Sun, 10 March: Weekly Review 1

Listened to Twice‘s new With You-th album, which I bought yesterday. They’re a Kpop group I love very much. This is their thirteenth mini album, and it’s so good. Pop heaven. I especially like the songs Rush and You Get Me. Rush actually has a NewJeans vibe that’s just this side of respectful, as opposed to outright appropriating. Their label mates NMixx  have a song, Passionfruit, on their new album FE304: Break that’s got the NewJeans sound too. But then, another song on this Twice album, New New, sounds a bit like NMixx in parts. Ah, they steal from each other! Anyway, new Twice album: life is good! Check ’em out on Spotify.

Felt the need to play some No Man’s Sky. I just wanted to lazily fly around my home planet, Mina, for a while. This is where I was spawned. It’s a highly radioactive planet in a very quiet solar system. I seem to be the only human in the whole place, which is nice. Buzzing around my home planet, especially at night, flying over the hills and valleys, has a dream-like quality. It calms me. I called it Mina after my favourite Twice member. When I did that I realised I had to go and name eight more planets after the other members, which I did. I like visiting their planets, and each one has something about it that reminds me of them. I didn’t really have any criteria for Mina because it was my first planet, and I just chose the first thing on my mind, which was her – as it often is. But come to think about it, it fits her because her luminous beauty is radioactive.

Went to the open mic at the Herd bar in Healesville. I go there to see my mate Josh Bain perform, but it’s also just a good night out. Josh put on his usual great performance, singing three of his unique original songs. Then he surprised me by doing a cover, the Beatle‘s Something with the drummer Isak on piano. Everyone joined in for the ‘You’re asking me will my love grow’ bit. ‘I don’t know-o, I don’t know’. (Check out Josh on Spotify under Joshua Bain or The Going Away Party. It’s good stuff. I recommend his Going Away Party song Bogan Rhapsody as a starting point.) A young girl, about 11, got up and wowed us with her singing and confidence on her ukelele. Dad hovered around filming the whole thing. I guess they let kids in to perform at pubs these day. One couple got up and sang some countryish tunes. Their voices melded in harmony beautifully and reminded me of Gram and Emmylou. Him on guitar and she just on vocals. She was a buxom thing wearing a low cut dress. Eye candy. Ash, the host got up after them and, thanking them, congratulated the guy on his great hat. “Who’s your milliner?” he asked. Ash also wears a distinctive hat. Then a girl called Claire performed, with Isak again on piano. She was amazing. Her voice was professional quality. She did Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah better than just about anyone I’d heard do it. I asked Josh after his performance if he ever got nervous having to go up on stage in this company. He said no (he was up just after the 11 year old). Then he paused, and added with a laugh, “Sometimes.”

Continued on some reading. This one’s A New Day Yesterday, by Mike Barnes. A series of articles about the UK prog rock scene from the seventies. It’s a big book but I plan to just read some of the articles that interest me. It took my eye (borrowed at the library) because they actually write about the Moody Blues, one of my favourites. Articles about the Moodies are few and far between, and usually they’re a bit snide (Moodies aren’t considered ‘cool’ by rock writers). I don’t think there’s even a biog out there. This time I read the two articles about King Crimson. I have the first two albums, In the Court of the Crimson King and In the Wake of Poseidon, but I really must get into Red and Starless and Bible

Read another article from my prog rock book A New Day. This time it was Genesis. I’m not sure about their later stuff, but I love their work when Peter Gabriel was in the band. In fact, Lamb Lies Down On Broadway is presently my favourite album of all time. The article featured a very detailed breakdown of the long song Supper’s Ready from Foxtrot. I plan to keep it in mind next time I listen to the track, which I think will be soon.

Listened to a cd I compiled that is a bunch of long prog songs edited down to something more manageable. I like to do special edits of songs that I feel have bits in them I don’t like or that I feel are arranged wrong. Presumptuous, I know, but I love doing it. I have a few other such cd’s I’ve made featuring other genres. I’ll maybe mention them in later posts. Anyway, I didn’t have time to listen to the whole cd, just the first 6 songs. They were, in order, In-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly, two edits of When the Music’s Over by the Doors, Bluebird by Buffalo Springfield, Take a Pebble by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and Moonchild by King Crimson. If you’ve heard these songs you might have an idea what I have done with them. I won’t elaborate.

