Josh did another performance at the open mic at the Herd the other week, and I missed it. The big surprise song he did for a cover this time was Mandy, the old Barry Manilow song. I approved and mentioned it was one of Angel’s favourite songs. I figure, as a vampire, he identifies heavily with that opening lyric: ‘I remember all my life, raining down as cold as ice’. All that atonement and anguish. I also mentioned that other Manilow song, I Write the Songs, which was written by Beach Boy Bruce Johnston. Good old Manilow. Josh said he was thinking his next cover might be Sometimes When We Touch, by Dan Foley. He seems to be getting into a shmaltzy thing. I said it’s also the sort of stuff his mate Anthony likes, and he agreed. I suggested David Soul’s Don’t Give Up On Us as another one in that vein, but he didn’t know it.
Back at Josh’s place, on the porch with some Asahi’s, I gave Josh my Christmas present for him – the Beatles t-shirt. He liked it, and it fit him well. We got to talking about libraries and research and uni – that kind of thing – and I mentioned the interesting book I got off Lui for my Christmas present, the Capitalism A Horror Story book by Jon Greenaway. The basic thesis is that Capitalism shares many of the traits of horror movie conventions. There’s a Capitalist connection for zombies, witches, ghosts, Aliens, and all the other horror touchstones. Josh was intrigued and mentioned how his dad had been working on a thesis about American comic strips and their association with politics. But he never finished it and died with it incomplete. Josh said the work must be somewhere in a box somewhere around the house, and I encouraged him to please find it. I’d like to read it.
Somehow we got onto conspiracy theories and the moon landing one came up, because I’ve known people who actually subscribed to it. Josh then thought Pink Floyd might have done a song about it, or maybe there was an album soundtrack, he wasn’t sure. He looked it up on the net and there it was, a thing they did called Moonhead. It turns out they were guests on the moon landing TV coverage in England at the time. As it was an all-nighter the producers thought it might be good to include a group like the Floyd to provide some background music in between the other segments to help keep people awake. It was mainly Floyd just jamming some ‘nice, atmospheric, spacey 12-bar blues’. Ian Gilmour recalled it being a special night. He remembers going home and looking up at the moon and thinking about how people were actually walking on it at that moment. The song is actually available for a listen on Youtube, though they never did an official release of it.
I bought a pack of cd jewel cases down Officeworks for a little project. I’m planning on putting my latest Kpop albums into them so I can put them in my cd collection. At present they’re sitting in their bulky Korean packaging. This is something I do from time to time. I printed out the artwork for Misamo’s Haute Couture and Twice’s Strategy and put them and the discs together in a couple of cd cases. Now they fit on the shelf. I don’t know if the new Twice album is as good as the last one. I’m really liking Strategy, and a song called Magical (placed that one in my Spotify Magic playlist), but the others haven’t really shown me their…magic. I’ll give it time.
I finished the chapter on the year 1968 from The Music Goes Round My Head. The Bee Gees’ profile is rising, Masters Apprentices have a difficult year with lots of personnel changes, The Twilights and The Seekers break up and the Zoot get started. Normie Rowe hunkers down in the army and Johnny Farnham takes off with Sadie. It’s clearly a year of transition for the Australian pop industry. We’re finally starting to catch up with the overseas trends.
My library was desperately throwing out a bunch of books and dvds it couldn’t even give away at its recent sale, so I had a look and grabbed a couple of DVDs. One was a science fiction series called Salvation, which is one of those asteroid is heading for Earth disaster things. This is a storyline I can’t resist so I’m eager to see how they handle it, this time. One of the best films in this genre, Don’t Look Up, is one of my favourites. The other one was an anime series called Trinity Seven. It’s a harem genre but apparently, going by some MAL reviews, the dude is not a dickhead and the girls are actually interesting. That makes a change! Have to say, I put a high premium on free anime series – they’re like gold to me. So I was very happy to get this one.
Watched three more eps of Lagrange. They’re mostly filler eps featuring Madoka trying to keep her Jersey club going. Moid, a character who never opens his eyes, is revealed as a bad guy, surprise, surprise, when he activates a relic found by Madoka’s older sister and uses it for some nefarious purpose. There’s some funny product placement in these eps, particularly to do with some energy drink. A number of the characters, goodies and baddies, are seen taking time out from the story for a fresh swig. In fact, I think the end theme song may include some of this product placement. The song’s main refrain sounds like ‘Jersey energy’, though the lyrics are written as something else. I even suspect the entire series was dreamed up as a way of promoting the seaside town of Kamogawa. Every episode has the name in the title. This is a not uncommon practice in Japanese anime and other media, especially in pop idol music. I don’t mind this because art always transcends commerce.
