A snack that starts with “O” – Onigiri!
 Onigiri for the kids in Eidan's class
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For Eidan’s kindergarten class this week, our parental duty was to bring in a snack for all the kids that starts with the letter “O”. So last night Maria and I made about 30 onigiri:
Onigiri (お握り), also known as omusubi (お結び) or rice ball, is a Japanese food made from white rice formed into triangular or oval shapes and often wrapped in nori (seaweed). Traditionally, an onigiri is filled with pickled ume (umeboshi), salted salmon, katsuobushi, kombu, tarako, or any other salty or sour ingredient as a natural preservative. Because of the popularity of onigiri in Japan, most convenience stores stock their onigiri with various fillings and flavors. There are even specialized shops whose only products are onigiri for take out.
justbento.com has some wonderful pictures of the many forms onigiri can take.
We made the traditional triangle shape, and thanks to the 69th St. H-Mart’s dazzling array of nori selections (half an aisle for nori!), we were able to use the nori that comes in individial plastic sleeves. The sleeve keeps the nori dry, so we could get them to school with Eidan and not worry about them getting soggy. You then remove the plastic sleeve right before eating. Of course someone has posted a video on YouTube to illustrate. Ingenious product packaging from the Japanese – what a shocker 
 Final snack - onigiri and lemon water before getting on the plane back to the US
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When we lived in Japan in 2007, the boys and I would stop at a convenience store for onigiri almost every day. It’s a cheap, healthy, and filling snack, and the boys never got tired of it. There’s a huge variety of fillings to choose from, some of which the boys liked (such as salmon) and some which they didn’t (like umeboshi – pickled fruit). So to make sure I didn’t buy the wrong thing, I learned to go to the stores that labelled the onigiri in Hiragana, which I could read, and to avoid the stores that used Kanji, which I couldn’t read.
Kai and Eidan in Denver
 Kai at Six Flags
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ATVs. Skateboarding. Roller coasters. Toy shopping. Vespa scooters. I’m not sure if we had a vacation away from the boys, or if they had a vacation away from us. While Maria and I were in Seattle, Kai and Eidan were in Denver with Maria’s sister Yoko and her husband James. Each time we called Kai from Seattle to ask how things were going, his answer was always “AWESOME.” Yoko and James showed them a wonderful time. The pictures say it all. Now they’re back home with us – their boring parents – eating their broccoli, and going to bed on time.
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5 Hours at Bumbershoot
 The water fountain at Seattle Center during the Bumbershoot festival
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Fellow Newporter (and former babysitter of my younger brother) Kristin Hersh provided a quietly hilarious, emotionally intense start to my 5 hours with Jay at Seattle’s annual Bumbershoot festival. It’s a 3 day festival of music, comedy, and other performing arts (Saturday-Monday) with 12 stages spread out across the Seattle Center for simultaneous performances. I had to choose either Saturday or Sunday, as I wanted to spend one of the days on Bainbridge Island, and I had to leave Sunday evening. As I reviewed the list of acts, the decision made itself when I was amazed to see NoMeansNo – one of my favorite bands – listed for Sunday afternoon, just a couple hours before I had leave for the airport. They hardly ever play in the US anymore, so I felt incredibly lucky. I haven’t seen them play for at least 9 years.
But before NoMeansNo, I have to tell you about Hersh. I’ve never seen her perform before, so I had no particular expectations. It was a combination of a one woman musical show and a very personal, intense, often dream-like spoken word performance. I was struggling with how to describe it for this blog post. Fortunately for me, someone else wrote a review of one of her earlier performances that captures it well. I recommend the whole article, but here are the key parts:
 Kristin Hersh at Bumbershoot
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[Her songs] were marvelously complementary to the texts and never obscured the words. And God, what words. Quite apart from the content, her fluid and laconic delivery was a joy. It was also frequently laugh-out-loud funny; Hersh is an undisputed and somewhat unexpected mistress of perfect comic timing… Her storytelling powers made each passage utterly vivid, combining a keen observational eye, a sense of momentum, awareness of the need for a story arc and the scattering of memorable details like jewels across velvet… She was strongest on her emerging creativity and the relationship between this and the bipolar disorder with which she was eventually diagnosed after a failed suicide attempt. Although she has spoken about this in various interviews over the years, this is the first time I’ve heard her describe this period of her life in such detail. It comes across as something that was initially an intoxicating whirl, gradually progressing into an all-consuming blizzard that nearly destroyed her. She talks about the recurring visions of the snake, the wolf and the bees that she experienced and suddenly songs like And A She-Wolf After The War (written, or at least captured, in hospital as she was recovering from cutting her wrists) spring into sharp relief.