Watched episode 31 of anime Urusei Yatsura on Youtube. This is the reboot starting from last year. It’s certainly more colourful in its design than the old series of the eighties. This Lum has rainbow-coloured hair. Urusei is one of my favourite animes, and I’ve nearly collected all the manga by mangaka extraordinaire Rumiko Takahashi. I recently came back from a trip to Japan, and oh the Urusei merch I brought back with me! Anyway, the episode is about the characters entering into alternate universes through these special doors that a mysterious rabbit-boy has charge of. Lum is hoping to find the universe where she marries Ataru, her ‘darling’, while Ataru (that ‘baka’) hopes for harems. The episodes are being put up by someone called AnimeSimp and I applaud their efforts, even if they are slightly illegal.

I then watched a short doco by Youtuber Rebecca Watson about the book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. I was interested because it’s a book I have though have not yet read. Watson refutes Diamond’s thesis in the book that European civilisations had an advantage over others like the Americas because their expansion was east and westward, rather than northward and southward. Clearly there’s lots to unpack here, but it was definitely a discussion-starter. I was intrigued by a note on Watson’s bio which said there’s an asteroid orbiting the sun with her name on it.

Still on Youtube, I couldn’t help myself, I had to watch more Twice content. There has been a lot of fan follow ups to the making of the One Spark mv mentioned last time. A particular target has been the segment where Sana teaches a new flirting technique (look into the right eye, then the left, then at the lips), and demonstrates it on some of the members, who crack up. This is so great: we get the mv, then the making of doco, then the fan follow ups that enthuse about and enlarge upon scenes in the doco. And the editing is often brilliant and funny.

This was the big day I went to see Scottish rock band Teenage Fanclub at the Croxton Hotel. I won’t say any more about it here, because I just wrote a whole review of it and put the blog up on this site. Please give it a read.

Perusing my latest Allkpop subscription email I see Karina of fabulous kpop group Aespa has started a highly publicized relationship with a male actor celebrity, and it seems to have upset some of her fans. The uproar has been such that poor Karina has felt the need to write a letter of apology to her fans (or maybe her company just told her to). This in turn has created some blowback from other ‘netizens’ who are embarrassed about how all this must look like to western fans. One such interesting response can be found here on the Young Turks Youtube channel. As discussed on the channel, the problem seems to be deluded and selfish fans who want the idol all to themselves. I suspect, for some, the fact she’s dating a man is also an issue. I mean, there are a lot of gay fans in Kpop, so there’s that too. Yeah, it’s pretty flat fucking crazy. And I’ve gotta say: I am so here for it! Thank you Allkpop!

A little sidenote to this. In the early days of the Beatles John Lennon had to hide his marriage from fans for fear it would alienate them. So, this phenomenon isn’t new, nor specific to Koreans. We westerners have also been culprits.

When I’m skimming through Youtube there are lots of videos that I put on my Watch Later list when I’m short for time. Here are some I encountered today…

Legendary anime director Hayao Miyazaki apparently made a ‘dystopian scifi music video’ for a Japanese group in the nineties. The cuts I’ve seen of it in this doco by Tim Thoughts look amazing. I must check it out. By the way, I can’t praise Miyazaki’s latest film The Boy and the Heron high enough. Best film of 2023 in my opinion.

Excuse the language here, but I’ve been encountering a certain word on the net and social media lately that seems downright bizarre. The word is ‘cunty’. I spotted it again today in a Youtube video titled Cunty Girlgroup Bops I Love. The Youtuber channel is sweetrndzvs. I’m assuming it’s a woman, and the bio seems to suggest a Latina. Not sure what to make of this. It’s certainly not language most western guys would use. I suspect it’s lesbian slang of some sort. Anyway, I watched the start of the video and the first ‘bop’ was SNSD’s The Boys, so looks like it might be a good set.

I discovered today there is an alternative ‘redux’ edition of David Lynch‘s Dune that was created by a fan film editor. It goes for over three hours and is apparently high definition and I can see it on Youtube whenever I like for free. My attention was caught by the copyright disclaimer that said the copyrighted material is being used under ‘fair use’. Does that mean I can put up my edits of the last two Hobbit movies under fair use? (Yes, that’s right, I basically cut out lots of material, including old ‘poop head’ Radagast and joined the two together to make one longish film, because Peter Jackson should have made two Hobbit movies, not three.) I once put up a brief edit I made of the Nicholas Roeg film (starring David Bowie) The Man Who Fell to Earth and got slapped with a cease order from the company. Maybe I should give it another try?

Played some more No Man’s Sky. I’m still on my home planet Mina. For this session I just lazily flew my ship back to the nearest base, called Sharon Base. Yep, that’s another Twice reference. Stopped a few times to check out some buildings, load up on some caches and mine some minerals. When I got back to base, Mina wasn’t there, her bed was empty. Sigh. Minari….

