Sun, 16 Mar: Weekly Review 53

Read more of Andy Partridge‘s Complicated Game. I’m near the end. He talked about two songs from the last album, Wasp Star. They were Stupidly Happy and Church of Women, both of which I listened to. Andy mentioned Stupidly Happy was inspired by the Rolling Stones, especially some of their ‘groove’ songs, like Miss Amanda Jones and Jumpin’ Jack Flash. That’s because it retains the same guitar riff throughout and there isn’t the usual bridge or middle eight. It just adds elements to keep interest, like Colin’s bass coming in half way and additional instrumentation. I’ve always liked it, especially the little interjection about the Devil that Andy did apparently holding his nose for that distant nasally sound. Not such a fan of Church of Women though. There’s a part with a trumpet that Andy said was a steal from Bob Marley’s No Woman No Cry, which was interesting, but he gets too technical with some of his music talk here. I liked his comment about writing songs, how the songs usually just ‘come out with an idea, a phrase, or a couple of lines simultaneously with chords’, and how the whole lyric comes later. That’s certainly been my experience.

Finished Andy Partridge’s Complicated Game book. Last bits were a talk about 2 Rainbeau Melt, a song from his Fuzzy Warbles series, and an Epilogue where he talked about songwriting. His advice for writers to not be afraid to make mistakes and just start recklessly pouring forth with ideas and impulses reminds me of the first Tarot Major Arcana card, the Fool. His story about the origins of 2 Rainbeau Melt was quite enlightening. He’d had an argument with his partner Erika, and they went for a walk and encountered a beautiful double rainbow that immediately melted their differences. Nice. Is it a song or a poem put to music? I think it’s a song, an impressionistic song.

It was good getting an insight into Andy’s thinking on songwriting and all the anecdotes about the guys in XTC. His personality really comes through – especially his penchant for making funny voices (which got a little tiring, truth be told). Todd Bernhardt was a very sympathetic interviewer who was clearly on Andy’s wavelength. So much so that he could match Andy pun for pun, which would not be easy.

Listened to Best of the Bee Gees Vol 2. A really nice collection. I was especially struck this time by the third song, If Only I Could Think of Something Else. A really fine moody ballad with ethereal backing vocals. Yet another of their unheralded gems, I’d say. I’ve put it up on my Spotify Revisits and Discoveries playlist.

I watched the third episode of the Netflix anime series Pluto. Atom’s sister befriends a seemingly homeless man who is actually a robot, then it turns out he is Pluto. We encounter another character who seems to be a robot but is able to disguise it when it goes through a detection screen. Seems like a candidate for the culprit of the robot murders we’ve encountered so far. The show has an almost fragmentary feel about it with multiple storylines going on all hung together by the central murder investigation. It’s clearly meant to be more than just a whodunnit. Maybe a meditation on what it means to be human and what it means to be a robot and how different are they really?

I read a couple more stories from the Best of World SF. They were Fandom For Robots by Vina Jie-Min Prasad and Virtual Snapshots by Tlotlo Tsamasse. The piece by Tlotlo, a Botswanan writer, is a well-written story of climate change dystopia in Africa where even the very air is up for purchase and most people stay indoors vibing on virtual reality, otherwise known as DigiWorld. It is not an option for the MC here who must go outside to visit her ailing mother who is now 12 months pregnant. It’s not a happy tale, but a vivid one nonetheless. The other story, Fandom For Robots, was an absolute pleasure to read. Telling the story of Computron, ‘the only known sentient robot, created in 1954,’ it lovingly details the out of date boxy robot’s growing fascination with an online anime show called Hyper-dimension Warp Record. This story charts the adventures of prison escapees Ellison, a human, and Cyro, a cybernetic robot. Computron gets drawn into the story so much that it begins writing fan fiction for it, especially identifying with Cyro. But its portrayal of Ellison lacks nuance, which is where fellow fan fiction writer bjornruffian helps out. The two begin a correspondence, with Computron calling itself RobotFan. They begin work on a collab fanfic of the show that becomes a hit. Bjornruffian, who is a woman, doesn’t know RobotFan’s true identity, and thinks its occasional mention of a lack of emotion circuits is simply its sense of humour. This story could have gone on much longer for me. In fact, there’s definitely scope for it. Like, what happens when bjornruffian discovers RobotFan’s true identity? Terrific stuff, and the first five star story for me from this collection.