Watched the last three eps of Lagrange. It was largely an exercise in getting it over with so I can move on, but I did enjoy it. But I can’t say I enjoyed it for the story, which was pretty nonsensical and bland. There was never any sense of a real threat in all of it. There wasn’t even a teary goodbye between Madoko and her friends, Lan and Muginami, who are leaving – because Madoko leaves with them too! I liked the characters and the music and the sunny setting. It often looked beautiful. That was enough.
I’ve started culling some of my books (again). Mainly concentrating on my fantasy books. It’s not that hard, I’m not that especially attached to most of them. It was easy to let them go. It’s more the ones I’ve decided to keep that surprises me. I kept my three volumes of the Thomas Covenant series by Stephen Donaldson, and my Gor books by John Norman. Some day I may read them. It gave me back some shelf space, which I quickly filled with some books I’ve actually read that I want to keep.
Had a listen to my first 60s Australian Pop Oddities playlist in the van. It’s culled from those albums, but this is just two of them, The Real Thing and The Breaking Point. And I’ve selected mainly the later more obscure (to me) tracks. A few of the songs sounded baroque to me. There was one by a band called 18th Century Quartet, so there’s that. But things like Love Machine by Pastoral Symphony, Village Tapestry by Marty Rhone and Craise Finton Kirk by Johnny Young (a Bee Gees composition that’s very Monkees) are dynamic interesting songs. Speaking of The Monkees, Western Union by The Strangers also sounds like them in country rock mode (think What Am I Doing Hanging Round). There were a couple of duds. The Groove’s The Best in Africa has a bloody Carribean calypso beat! What’s that doing in a song that name-checks Africa? Johnny Farnham’s Friday Kind of Monday, his second single after Sadie, is pretty bland, though the chorus is a bit of an earworm which I actually remember from back in the day when it came out.
Following on from this I made two more playlists culled from the other four albums in the series. It’s a similar game plan: mostly later songs that I’m not too familiar with. Volume two gathers songs from Move Baby Move and Age of Consent, while Volume three has songs from Shakin’ All Over and Shake Baby Shake. I’m enjoying delving into these lost oldies.
Watched some Youtubes, including some Twice stuff. There was a nice dance rehearsal vid of the girls working up the moves for the song Strategy. It’s a wonderfully candid scene as they enter the practice room and greet each other for the first time in a month. Most are pretty casual about it, but then comes Sana, who is all over the members, hugging and kissing them and being generally irrepressible. Straight after that one I saw the first part of Twice’s making of vids for the Strategy video. This, as always, was a treat. Many of the comments singled out Tzuyu and her cuteness for some reason. Well, she is the member with the most fans…
Then I watched Twice’s Strategy Making of Episode 2. This one had a lot of group dancing scenes, which tend to be the most fun to watch because the members are really comfortable and fun with each other. When they’re alone they tend to be more self conscious – something Jeongyeon basically said during her solo scene. This was also a more fun shoot compared to the One Spark video shoot. It was mostly indoors and they weren’t required to freeze to death outside, as they did with that video. Mina has her black hair, so this was months ago. There’s one more to go, and it should feature Megan Thee Stallion.
After having just released the new album, Strategy, Twice put out a new Japanese song today called The Wish. I found out about it whilst having my lunch break in a little diner near the library called Bronto’s (has a Flintstones theme). The song is a part of their sponsorship deal with Japanese combini chain Family Mart. Comments on Twitter were pretty favourable about it. I checked the lyrics out and it seems it’s another Christmas themed thing. Whilst in the diner there was also a fun meme on Twitter about yet another incident with Twice Sana. Some footage from their recent fan sign event put up by ‘Chien‘ shows her having a wardrobe malfunction and some female security guard holding her closely whilst she adjusts her garment. Sapphic Onces are presently swooning over the image. In the scheme of world events it’s not earth-shattering, but we Onces will take all the crumbs we can get.
On the drive home I listened to Twice’s newie The Wish four times in a row. It’s a little by the numbers at first, but it lifts near the end when the vocals go high for a bridge section and then Jihyo comes in with some stellar singing, lifting the song immeasurably. First Strategy, now this. Man, we Onces are so spoiled for Twice content at the moment!