Hersh’s approach to creativity has long fascinated me. She insists that she doesn’t “create” or “write” the songs, that they exist outside of her – or at least somewhere deep within her – and she is merely setting them free. This might sound rather precious and even a little pretentious, until you hear her describe the visceral means by which these songs demand to be articulated, and the consequences for her mental and physical health if she tries to contain them and refuses to let them out. It’s “creativity” in its rawest form, more akin to the hot, wet and bloody process of childbirth than the refined piecework of an artist in her ivory tower. It sounds both exhilarating and terrifying.
As a teenager she spent her savings on studio time, trying to exhaust her supply of material. The songs simply kept coming, at a pace that only sped up and eventually nearly defeated her. If this intense subject matter sounds at odds with the humour that I described earlier, in the context of the performance it is anything but. She describes these weighty issues with a lightness of touch that marks her as a writer and raconteuse of considerable ability. Even the section covering her suicide attempt seeks no pity, describing her teenage self with a restrained compassion. It was intensely moving, without being either sentimental or harrowing.
It was quite a shock going from Hersh’s performance to see the utterly banal Lonely Forest. I wasn’t familiar with them, but I knew they were darlings of the NPR music reviewers, so I thought they’d be worth a listen. The music sounded ok, but the “I want to hold your hand” variety of lyrics was a huge comedown after Hersh. In her performance, Hersh described her band (Throwing Muses) as “spinach” (chewy and bitter, but good for you), while most other bands were candy or beer. Lonely Forest was definitely sweet but uninteresting candy.
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More in the category of beer is NoMeansNo. A really good, thick draught beer. A beer you’ll have to try at least a few times to fully appreciate, and it’ll become a favorite you’ll come back to year after year. They sound like no other band. In an interview I heard years ago, they described themselves as “the Ramones crossed with the Replacements.” I’d describe them as very tight, bass-heavy punk with serious groove, a noticeable dose of blues, and sometimes jazz-like improvisation. Below is part of a new song I recorded at the show – “Slave”. I didn’t record the whole song as I could resist my feet for only so long. If it doesn’t grab you in the first minute, give it until at least the second minute. But I’d also say to not judge them by the tinny audio quality of my pocket camera. A fairly accessible first song to try is Humans, which you can hear on YouTube.
Bainbridge Island
 Fort Ward State Park
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Maria had a full day planned at her conference on Saturday, so I decided to spend the day riding a bike around Bainbridge Island. It’s about the size of Manhattan, and it’s a 30 minute ferry ride from downtown Seattle. What I didn’t know is that the entire island is just one steep hill after another. The leisurely bike ride I pictured in my mind was instead an intense workout. I still had fun – the weather was perfect and it’s a beautiful place (I just learned from its Wikipedia page that Money magazine named it the second-best place to live in the United States a few years ago). I was completely wiped out by the time I got back to Seattle. I’m in decent shape but I don’t do much cycling – I was actually dizzy by the end. I was silently cursing the (better informed) tourists who sped past me on the hills, on their rented scooters.
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My main destination for the day was Fort Ward State Park. A few unexpected discoveries along the way were the Blakely cemetery, where I learned about the Dix disaster, a cool Buddhist prayer wheel that was literally on the side of a lonely road, and the very moving Japanese-American Exclusion Memorial, dedicated to the Japanese members of the community who were all removed from the island by gunpoint, not knowing where they were being taken, and sent to live in barbed-wire internment camps in Idaho after the Pearl Harbor attack. What it mainly made me think of is all the same ugliness, paranoia and hate that’s been stirred up in this country since 9/11, and how prominent it is in our politics and culture now. The packaging and marketing of it is certainly more subtle than in decades past, but it all springs from the same fears. I grew up with the naive notion we had, for the most part, left that ugliness behind us, but instead it’s resurgent.
Last month The Atlantic published an amazing set of photographs from the internment camps. It turns out Maria has 3 degrees of separation from T.Z. Shiota, whose letter is posted in photo #9 (he was the father of a friend’s friend). There are a few photos of people from Bainbridge island as well, including the strawberry farmer who lost his farm after being “evacuated” (photo #16). According to what I read at the memorial, his crop that summer would have earned him enough to make the final payment on the farm, but instead he lost it. I wonder if he knew the fate of his farm when the photo was taken.
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The Henry Art Museum
 Digital Eye exhibition at the Henry Art Museum: Simen Johan. Untitled #83 (from the And Nothing was to be Trusted series).
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The highlight of Friday was spending the afternoon with Jay (my best friend from college), his wife Pauline, and their 7-week old daughter Desiree. We went to the Henry Art Museum, on the University of Washington campus, for the exhibition The Digital Eye: Photographic Art in the Electronic Age.