I finally did the vote for that My Anime List story competition. There were ten to choose from and I read the first chapter of the ones I liked. They were An Ode To the Stars, Soullet, A Cynic’s Guide To Igniting Love In Future World, Memoria, Food Truck In Space and Reborn As An Android Girl In a Familiar New World. I chose this last one, which was actually the first one I read. Written by someone called oneiricElegy, it’s a story about a scientist who has created something called a human consciousness integration project that benefits all mankind. But she’s tired of being a scientist and living the scientist life. She wants to live a normal life as what she really is: a teenage girl! I can’t resist scifi stories about cute brainy girls…

And okay, I know this whole competition thing is all about sites like AnimeID and Honeyfeed, which run this, getting their data hooks into you, but I can live with it. Honeyfeed is a web novel site that, if I had more time, I would definitely like to explore. I’m actually considering submitting one of mine to the site, a short story I wrote called A Princess of Planitia.

Played and transferred my Junko Yagami album. Side one had some nice uptempo things bordering on city pop, but side two was mostly histrionic ballads.

Had a listen to my newly burned Junko Yagami cd of her album I Wanna Make a Hit Wit Choo. It’s starting to show its charms. She has a cute voice and I’m really liking the song Hey Kid. It’s almost like a new wave song with some fun spoken word passages.

Listened to a compilation of the Reels in the van on the run to Millgrove. They’re a band who’s bio I just read in that Australian Rock Encyclopedia (I’m up to the R’s) and I remembered how much I used to like them and must get an album. The comp started with Love Will Find a Way, which I couldn’t help but feel was a message to me, because I had hopes of seeing Susan again at the Millgrove church. Alas, she wasn’t there – so it didn’t find a way (for now). Had the usual terrific chat about pop culture with Michael. He told me about a Peter Sellers film he saw recently called A Day At the Beach. It was written by Roman Polanski and was apparently what he was doing when his wife Sharon Tate was murdered. Michael also mentioned another film called Candy, which looks and sounds like one I’ve gotta watch. It has Marlon Brando in it and the girl who plays the title character looks amazing. The subject got around to the Beatles and Michael had a different recollection about who says fuck on Hey Jude. He thinks it was John. I tried to correct him that it was Paul, because I’d read about it in Geoff Emerick’s book Here, There and Everywhere, but he wouldn’t have it. But he did ask me to see if we have the book in the library so he can read it.

On the way back from Millgrove I got pulled over by the cops for speeding. Bastards had the car hid down the road that’s a known speeding trap. To his credit, the copper didn’t fine me, just let me off with a warning. Guess I was lucky. He did say one funny thing: ‘the books will get where they’re going without you speeding’.

I’ve been listening to my copy of Blackpink Rose’s album Rosie in the car. It’s very good, but there are a lot of angsty poor little me/us bogan type songs on there. Sounds like damning with faint praise, but no, the songs really are good, and Rose sings wonderfully. I also checked out the new Lisa album Alter Ego in the van on the way back from Millgrove (the first song was playing when the cops pulled me over). It’s much better than I thought it would be. I especially liked a song called Thunder and one called Rapunzel, featuring Megan Thee Stallion, who guested on the recent Twice song Strategy. Damn, the woman’s everywhere! At this point it’s inevitable I’ll prolly buy the album. Then it’ll be Jennie, then Jisoo…I’m so pathetic.

Rage has a pretty interesting bunch of artists on the new releases show tonight, so I’m recording it on the PVR. There’s some Blackpink Jennie and a band called Bonnie Trash that has a song called Poison Kiss that I must see. The record label they’re on is called Hand Drawn Dracula. I suspect I will like them.

I watched episode four of the asteroid hitting earth disaster series Salvation. They’re really drawing out the story with lots of intrigue and shenanigans. The politics are very Cold War with Russia lately showing up as the baddie, installing a meddling spy into the mix. There’s a mildly interesting storyline where the science fiction author joins a task force trying to decide the makeup of the 160 people who should go on the entrepreneur character’s Ark ship to Mars, if the asteroid hits Earth. She of course advocates for artists over the scientist and engineer types (‘useful people’) that the other team members favour. So far no one’s talked about the obvious elephant in the room when it comes to this topic: how it’s the slippery slope towards Eugenics and Malthusian selection – ie, Hitler. There are lots of holes in the plot and the characters, and the science can be pretty dodgy. There’s a scene where the characters are in the control room at NASA watching a probe orbiting Jupiter. They make changes to the probe’s programming and the changes come up immediately on the screen without the time delay that would obviously occur. I think it would at least be a half hour or more before the signal would get to the probe in reality. I guess it’s not a biggie as it’s about story expediency. So far all the machinations of the story have been done in private without the public’s knowledge, but I do know this season is heading to the point where the oncoming disaster is revealed to the public. Then there’s a whole other season to deal with that. Don’t know if I’ll stick around for that, but I’ll at least finish this season out. It’s not a bad show.

It was a full moon tonight, so I took my Star Trek TNG Tarot deck out into the moonlight to have it purified. Yes, I know this isn’t exactly scientific, but I still feel there’s some meaning in doing these rituals. As the moon’s light passed across each card I could feel it doing them good. Hail Moon! Well done Moon!

