Sun, 5 Jan, 2025: Weekly Review 43

New Years Day. I had a go at that Myers Briggs test at 16 Personalities. The result was INFJ -A, the same as Issy’s. This makes me the Advocate, or Idealist. We are the rarest of personality types (at least in the US). Which I think is some kind of disadvantage. It was a pretty similar result to what I’d already worked out from that Tarot book by Rose Gwain. It must be true then. I’m an Introvert, Intuitive, Feeling, Judging person.

Going through some Youtubes I saw one titled The Anime Masterpiece Nobody Cared About by Gian’s Adventure. The masterpiece in question was a film or series called Pluto. As the video related, it had its origins in the work of master mangaka Tezuka Osamu, but was mostly the work of Naoki Urasawa, whose manga it was ultimately based on. Watching the doco, I realised I had encountered this film/series before when I went to the Tezuka Museum in Japan. It had a section promoting the film. It’s a pity that, as the doco relates, it did not garner much commercial success. Now that it’s really been brought to my attention, I know I have to see it (and I’ll try to track down the manga as well). And it’s apparently on Netflix, so here’s yet another reason for me to renew my subscription.

Watched a couple more eps of Picard season three. These were Dominion and Surrender, the final fourth and third eps. They were very talky with a lot less action than usual. The MA Vadek gets a nice line as she’s ejected into space and about to die: ‘Fucking solids!’ she mutters. She was an otherwise annoyingly gloaty antagonist throughout the entire show. This sets us up for a nice ‘the gang’s back together’ scene with all the TNG principals gathered in the planning room deciding what to do next. What exactly is gonna go down on Frontier Day? The final scene of Surrender has Jack in a therapy session with Troi who is trying to get Jack to open the mysterious and probably evil red door he keeps seeing in his visions. What’s behind it? I can only think of the most evil thing I’ve ever seen on ST:TNG – Lwoxana Troi!

I watched the second last episode of Picard season three, titled Vox. So what’s behind the evil red door Jack sees in his visions? It turns out it’s Locutus. Enter the Borg! By this point the original Next Gen crew have commandeered the old Enterprise D because it’s ‘analogue’ and not tied to the Borg collective’s connections. Jack confronts the Borg queen on board a giant Cube parked (or hidden) within the atmosphere of Jupiter. The reason for the Borg’s interest in Jack are pretty convoluted, to do with his DNA pointing the way to some kind of Borg ‘evolution’. I still think Lwoxana is more scary than them though.

Watched the last episode of Picard, called The Last Generation. This whole final season of Picard has been a legacy season, seeing them off one final time, taking stock of what they’ve done and where they’ve boldly gone. Seeing the original TNG crew on the deck of the Enterprise D again made me deeply nostalgic for the TV series. Those seven years (plus most of the four films afterward) were such a wonderful memory. Thank you, Next Generation. Overall, you went out with a satisfyingly epic bang. If this is the very last, it ain’t a bad way to go.

But I do have notes…Watching the original seven crew members go through their paces as they rush to Jupiter, where the Borg has a vast cube containing the transmitter controlling the entire Federation fleet, had me wondering how they were doing all this without an actual ship crew to back them up. Also, I hated the solution the Borg, in league with the Changelings, used to overthrow the Federation by secretly having crew members’ DNA being altered to include Borg implants whenever they used the transporter pads. This smacked of the worst pseudo biological science – something that’s always been a weakness of the Trek franchise. Oh, someone’s been biologically altered beyond their normal humanity; that’s okay, we’ll reverse engineer the treatment to make them good as new (or simply cut the transmission that’s making them that way). Please! And, as usual, the stupid Borg, who are all about collective connections, leave themselves conveniently vulnerable by having one weak point, namely the transmitter on the Cube.

So, in the end, the story wasn’t much chop, which is a pity. The original TV series had some wonderful stories, plus those wonderful characters. I guess one out of two ain’t bad. After tying everything up with a neat bow there was a sad little epilogue where Jack is confronted by Q, who has a new mission/purpose for him. Sad, because it wasn’t followed up (or hasn’t been, yet).

