iesu!

art of music : salute to shostakovich
a pretty complex musical and photographic biography of the soviet composer dmitri shostakovich (no offense to russians but /oh god his last name/) .
i kind of like his early music. it's cheerful and playful, but keeps an edge of intelligence and irony that prevents it from being toothachingly sweet and therefore unbearable. it kind of reminds me of 'rhapsody in blue' for some reason.

his later music (specifically after he was publicly denounced for his opera 'lady macbeth') becomes extremely bitter. depressing minor twangs, stilted jumpy dances, harsh grinding chords. (in fact, a lot of them remind me of rachmarinoff, except he's more emo, with his 'swirling into the deep black abyss of utter depression' songs)
the whole group of them i'd like to call 'symphony of the broken toys'. things that might have been happy, a long long time ago, but you can't tell anymore.

the photographs were black and white and most of them were of places shostakovich had been to, with a few of his family. most of the family pictures were rather bland, actually, except for a photo of his third wife in the apartment they lived in in moscow after he died. just her sitting alone on the couch, looking down, mixed with the lecturer talking about how she'd been his 'angel' when he died, nursing him and caring for him and hoping. (she was 28 years younger than him)

mm. yeah. emotional stuff.


we had hot pot tonight! it was yum and delish.

HSPAs tomorrow!
spent today trying to do homework (and failing).
health asked for us to write down what we ate, calculate the servings of grain, meats, etc and figure out if we're missing anything from our diet. it /sounds/ easy but it became and absolute chore when i realized that half the stuff we eat i a) don't know the name of or b) can't translate the name into english without sounding really dumb (for instance, one of the staples of the chinese diet is a vegetable that is literally called 'green vegetable')
oh american culture how you make me cry. D:

finished (sort-of) 2 scileague tests.
my brain feels like it was run through a meat grinder, then a blender, then a juicer, and then baked for an hour. >:(
i need sleeeep...

yus

gud nite.