I was looking through some of the latest offerings on Netflix tonight and discovered they have The Platform films. These amazing horror films were mentioned in my recent reading of Capitalism A Horror Story and I’ve been wanting to watch them. Yay! There was also some other intriguing things that I added to my Watchlist like The Hot Spot, a series set in Japan about a female hotel worker befriending an alien. There was also ZOM 100, a Japanese zombie movie about a salaryman who’s happy about the Z apocalypse because it means he doesn’t have to work anymore! He then proceeds to fulfil his bucket list of 100 items before the zombies get him.

I actually started watching The Hot Spot. It was kind of quirky and definitely dry, but I liked it. The setting is quite close to Mount Fuji, which is featured throughout the show.

Snagged a couple more Grubby items that were being thrown out at the library today. They were the cds of Arctic Monkeys‘ Tranquility Base and Loretta Lynn’s 22 Greatest Hits. And the dvd of the French animated film Fantastic Planet. I have a burned copy of the film, but it’s nice to have a proper copy. I’ve seen it and it’s an amazing film. Actually I thought I might already have the Loretta Lynn album, but it turned out I don’t. I have a lot of albums I’ve bought cheap from op shops over the years, and many of them have languished in my cupboards waiting for me to get around to playing them, and I thought one of them might be that one. I’ve now got two Arctic Monkeys albums in storage. I guess I’ll get around to playing them someday.

I played and burned a copy of my old Kinks Celluloid Heroes compilation album today. It’s been quite an oversight for me leaving it this long to do it, being the huge Kinks fan that I am. The album is a collection of some of their singles from their RCA years of the Seventies, and many of the songs are different from and often superior to the album versions. I particularly like the single versions of Muswell Hillbilly, Here Comes Yet Another Day and Sitting In the Midday Sun. The single version of MH is more sprightly than the album version, and Dave’s tasty guitar licks are more on display, whereas they’re buried in the mix on the album version. The drums on SITMS are better balanced on the single version, and Dave’s nice harmony vocals near the end are more to the fore in the mix. HCYAD is a surprising and superior live version that’s not even on the live disc that came with the Everybody’s In Showbiz album. On the other hand, the album version of Starmaker is better than the shortened and sped up single version here. Yeah, I’m a bit of a nut about the Kinks. You should see what I did with their Picture Book boxed set…

I listened to my Kinks Celluloid Heroes compilation that I digitised last night. Boy those are some good songs. The live tracks, which are mostly from Everybody’s In Showbiz, are the aural equivalent of being happily drunk. It’s appropriate that one of them is called Alcohol. This was the first of two compilation albums put out of the Kinks’ RCA years. Released in 1976, CH didn’t include material from the last RCA album, Schoolboys In Disgrace, which was released later that year. It also didn’t have anything from Preservation Act Two. The second album was called Second Time Around and came out in 1980. I remember seeing it in the shops, but I didn’t buy it because I didn’t like the song selection. Two of the tracks, A Face In the Crowd and Celluloid Heroes, were included on the first album, so I don’t know why they were there. The live version of Lola is the short minute and a half snippet from Everybody’s In Showbiz, so that’s a bit of a waste. For some reason two of the weakest songs from the studio version of that album are there, Hot Potatoes and Motorway. The Hard Way and No More Looking Back from Schoolboys In Disgrace are welcome but it’s not enough. I think about what they could have put on there. The single b-side version of Scrapheap City with the Ray vocal, the single version of Mirror of Love, Supersonic Rocket Ship – I mean, c’mon! It was a shitty compilation and they should have done better. See, I told you I was a nut about the Kinks.

Had work at Realm today so I stopped in at JB Hifi for a peruse. They had a copy of Blackpink Lisa’s album which I was tempted to buy. It would make a nice companion to my Rose album, but I’m begging off for now. I’ll check it out on Spotify first because I’m a little bit iffy about Lisa’s music compared to Rose’s. Actually the other two members, Jennie and Jisoo also have solo albums out so I can definitely feel a Best of Blackpink Solo mix tape coming on.

In one of those cases of ‘just go with it’, a woman patron came up to me in the library today and showed me a page of a book that pertained to librarians that she thought I’d appreciate. The book was Neil Gaiman’s Art Matters and the page was the chapter title of ‘Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming’. She was insistent that I should peruse the book so, after thanking her, she left it with me and simply walked out of the library. I started looking at the chapter and some of the things Gaiman was saying about reading and its power really clicked with me and some of my thinking at the moment, so I borrowed it. It has illustrations by Chris Riddell. They’re cartoony and adequate to the job, but there’s one he did I didn’t like. In order to illustrate Gaiman’s point about ideas, including bad ideas, he gives us an image of an Arab terrorist. I hope in the next edition he gives us an image of Netanyahu, for balance. Apart from that, I’m enjoying the book, which is something of an entertaining and enlightening manifesto.

