - this is a nice effect.


Here are more of the blossoms.

One thing I'll hope for: I hope I get my $6.50 worth of blooming time.

Peony Saver

This past weekend, I got my hands on a bunch of five stems of peonies, flowers I've heard that cannot grow here in California because it doesn't get cold enough. Well, at the local Trader Joe's, they were selling them for about $6.50 a bunch - not bad for such a rare find.

Here's what they looked like when I took them out of the bag and placed them in a vase filled with water:


After the first night, the peonies were on their way to full blossoms. Here's a picture of the most mature stem:


That was last night. Tonight all of the blossoms have fully bloomed. Here are photos of two of them, taken without the camera's flash (too garish) but with background lighting from a desktop lamp.



Overall, I think both the blossoms and the photos turned out quite well.

Dancing like a village priest

Check out my mask - looks freaky, doesn't it?


Anywho, this is me and fellow dancer Casey Lee after performing at the "Cafe 360o", a composition recital concept held on campus. The concept itself was simple: an audience would gather in the center of the playing arena while musicians and other acts would take place around them. Casey and I, along with some members of the UCSB Javanese gamelan ensemble, participated in one of the acts. This particular act had a story which illustrated the importance of cooperation: sayuk rukun, tandhang gawe, sing sayuk sing rukun, all that jazz. I played an extremely ugly and foolish temple priest, while Casey played a tree spirit who was toying with the priest ,who had the duty of lighting an important lantern before sundown. (She actually harnessed herself to get down the tree.) Got the story? Good.

The mask I used is known as cungih, which refers to a harelip, sometimes with "demon teeth" - teeth which appear where they shouldn't. Man, if I saw this mask as a kid, I'd freak out and run away from the scene as quickly as possible. I didn't like clowns in general when I was young - their garish and pallid makeup and screwy laughing manner reminded me of corpses with a sadistic sense of humor. Now I find it ironic that I play not one, but several clowns in my topeng (masked dance) performances.

After the May 6 concert

To start things off, here's a picture of me with Pak Djoko, our guest director for the concert:



The performance itself was excellent - good energy from the musicians, dancers, and the audience. There were certainly many more audience members from last year - back then, we had a miserable attendance of 30. I think we got at least a 100 this time around. It doesn't sound major, but to get an audience which is mostly unfamiliar with the whole culture of gamelan is a major undertaking.

The only thing I had to complain about was the heat inside the concert hall. I think the boilers were on overtime since we had some cool weather in the past days. But on this day, the weather was warm and nice. This, however, meant certain discomfort in an overheated concert hall. At least we were wearing Javanese clothes, which in part were made for (overly) warm conditions...