When I got home from work what was waiting for me but my Complete Urusei Yatsura anime series I ordered from the USA! Actually, I unwrapped the package with some trepidation as it was much smaller than I thought it would be. When I got to the contents I found I had two sets of 12 dvds bound together by elastic bands. Apart from the sleeves, there was no other packaging, not even some artwork. Very strange and very cheap of this Etsy company. My other worry was that the discs wouldn’t play on any of my players, or if they did, they wouldn’t look or sound good. I popped disc one in the Playstation 4 and it played fine. Everything was present and accounted for, including the OVAs and movies and they looked and sounded pretty good. But even with 24 discs they’ve clearly been compressed (unless they’re double density discs, which I don’t think they are). The six films are on only two dvds, for example. And the dvd authoring looks slightly, shall we say, unofficial. I smell a rat, but I’m not gonna complain coz I’m so happy to have this complete set of UY. In fact, it’s a bit overwhelming. There’s nearly 200 episodes, plus six films and eleven OVAs. The amazing bounty that this is is kinda hard to comprehend. I quickly made up and printed out some cover artwork for the discs and put them into a couple of nice cd boxes I have. Man, with this, and the Lagrange eps, and the unfinished Picard eps, and the two series I grabbed today, I have so much television to get through. But I know I’m gonna start tonight with a viewing of the first Urusei Yatsura movie, Only You. I’m dying to see that.
So I watched Only You, and it was stunning. Gave it five out of five stars on Letterboxd. This is one of two films (the other’s Beautiful Dreamer, the second one) directed by Mamaru Oshii, who would later direct Ghost In the Shell. I’d seen a lot of stuff about this first film, and I knew it included a sad Lum singing the beautiful Lum’s Ballad (sung by Fumi Hirano, the voice of Lum). Ataru is truly a bastard in this one, ignoring Lum and taking up with his ‘new bride’ Elle, who it turns out has a giant freezer full of handsome young men she hoards to herself. The scene where they’re unfrozen and start a riot during the wedding is hilarious. Some great space battle action shots that remind me of Macross: Do You Remember Love. I had such a good time with this. It just confirmed the rightness of my decision to get this amazing box set. A necessary poichase.
Going through my old cd boxes, as I did yesterday, I discovered some old compilation albums I had made and forgotten about. Most were pretty useless to me, but one three disc series I made of Justin Hayward rarities I plan on keeping. I’d already made one other album of the stuff – namely the Live at Capistrano album. These are songs I compiled from those old free streaming sites like Pirate Bay and Limewire (remember them?). Some of them, like It Won’t Be Easy and Heart of Steel, have had official releases as extras on some of Justin’s albums, but the rest are still pretty rare. There’s a really nice track called Skimming Stones that I believe appeared on the soundtrack of an Italian film. There’s also The Lights Are Low, a song that appeared as an extra on the cd version of Justin’s Moving Mountains album of 1986. I’m always on the lookout for that cd when I go to Dixons, but have yet to find it. I especially like a fragment Justin recorded around 1976 called Forever To Be Alone. It includes a bit that he reworked for the song Songwriter Part One, but the other bits remain unfinished. It’s a fantastic intense performance, very rough and badly recorded, but I like it a lot. I have had the thought of trying to finish it for Justin, but I doubt I’ll ever be up to the task.
Watched the Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer film. This is a celebrated film in the annals of anime. What starts as a sort of Groundhog Day scenario where Lum and the gang experience the same day over becomes even weirder when they discover they’re inside someone’s dream made real. I love the film and particularly like the languid middle section where Lum and the gang have given in to the situation and learned to enjoy it. But I feel that when the reveal is shown and we meet the Dream Maker who granted the person their dream it goes a little awry. The Dream Maker keeps trying to trap Ataru in ever more complicated dreams which he keeps breaking out of. It’s a shift in tone that doesn’t completely work for me.
Watched the first half of the Urusei Yatsura movie Remember My Love. It seemed to me I’d seen it before, or maybe it was something I read in one of the mangas. Lum gets cursed by a witch when she is born. Ataru gets turned into a hippo by a magician who has built a mysterious circus on the outskirts of town. The opening theme song was Born To Be Free by Stephanie, which I’d just listened to on my UY soundtrack comp. This is a great rocker very much in the vein of Pat Benatar. I also listened to Love Is a Boomerang, the end theme song for Beautiful Dreamer.
