"Sonic and Visual Trajectories: Taiwan's Pop Music in Chinese-Speaking Asia," September 26 at Pitt.

The University of Pittsburgh's Asian Studies Center will host Marc Moskowitz and his talk "Sonic and Visual Trajectories: Taiwan's Pop Music in Chinese-Speaking Asia" on September 26.

Taiwan's popular music has shaped China's music and culture to a surprising degree. The roots of Taiwan's music industry can be found in the 1930s Jazz era in Shanghai. Sixty years later, Taiwan was the hub of the Chinese-language pop music industry--a sonic movement that shaped CHinese understandings of music, gender, and individuality in the contemporary age. Today, music videos and mash-ups that are posted to YouTube (and its Chinese counterparts Youku and Tudou) demonstrate cultural proximity between China and Taiwan that reveals both shared cultural understandings and ongoing regional tensions that arise out of their distinctive pasts.

The talk starts at 5:00 pm in 144 Cathedral of Learning and is free and open to the public.

SAP Ariba hiring bilingual Mandarin-English Procurement Operations Specialist for overnight call center position.

SAP Ariba is hiring a bilingual Mandarin-English Procurement Operations Specialist for an overnight position in Pittsburgh.

ROLE DESCRIPTION:

The Customer Support Associate primary function is to effectively support Ariba applications for both internal and external customers. Support includes site navigation and system troubleshooting as well as interfacing with other Ariba teams to ensure world-class service. Assistants will provide complete satisfaction for all customer interactions.


EXPECTATIONS AND TASKS:

Responsibilities

• Provide inbound and outbound (phone, email, web form, chat, community) application/ functional support and resolution to customers (external and internal) while presenting the company in a positive and fair manner with timely updates and knowledgeable answers
• Collaborate, coordinate, and escalate on customer issues acting as a customer advocate while working with all departments
• Maintaining the quality of the customer support organization (release readiness, process definition, training, service audits…)
• Document transactions in CRM system
• Create content for knowledge base systems

Yoshino coming soon to Shadyside.

The new Japanese/Chinese restaurant coming to Walnut Street got a name this week: Yoshino. It is taking the place of China Palace, which closed in Shadyside after nearly 30 years in business. A handwritten sign on the door says both China Palace and Mt. Everest Sushi cuisine will be available.

Pitt Honors College presents The Farewell, September 27.

The University of Pittsburgh's Honors College will show The Farewell on September 27 as the next installment of its "Movies Everyone Should See" series. From the distributor:

In this funny, uplifting tale based on an actual lie, Chinese-born, U.S.-raised Billi (Awkwafina) reluctantly returns to Changchun to find that, although the whole family knows their beloved matriarch, Nai-Nai, has been given mere weeks to live, everyone has decided not to tell Nai Nai herself. To assure her happiness, they gather under the joyful guise of an expedited wedding, uniting family members scattered among new homes abroad. As Billi navigates a minefield of family expectations and proprieties, she finds there’s a lot to celebrate: a chance to rediscover the country she left as a child, her grandmother’s wondrous spirit, and the ties that keep on binding even when so much goes unspoken. With The Farewell, writer/director Lulu Wang has created a heartfelt celebration of both the way we perform family and the way we live it, masterfully interweaving a gently humorous depiction of the good lie in action with a richly moving story of how family can unite and strengthen us, often in spite of ourselves.

The movie starts at 6:30 pm on the 35th floor of the Cathedral of Learning and is open to the Pitt undergraduate community.

"Sport as Global Spectacle: 2020 Summer Olympics Study Abroad Program" information session at Pitt, September 25.

Logo concept by @darennewman

The University of Pittsburgh's Study Abroad Office will present a "Sport as Global Spectacle: 2020 Summer Olympics Study Abroad Program" information session on September 25.

Sport as Global Spectacle: 2020 Summer Olympics is a 4-week intensive summer study abroad program that will engage you with the cultural and global spectacle of the Summer Olympic Games. The 2020 Summer Olympics will take place from July 24 - August 9 in Tokyo, Japan. This program will run from July 11 - August 10, 2020. The first two weeks of the program will take place in Osaka and will be intensive class preparation along with guest speakers and the remaining two weeks will be in Tokyo focused around attending, analyzing and discussing the Olympic spectacle. You may have the opportunity to meet and hear from Olympic planning officials, local leaders and regional experts on the impact and significance of the Olympics in the region. This program will help you understand the local and global implications of international sporting events as well as the unique cultural spectacle the Olympics can cultivate. Students in the program will attend some official Olympic sporting events.

The information session runs from 3:00 to 4:00 in 3106 Posvar Hall.