Had a day off from work, so I went to the movies on this sunny day. It was Dune 2 in Boronia. I had planned to re-watch the first film to refresh my memory, but didn’t get around to it. I think a lot of people did that. I know the copies we have of the dvd in my library have been pretty popular lately, and that’s probably why. It didn’t matter anyway, I got up to speed pretty quickly once the film started. It was a 2:45 session and there were just four people in the cinema, including me. This is something I like a lot. Plenty of places to sit, no annoying people in your way. Of course the film was great, but I had some small issues with the story and character development. Stilgar comes off as a bit of a religious nutter, instead of the kickass warrior he is in the book. Paul’s surprising birth connection to the Harkonnens is given short shrift. And some of the staging of the final battle, I dunno, could’ve been better. Paul’s mother, Lady Jessica, seems to remain pregnant for a long time. Surely the action takes place over a period longer than nine months? That’s a long pregnancy! But I love the fact that Jessica’s unborn baby, Alia, speaks to her from the womb because the ‘water of life’ her mother has taken has awakened her mind. I wrote a brief review of the film on my Letterboxd channel. It was just this: ‘Must be the only film that features a main character who is a baby in the womb’.

I had a bit of time before the movie to check out a nearby op shop, and scored a couple of REM cd’s. They were special editions of Green and Monster (both of which of course I have) that included surround sound mixes on dvd. And they were four dollars all up. I have a surround sound setup at home, so I can’t wait to check them out. Normally I’d pass on yet more cheap cd’s, but these two I couldn’t resist. REM: second best US band.

Dune 2 is really trending on social media at the moment. I read a couple of interesting threads on my X/Twitter, which I retweeted. One post, from Pulp Librarian, looked at the early struggles to bring Dune to the screen. Another, by Moschindorito, pointed out the reasons why Star Wars is just a worse version of Dune.

The Dune 2 social media trends continue. Saw a fantastic video on Youtube titled The Real Stars of Dune, about the real planets featured in the novel. Great computer graphics, informative commentary. Apparently Arrakis is fictional, but Canopus, the sun it revolves around, isn’t.

So the other big pop culture item I consumed today was my Misamo concert bluray. It stands for Mina, Sana and Momo, the three Japanese members (the J-line) of Kpop group Twice. They released their mini album, Masterpiece, last year in between touring duties with Twice, and then did a series of five showcase gigs in Japan, the last of which was filmed. The ladies, of course, looked gorgeous, and they performed splendidly, and I wondered how they were going to stretch out an entire gig with just seven songs in their repertoire, but I won’t bore you with the details. Just accept that it was fantastic, and I loved it, and it was (a lot of) money well spent.

Now that Twice‘s new mini album, With You-th, is out there’s a whole bunch of promotional material to go with it, and I’m absolutely here for it. Watched a video where the ladies practice the dance for the song One Spark, the latest single. In the early part there’s lots of goofing around while they block the spaces and work out what to do. Their instructor has a lot of work ahead of her, but they knuckle down. Later, when they start practicing to the song it starts to come together and there’s an exhilarating energy when they finally nail the dance. I guess it’s not for everyone, but I could watch them watch paint dry and be absolutely mesmerized. I’m that kind of fan.

A little later, I saw the making of video for the One Spark video. That’s right, we not only get the music video but we also get the making of, often in multi parts. I love this. The music videos go by so fast, there’s not enough time to take everything in. So it’s great to get a closer look at the ladies in the outfits they wore and the behind the scenes incidents and fun times. There’s an amazing sequence of Dahyun crying on cue for a scene which ends up lasting less than a second in the final video. Poor Dubu…At one point oldest member Nayeon comes in and, seeing her junior member crying, asks accusingly “Who made her cry?” Later, we see Mina chilling out playing a game on her hand held. She reminisces about an earlier shoot when Jeongyeon tried to interview her on camera but she could not because she was too absorbed in her game. My darling otaku Mitang…A sequence involving Nayeon finally answers a question I had about the music video. It’s of Nayeon looking hungrily at a cake. Very similar to a scene that appeared in the Donut video because again she’s wearing a beret (she looks good in berets). But there’s something wrong with her nose, a dark smudge on the right side. What is it, did she get a nose job or something? Turns out she had a big pimple there. We see a makeup artist covering it up, but it’s still not perfect. My poor vain Nabong….