Watched the rest of Urusei Yatsura: Remember My Love. In the second half Lum gets captured by the magician who turned Ataru into a hippo. He takes her to another dimension, where she is imprisoned. He turns out to be a young boy who has possession of the curse the witch originally placed on Lum. Meanwhile, back on Earth, Lum’s friends Benten and Ran and the rest, with Lum gone, leave the Earth. Shinobu finds she no longer has the super human strength she had when she was angry, and Ataru reverts back to his own form. It seems, with Lum and her friends gone, the magic is gone with them. There’s a perceptive line that Mendo utters at this point that really cuts through what’s happening here. He says, ‘Is this how we become adults? By the loss of our irreplaceable loved ones?’ This is definitely a storyline that Rumiko used in one of her manga stories. Thankfully, the young boy’s tutor shows up in Tomoboki and agrees to help Ataru and the others track down where Lum is and all’s well that ends well. Like the other films, I loved this. I’m having such a good time with this Urusei Yatsura movie marathon!
Then I started rewatching the Top 50 Urusei Yatsura Episodes (for newcomers) vid by Caribou-Kun on, something I have in my Favourites in Youtube. It’s a very useful resource, and quite accurate. Nicely edited by Carbou-Kun, and he keeps up a fun and interesting and informative narrative throughout. These really are the best episodes. Then I watched UY ep 10, the first of the listed best, the Christmas ep, where Lum gets put out because Ataru is going on a date that jealous Megane has set up to make him look like a fool. When she discovers Megane’s scheme, Lum takes the place of the date and foils Megane’s plans. For once, Ataru realises how pretty Lum is and they both shyly walk off hand in hand at the end, as if on a real date. I really loved the little Christmas jingle heard as Lum walks through a shopping centre. The main refrain is ‘dar-ling dar-ling’. This is a good Megane episode too, showing the spectacled one at his most manic and obsessive over Lum. I think it’s also the one that introduces the idea of Megane and his gang as being Lum’s Stormtroopers. They never appeared in the manga, but here they are a real asset. This was a well deserved top 50 entry, directed by Mamaru Oshii himself.
Looked at some Best of 2024 lists on the net in preparation for my own list, which I’ll put up soon in Favourites. I know pretty much what I’m going to list but I wanted to see what others have put up as the best for the year to see if there are any surprises. And of course there are. I didn’t realise that Redd Kross released an album this year. I’ll have to check that out. They toured behind their last one, Researching the Blues, and I saw them back then. The things you miss! Looks like there were a lot of good movies I missed too. Wicked, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Golden Kamuy, etc. I’ll have to catch up on some of them in the new year.
Made some more album covers for some of my Kpop albums. Did Aespa’s Armageddon and Whiplash albums, also Nmixx’s FE304 Break and RM’s Right Place, Wrong People. I’ll get them printed out tomorrow at Officeworks and put them into their jewel cases. It’s a lot of mucking around but necessary for my need to have a neat cd collection.
Went to Melbourne to take back my copy of JG Ballard’s The Drought. Whilst there I figured I’d look around. Nice sunny day, lots of tourists. Went briefly into the Melbourne Library when I dropped off the book. I still hate what they did to it, gutting the collection. The mezzanine floor looks especially forlorn. I left my phone in the toilet and a guy found it and returned it to me before I’d even missed it. Nice! I bought an album at the Hot Wax Records store on Flinders. It was Love Songs by Mariya Takeuchi. A nice city pop thing I think I’ll enjoy, though it’s definitely not a necessary poichase. The pushy Japanese vendor lady there tried to get me to buy another city pop album, Spacey, which was $150! Talk about a hard sell. I also bought a UY-themed jigsaw puzzle at the One Stop Anime store above Dymocks bookstore. Was tempted to buy an Evangelion-themed pack of cards too, but it was too expensive. I’m gonna enjoy putting the pieces of the puzzle together, even though it’s a small 300 piece set. It was a strange ‘short’ visit to town. I wanted to go to the Off the Hip record store in Flinders Lane but they were still closed. Maybe next time.
On the train I made up a Best of 2024 Spotify list to pass the time. As usual, it’s full of Kpop tunes. There’s a couple of Jpop or Jrock and a smidgen of western rock. This is because I’m only going with songs that were created and released this year. The only outlier was Teenage Fanclub’s I Will Love You from last year, but I only really got into that song this year and, of course, I saw the Fannies this year. The only other western rock thing I included was three songs from Pearl Jam’s Dark Energy. There really was no other western rock or pop I bought this year or liked enough from the radio to include. Oh, I tell a lie – there was Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter. But That’s All. I won’t go into the rest of the list here, I’ll put it up on my forthcoming Favourites of 2024 page.
Back home, I went over my City Pop book to see what it says about Mariya’s Love Songs album. The song September, which is on it, is number 3 on the 70s list. I also checked out the Spacey album, which was offered to me at Hot Wax for $150. It’s not as high on the chart, but clearly an important citypop album. Made by Tatsuro Yamashita, Mariya’s husband.