2016 Japanese animated movie A Silent Voice (聲の形) at CMU, September 20.

The Japanese Student Association at Carnegie Mellon University will screen the 2016 Japanese animated movie A Silent Voice (聲の形) on Friday, September 20. A synopsis of the film from the distributor:

The story begins with a deaf elementary school girl named Shoko Nishimiya, who transfers to a new school and meets a boy named Shoya Ishida. Shoya, who is not deaf, leads the school in bullying Shoko over her disability. The bullying escalates, and so Shoko transfers to another school. Immediately, the class and even Shoya's closest friends, bully him for having bullied Shoko. Shoya loses contact with Shoko, and for years he suffers the consequences of his guilt. Upon entering high school, Shoya finally decides he must find Shoko, determined to make amends for what he did in elementary school and to become Shoko's friend. Along the way, he meets new and old faces, and struggles with many complicated relationships and feelings.

It runs from 6:30 to 9:00 pm in 1211 Doherty Hall (map) and is open to the university community.

English-Chinese Language Social Hour, October 4 at Pitt.

via Pietro Motta (Creative Commons)

The University of Pittsburgh's Asian Studies Center and English Language Institute will collaborate on an English-Chinese Language Social Hour on October 4.

Join us for an evening of language and cultural exchange between Pitt students and international students

The event is free and open to the Pitt community, and will be held in 4130 Posvar Hall (map) from 4:30 to 5:30 pm.

Big plans for the KBox site.

The online exhibition of the 2019 Design Pittsburgh Awards has an interesting building in its "unbuilt" section: a new five-story cooperative-living project on the current site of KBox at 214 S. Craig St. in Oakland. From AIA Pittsburgh:

We addressed the problem of displacement due to gentrification by designing an affordable Pittsburgh alternative to owning your own home: This project features a cooperative living arrangement in which potential residents purchase ownership shares in an organization that owns the entire property. Our renderings demonstrate that both the light filled residential units and the common areas have been carefully designed according to the WELL standard of “improving comfort, driving better choices, and generally enhancing, not compromising, health and wellness.” Our design makes an impact because we have designed just what Pittsburgh needs today: an affordable high density, multifunctional environment that is physically attractive.

The client is Mike Wu of the Ramen Bar, Pink Box, and Rose Tea Cafe ownership, and the architect is Fisher ARCHitecture.

Years ago the plan for the site included a new, larger Pink Box in Oakland at 4527 Winthrop St., directly behind KBox, though eventually the Oakland address was removed from the logo.

English-Korean Language Social Hour, October 11 at Pitt.

via travel oriented (Creative Commons)

The University of Pittsburgh's English Language Institute and Asian Studies Center will present its next English-Korean Language Social Hour on October 11.

Join us for an evening of language and cultural exchange between Pitt students and international students.

It runs from 4:30 to 5:30 pm in 4130 Posvar Hall (map).

"Twilight World of Screens? Really? Women, Art, and Agency in Late Heian Japan" at Pitt, September 26.

The University of Pittsburgh's History of Art & Architecture will host Yale University's Dr. Mimi Yiengpruksawan and her talk "Twilight World of Screens? Really? Women, Art, and Agency in Late Heian Japan" on September 26.

For decades it has been a commonplace that the Buddhist art practices of the Kyoto elite in the 11th and 12th centuries were for the most part the preserve of a man’s world of statesmanship, faith, and patronage. Among the most influential of such patrons were Fujiwara no Michinaga, his son Yorimichi, and their circle of gentlemen friends. A close look at primary records of the period, such as the diaries of Michinaga and his associates, tells a different story and allows another picture of their world to come into view. We see that, in that world, women of the Fujiwara and Minamoto houses—Fujiwara no Senshi (Akiko), Fujiwara no Shōshi (Akiko), Fujiwara no Kanshi (Hiroko), and Minamoto no Rinshi (Tomoko) in particular—were the equals of these men if not their superiors in Buddhist arts patronage of their day. In this lecture Professor Yiengpruksawan provides evidence for this claim and then considers the role of modern analysis and interpretation of the Tale of Genji—a haunting story of love and loss written by Murasaki Shikibu during her years in service to Michinaga’s daughter Shōshi—as having skewed and even obscured our picture of women at the Heian court. Her hope is that, by drawing attention to the primary textual and visual records, and stepping away from generalizations about the lives of Heian women based on modern and often gendered commentary, we can break free of assertions that, compliant and servile, the Heian woman lived in what Ivan Morris once called “a twilight world of screens.” That Heian woman, it must be said, is not to be found in the actual historical and visual record, which delivers instead a woman of great vision and agency in the emergence of traditional Japanese culture, holding her own in a complex world of politics, and flourishing there.

It starts at 4:00 pm in room 202 of the Frick Fine Arts Building (map) and is free and open to the public.