Still on the Kpop vibe, there was a news piece on email channel Allkpop I subscribe to about girl group Nmixx that momentarily threw me for a loop. The title was ‘J.Y. Park says he gives up on NMixx’s Bae?‘ Bae is one of my favourite members of Nmixx and the text seemed to be saying that J.Y.P., the company’s founder (see main picture), was letting her go due to some unknown transgression. I was actually horrified. But it turned out this was a setup for a promo for a new web entertainment show the company was making called ‘The Second Life of Those Given Up by Company’. Phew! But you have to understand, this sort of humour is a bit close to the bone for us NMixx fans (we’re called NSWERs – answers) since one of their members, Jinni, actually left the group (or was kicked out) under mysterious and distressing circumstances. Their latest mini album, FE304, is fantastic, by the way.

I saw a snippet of the show that features NMixx‘s Bae that I mentioned yesterday. She was starting her new ‘career’ as a kindergarten teacher by doing a story time surrounded by kids and reading from a book about Farts. Some of the kids were shown interviewed later and they said it was ‘weird’. It looks like fun, so I’ll check it out soon. It always amazes me how gamely these kpop idols seem to take to these silly reality tv setups. I guess they don’t really have a choice. It began around the start of covid when the kpop companies couldn’t send their charges on tour, so they created these reality tv programs around them to give them something to do. Twice have been doing one called Time To Twice that’s still going. We Twice fans (called Onces) eagerly look forward to each new installment. They are great for highlighting their individual personalities and inter-personal relationships.

Saw a news item on the tv about Sam Kerr, captain of the Matildas soccer team. She had apparently got into trouble for insulting a policeman by allegedly calling him a stupid white bastard. Pretty funny. Can’t help but think of all them stupid white bastard news readers who enthused about her during the recent women’s World Cup. I wonder what they think of her now? Actually, racism’s never really funny, but I think us whiteys need a little reverse racism from time to time to put us in our place and remind us what it’s like for people of colour.

Read my LibraryThing: State of the Thing newsletter for February. This is a monthly email post I receive about the site which is basically a database for book lovers, not unlike Goodreads, but I think it’s better. Lots of really good info about the state of the book world, including interviews, awards notices, lists, talk and even a In Memoriam section. One item that caught my eye was a discussion about Space Opera happening in the Science Fiction Fans section of the site. I gave it a read and it was full of great recommendations about the sub genre. I’m familiar with the early space opera writers, like Doc EE Smith and Isaac Asimov and his Foundation series, but I haven’t really got around to the later authors. I’ll have to give them a try, when I have the time.

I saw in the In Memoriam section there that British writer Christopher Priest died recently. He was 80. I loved his book The Space Machine, a kind of amalgam of HG Wells’ Time Machine and War of the Worlds. He also wrote the book The Prestige, which was made into a good film by Christopher Nolan (featuring David Bowie as Nikola Tesla). RIP Chris.

Found a nice little channel on Youtube called Dutchsteammachine that deals in lots of retro content. Contained a video of an old shellac recording from the 1930s playing a song called Girls Were Meant To Take Care of Boys. Seems to be part of the Youtuber’s efforts to digitize some old shellacs, a project that has my utmost respect. The song is sung by Rose Murphy and it’s beautiful. A sound slightly reminiscent of early Billie Holiday. Her voice and the instrumentation, oh man…I put it in my favourites.

Still on the retro vibe, I came across a terrific little video called Finding and Digitizing the Apollo 11 Moon Landing on NBC by RetroFreak84. The guy details the adventure of finding this old video reel for sale online, bidding for and buying it. When he takes delivery of the reel, he painstakingly cleans it up then watches it for the first time. Turns out it’s the real deal. We watch as the original animation of the landing is shown, complete with Neil Armstrong and Mission Control’s original dialogue. I know it all sounds pretty boring, but I have to say, I was positively salivating at the tape reel to reel machines the guy had and all the near pornographic details that went into cleaning the reel (at one point he ‘bakes’ the tape to stop it from clinging). I read some of the comments and there was the usual conspiracy nutters who thought the moon landings were a hoax. But some were appreciative.

I’m very fond of old Mission Control, the guy who helped talk Neil and Buzz down to the surface of the moon. He was Charlie Duke, who would go on to walk on the moon himself on the Apollo 16 mission. In the 1990s Charlie was visiting a High School in Victoria as part of a tour he was doing promoting NASA. He required the school’s media teacher to set up some film he had of the mission to show to the kids in the auditorium. The session went well, and Charlie thrilled the kids with his talk and the film footage. Afterwards, the media teacher was thanked by the great man and got to shake his hand. I was that media teacher.

I cancelled my subscription to Andromeda Spaceways magazine today. It’s been a great mag, with lots of terrific scifi, fantasy and horror short stories, but basically I just don’t have time to read it. I already have a backlog of the things to go through. And the last issue I read, #92, I have to say the quality had gone down. I have a bunch of reviews I wrote about the mag here, if you’re interested.