Technology has driven the art and science of photography since the invention of the medium in the early 19th century. Digital photography is the most recent development, and in many ways the most perplexing and provocative. New cameras, printing techniques, and software allow artists greater freedom than ever before to take photographs of the real world and to generate images from the imagination. At the same time, the capacity to seamlessly merge and morph pictorial elements has social, political, and legal implications. As a challenge to photography’s documentary nature and as a catalyst for creativity, digital photography has a profound impact on visual culture.
Art museums are usually low on my list of places to go when on vacation, but I saw an article about this exhibit, and it intrigued me. I thoroughly enjoyed it, by which I mean I found it challenging and disturbing. I don’t have much of a background in art, so I don’t feel I have the right vocabulary to say much beyond that.
An unexpected – and fun – surprise was the James Turrell Skyspace room. Maria finished with the digital art exhibition first, went in to the Skyspace room, and almost fell asleep. The rest of us came in a little later, and we must have been in there for almost an hour, just talking. It was an amazingly comfortable space, and we were lucky to have it all to ourselves for so long.
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First 36 Hours in Seattle
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I was warned not to let myself be seduced by Seattle in the summer (the only time of year it’s not gray and wet), but it’s too late. What a wonderful place. I leave later today, after an all too brief visit of four and half days. Over the next few days, I’ll write up a short post for each day.
Jay, my best from from college, lives here, and he picked me up from the airport Wednesday afternoon. It’s been six years since we’ve seen each other, so it’s been good to catch up. He lives near the Fremont neighborhood in northern Seattle, so he took me to see the Troll, the Ballard Locks, and the statue of Lenin (how it ended up in Seattle is a peculiar story – it’s not something the people in the neighborhood wanted – click the link if you’re curious). I arrived late in the day, so it was a short visit.
Maria arrived that night. She was at the APSA conference most of Thursday, and we’re staying downtown, so I made the obligatory tourist visits to Pike Place Market and the Seattle Center, home of the Space Needle and the EMP Museum. I especially enjoyed the EMP – it’s a combination rock and rock and science fiction museum. But it’s small, and unabashedly makes no attempt to approach either topic in a comprehensive way: most of the floor space for the rock and roll section is dedicated to Nirvana, and Battlestar Galactica dominates the sci fi section. I really enjoyed both. I was a big fan of the re-imagined BSG 2nd series, except for it’s absolutely awful final season (I wish I could be here for the last day of Bumbershoot tomorrow, so I could ask Ronald Moore the question at the very end of this article). Although I was never a big fan of Nirvana, the museum paid a lot of attention to some of my favorite music from the early 80s punk and alternative music scene that came before grunge. However, it was weird to see punk music so intensely analyzed, categorized, and neatly packaged in a museum – it felt antithetical to what punk itself it about. But once it becomes part of history, I suppose it’s inevitable.
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36 Hours in Denver
 Eidan and James at the Denver skate park
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 Kai at the Denver skate park
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My family and I are in the middle of my convoluted vacation plan for this week, which is designed to achieve two goals: give Maria and I some time together for our anniversary, and have the boys spend some time with Maria’s mother and sister, since they’re overdue for a visit.
On Monday I flew to Denver with Kai and Eidan, then yesterday I flew to Seattle, leaving the boys in Denver with Maria’s sister Yoko and her husband James. Maria flew out of Philadelphia yesterday and arrived in Seattle a few hours after I did – she’s here for the APSA conference. On Sunday Maria and I leave – she’ll go straight back to Philadelphia, and I’ll stop over in Denver to pick up the boys.
I had a day and half with the boys in Denver. I’ve been to Denver a few times now, and it’s become one of my favorite cities. The weather is spectacular, the people are easy going, the city is fun and easy to navigate, and there’s endless natural wonders outside the city. I got in a full day with boys on Tuesday. But unfortunately I forgot my camera, so all I have to share are the crummy cell phone pictures above.
We started the day early at the Westlands Park playground for frisbee, skateboarding, slides, swings, and some baseball. This past month was the wettest August ever for Philadelphia (19 inches, beating the old record by a full 5 inches), so the boys needed some time to play in the sun (without mosquitoes!). Then we headed to the Wizard’s Chest, which is a very fun toy and costume store. We took some downtime at Yoko’s place in the afternoon, and then ended the day with dinner at Pho Duy, a ride on Yoko and James’ scooters to the amazing Denver Skate Park so Kai could get in some more skateboarding, and then, finally, ice cream.
Nicole’s Wedding
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We just got back from my younger sister’s Nicole wedding. She and Keith were married on 1st Beach in Newport. The ceremony and the reception were great. The party is still going on, but we needed to get the boys to bed. My nephew Robbie almost stole the show in the ceremony as the ringbearer, coming down the aisle on his skateboard to deliver the rings. The wedding party arrived on a school bus since Nicole is a teacher (and they needed a bus since they had a a flotilla of 10 bridesmaids and 10 groomsmen). After the ceremony they had their photos taken on a firetruck since he’s a fireman.