There was a funny discussion about MILFs on Twitter today. It was a response to a 21 year old woman’s declaring herself a MILF because she already has three kids. Most argued she was not a MILF but more like a disaster. Some just said that they needed to be at least 30. Most posters agreed that when a woman gets to 50 she’s hitting cougar territory. The things Twitter people write about. Funny? Appalling? You be the judge.

Watched another episode of Macross. This was the lead up ep to the final battle episode and was all about that fabulous Zentradi character Exedor’s attempts at diplomacy aboard the Macross. Here he’s been ‘micronised’ in order to fit on the ship, because the Zentradis are giants who can make themselves human-sized through equipment they possess. I love how he insists that Lynn Minmay be a part of the diplomatic discussions because her music and presence has had such a powerful influence on his Zentradi fleet. Because he doesn’t know her name he has to sing (and dance) a couple of bars of My Boyfriend Is a Pilot to get the message across to the delegation. It’s a scream. But, in the end, all the diplomacy is in vain, because the entire fricken Zentradi fleet show up to join the vanguard fleet and prepare for war.

I watched the big battle episode of Macross. Also the next ep that was set about a year after the events of the war. The battle episode is one of the most amazing episodes of anime ever. So much going on. Hikaru declares his love for Minmay, who is recruited to sing for the fleet to weaken the enemy (and also required to kiss her step brother Jason, because that will have an effect too). Meanwhile Misa is on Earth as the Zentradi army annihilate it in a shower of spectacular explosions and devastating death scenes, including one where a man shields a child from a nuclear blast to no avail. Minmay sings a bunch of her songs as the battle rages, and Hikaru makes a desperate trip to Earth to save Misa, who has survived the explosions. This whole sequence was re-done even bigger and better in the film Do You Remember Love. So epic. It was supposed to be the final episode, but the studio got extra funding for more episodes so they had to devise a long epilogue to the show that ties up the loose ends.

Twitterer Eric Alper posed a couple of interesting questions on his page that I thought were worth re-posting. One was ‘What Was Cool When You Were Young But Isn’t Cool Now?’ The overwhelming response to this was cigarettes. I lurked, as I usually do, but if I’d responded I might have said Benny Hill, though I’m not sure if he was ever cool. He was a funny but dirty old man who’s sexist humour we liked back then. The other question was ‘What has gradually disappeared over the last 10 years without people really noticing it?’ Besides comments like ‘the phone book’ and ‘common decency’, my favourite response was ‘car cds’. As someone who has a car that was a last model to include a cd player, I can sympathise. I would also include cd rom drives in computers, though that’s an easy fix with an external drive, which are still available. I like Alper’s questions: they often provide some stimulating food for thought, and good threads. Keep asking ‘em, Eric!

The library had the latest issue of manga Yashahime, number 6. It threw me a bit because I haven’t seen a copy in the stores as yet, so I’m surprised the library already has a copy. I borrowed it, of course, but I’ll buy it anyway if I can find a copy. It’s a manga I’m definitely collecting.

I read the Yashahime manga. After a tearful reunion with their parents who are stuck in some spiritual limbo, Towa, Setsuna and Moroha are headed to old period Nagasaki in Kyushu to try to vanquish Kirinmaru. They are accompanied by Riku, a young man created from Kirinmaru’s severed arm, and Rion, a ghost child who was once Kirinmaru’s daughter. Their first stop is the bustling port city of Sakai, near Osaka. Here they encounter a corpse dealer related to Jubai who sets their journey to the west up with some pirate demon hunters. The head pirate is a half-demon babe called Shiori, and it is with her and her crew that Towa and the others help fight a sea goddess called Zuchi in the midst of their journey. This was a pretty enjoyable sequence. Shiori is indeed a babe of bat-demon origins and Zuchi is designed as a kind of sea gorgon with snakes attached to her head. But she’s also kind of a babe, an evil babe with terrific boobies – you know the kind. I always wish these evil babes would somehow get rehabilitated instead of destroyed in the end (as Zuchi does) so that I can have a shot at them boobies and hope the babe is rehabilitated enough that she doesn’t kill me instead. Uh, but that’s me. It’s a fun manga. Now that I’ve read it I’m not sure if I’ll buy it if I see it. Is there any point apart from collector’s fever?

Had a quick look at Youtube and discovered a nice clip from the anime Sound Euphonium. It featured a scene with the brass band playing at a parade and what caught my ear was the song they were playing. It was a brass instrumental version of the old Yellow Magic Orchestra tune Rydeen. Very cool. I’ve never watched the show but have seen it around from time to time and was always intrigued by it. I guess I’ll have to catch it sometime