If I remember right, it was 2010 the first time we went to “JFest”, the St. Louis Japanese Festival at the Missouri Botanical Gardens every Labor Day weekend. We watched St. Louis Osuwa Taiko twice that day and I lit up when they mentioned having beginners’ classes. I probably would have shied away from it but the friends we were with encouraged me to give it a try. I did it, persisted though it was physically tough and I lacked in endurance, and then qualified to join the performing group. I performed at two JFests and an early Spring event there called “Sake & Sakura”, which would be my last, as I left to concentrate on my own creative pursuits.
Anyway, right at the end of summer, the weather is often still quite hot and often humid. In one evening show as I played a shaker in the back during the finale, I could see steam rising from the sweating performers in the front line. As I recall, we spent the majority of our time that weekend when we weren’t performing, just sitting in the air-conditioned green room.
Since those days I haven’t been very physically active, and my spouse isn’t either. I also sunburn easily and my eyes are sun-sensitive, and it has been known to trigger anxiety (though I think the mere recognition that it does that, and wearing a hat and the right glasses/sunglasses, helps a ton). So a day at the festival, wandering the extensive garden grounds in hot, sunny, humid weather, with no good place to sit other than the ground for performances, is a lot for us.
We skipped it the last few year due to that hot weather. But with slightly more favorable weather this time, we went for it. It wore us out but we had a good time. Happy to say though I’m a little stiff (probably from standing in one spot for too long while watching the Eisa and taiko performances) I’m not too sunburned or too wiped out today. The gardens themselves were either nicer than ever or I appreciated them more, and I was lucky enough to snap a half-decent photo of a hummingbird visiting some nifty star-shaped flowers.
We had both been looking forward to the koi that swarm a footbridge in Seiwa-en, the Japanese garden around a lake that is one of the place’s main features. But there was an algae bloom and few fish; we speculated that on the third day of a very crowded festival they’d already eaten more than enough kibble from the vending machine and were sleeping it off.
The taiko group was fantastic, as always. I only recognize a few people from when I was part of it. They have a new (to me) member who played an actual odaiko solo piece and she absolutely was killing it. That’s a staple of more “professional” groups’ repertoire but isn’t something that we ever did while I was in the group or the few years after, and I loved to see it. (Many taiko pieces do have brief, often very structured solo sections, so most performers do get a chance to solo a little bit.)
On a whim I went back and re-read the last few years of this blog. I don’t really have much insight, other than to laugh at the number of times I have changed my mind about things that I was sure of at the time.
Toneboosters released a new equalizer plugin (simply “Equalizer Pro”) that instantly became a new favorite. This is the first one I’ve tried where I’ve felt like dynamic EQ is worth using (instead of, say, ZPlane Peel or Bitwig Multiband Split with a dynamics plugin in its chain), and it’s also got options for bands that apply only to transients or sustained sounds (oooh) as well as bands that apply only to “ambience” (reverb) or direct sounds (aaaah). That last one can be cool as a creative effect even when the detection is wrong, and just in testing I’ve found that using it to emphasize particular ranges of reverb is pretty great. Not all reverb has good EQ controls built in, and even when it does, using this instead can kind of glue things together nicely. And for all that this plugin does, it’s cheaper than a lot of its competitors.