The only person obsessed with the “Toppa” name more than me is Nicole (I have toppa.com, but she has the TOPPA license plate). She’s giving up her name for him, so she must be in love. Congratulations Keith and Nicole!
 Maria, before the ceremony
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 The ceremony
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 My nieces Taylor and Haley – 2 of a flotilla of 10 bridesmaids
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 Matthew, Kai, and Eidan
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 The boys with me and my dad
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 My sister E’loise and Maria
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Japanese Proverbs, Entry 2
The first Japanese proverb I posted was from a book published 56 years ago. Today’s is from a more recent book, 101 Japanese Idioms
Sashimi no tsuma
Garnish for raw fish
However attractive, the garnish that accompanies a serving of sashimi is of no significance. Some people may not even notice its presence. Such is the degree of dismissal sashimi no tsuma carries when used in discounting the importance of a person’s attendance at a meeting or gathering.
A note on pronunciation: when I tell people unfamiliar with Japanese about my experiences learning it so far, they are always surprised when I tell them it has very few sounds that don’t exist in English. A native English speaker won’t have much trouble pronouncing most Japanese words reasonably well (after you get used to all the vowels being monophthongs). One of few divergent syllables is the “tsu” (つ) in tsuma. Americans will recognize it from tsunami, but we tend to drop the “t” sound at the beginning. You can make the correct sound by trying to make an “s” and a “t” sound at the same time. What works for me is trying to make a “su” sound, while holding the front of my tongue at the front of the roof of my mouth. And like anything else, if you practice enough, it comes to feel natural.
Newport, Tokyo, Honolulu
The boys and I came back from a trip to Newport on Thursday, and Maria came back from Tokyo on Friday. She got stuck in Detroit for 6 hours, and had been awake and traveling for over 30 hours by the time she got home. It was a short (and successful) research trip for her. She spent most of her time there in one appointment after another. Before going, she had identified some problems in the data about Japan in the data sets compiled by AidData, so part of her trip was to determine what had happened with the Japanese government’s coding of the data. She was also there to further her general research on Japanese development aid, which has become an important part of her work in recent years.
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The boys had a good time visiting their cousins in Newport. We’ll go back again in August for my sister Nicole’s wedding. This is a photo of E’loise (one my other sisters), who was in the Doris Duke charity clothing auction.
If you follow me on Twitter you’ll know we took a trip to Honolulu back in early April, but I haven’t had a chance to mention it on my blog. Maria went for the ICAS AAS conference. Her ticket was paid for, and we had enough frequent flyer miles to cover two more, so we only had to pay for one ticket. The past year has been crazy for me with work, so I really enjoyed this trip.
Maria spent the first few days at the conference, and the boys and I explored the Waikiki area on foot. For our last few days, we rented a car and visited Diamond Head, Pearl Harbor, Hanauma Bay, the Foster Botanical Garden, the Polynesian Cultural Center, and a few other places. We had visited most of these places before on our last trip (the AAS conference regularly returns to Honolulu every 6 years), but the Polynesian Cultural Center was new for us. It was very well done, but a little too much like a Disney version of Polynesia. We chatted with some of the workers and performers, and they were all students at Brigham Young University Hawaii, which created the center. They work there to defray the cost of their education.
When it was time to fly back home, I really did not want to get on the plane. Part of me was thinking, hey, I’ve got credit cards, I can make this last for a while, but I reluctantly decided to not give in to the temptation.
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Mike's Tweets
- Looks like there is a "Mr. Toppa Toppa" who is a reggae producer - Toppas are everywhere ;-) http://t.co/H4yzmK9r #fb 1 day ago
- @speno for the kids we kept it simple - some onigiri had shiso salt and others had green tea salt. For the teachers, we used saury fish in reply to speno 4 days ago
- The boys & I have been re-watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. I mean the amazing anime series, not the awful movie http://t.co/ZQkYkpmQ #fb 4 days ago
- Just responded to another batch of Shashin support requests. I deserve a prize, or some donations (cough, cough) http://t.co/1Orx8brr 5 days ago
- RT @jtsternberg This video made my day! http://t.co/p3hM8Ny7 #fb - mine too 5 days ago
- More updates...
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Random Pictures
My sister E'loise and Maria
St. Stephen's Basilica
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Flotsam
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Random Posts
- 10 Nov 08 - Kai’s Candy Company – Going Out of Business Sale
- 27 Apr 04 - The Mike Toppa Archiving Project
- 01 Nov 04 - Samurai Kai
- 31 Mar 04 - The Stated Justification for the Iraq Invasion
- 09 Oct 04 - Debate Poll Results