The site Music Radar had a nice article by Will Simpson about a book by the surviving members of the Sixties girl group The Liverbirds. I know their song Diddley Daddy, which was on one of the many Girls In the Garage compilations I have. Great stuff. The surviving members, Mary McGlory and Sylvia Saunders, have published their book, ‘The Liverbirds: Our Life in Britain’s First Female Rock N Roll Band’. There’s even a theatrical musical about them that’s playing in Britain called Girls Don’t Play Guitars (something apparently John Lennon told them in their early days). Man, I’d love to see that (and John, shame on you!). I definitely want to read that book. And they have a compilation album of their sixties work on Spotify, so there’s that to check out too.

Started on the Urusei Yatsura jigsaw I bought in Melbourne recently. A good activity to listen to music with. I went with my Best of 24 playlist and the first disc of my Urusei Yatsura soundtrack appropriately. Such an enjoyably absorbing time on this hot day in my air conditioned home alone. First I did the borders then I got the faces of Lum, Ataru, Mendo, Shinobu, Sakura, Ryunosuke and Ran. Ah, that UY soundtrack is so good and really put me in the mood.

I finished the Urusei Yatsura jigsaw puzzle. It didn’t take long. Listened to the second disc of my UY Soundtrack whilst doing so, which was a very good time. When I thought I’d finished the jigsaw there was one piece missing. Interestingly, it was the piece that is more or less where Ataru’s heart would be. This seemed very significant. Did the jigsaw makers deliberately leave that out as a none too subtle comment on Ataru’s seeming heartlessness towards Lum? Well, no, because I quickly found the missing piece underneath a chair. Phew! The box came with a sachet of glue for gluing your completed puzzle to a board as a framed picture. But I won’t need it because I’d rather do the jigsaw again some other day. And I could make a better image by scanning the box image, which doesn’t have all the puzzle lines, and printing that. Doing jigsaw puzzles is one of those happiness through absorption activities. You’re so focused on doing them that the world goes away to oblivion, leaving you in a blissful bubble of happiness.

Then I watched the rest of Rage’s Top 50 that I recorded on the pvr recently. I was down to the top last 15 videos, which included Sabrina Carpenter (her spectacular Taste video where she and Jenna Ortega kill each other multiple times over some dude), 3% and Jessica Mauboy (Won’t Stop clip with Jessica weirdly reminding me of Twice Jihyo), Kendrick Lamar’s pretty good Not like Us clip, FKA Twigs (her amazing body-morphing gymnastic clip for Eusexua), Justice (the Generator clip, more body-morphing, this time with androids getting it on – eye-popping, flesh-shredding stuff), a couple of Amyl and Sniffers clips (ho hum, bogan punk). Number one was Asap Rocky’s Tailor Swif, a wonderfully surreal amalgam of bizarre tableaux. Yes, I did just write that. I really like that word, tableaux. Think I’ve been waiting a while to use it in a sentence. Anyway, the clip was flashy, like the song. I think the Twiggsy clip was best. I’m putting that in the Collection.

Watched another ep of Urusei Yatsura, this time #40. The first half was about a giant watermelon threatening the gang. The other half was about a sentimental yokai pining for the lost summer. This ep featured a scene were Ataru and Lum lounge around a boat and listen to the song Margarita by Helen Sasano. Ataru mentions what a good song it is. He’s right, and I have a copy!

Watched more UY eps 44 and 45. 44 was After You’re Gone, a poignant episode where Ataru puts Lum down one time too many and she seemingly leaves him. He realises his mistake too late and only has the Lum doll she left for him for company. I so want one of those dolls! They’re so cute! His plight is punctuated by the song Don’t Worry on the soundtrack. We get the full version of this fabulous song by Helen Sasano, whose lyrics fit the situation. It turns out the doll has a radio transmitter in it and Lum has been listening in to Ataru’s pathetic cries of loneliness whilst on her father’s spaceship. She only went away to get her interstellar passport updated! Ep 45 was Lum’s Class Reunion. This saw the return of Benten, Oyuke and her other space chums as they plan a surprise Class Reunion for Lum. It’s a real bravura episode with the reunion celebrations making for some stellar animation sequences. You’d think the creators were celebrating the 50^th episode rather than just the 45^th.

Watched another ep of Urusei Yatsura. This was Take-outers Gather ‘Round, about what happens when the Tomoboki High faculty decide to ban students from eating out for lunch. Well, it’s a move that pits the students against the teachers in an all-out ‘lunch war’, which is a lot of fun. For a show that thrives on and the gang, and especially the school’s Principal, are having a ball planning and strategising. We get a glimpe into some of the other teachers at the school that we hadn’t seen before. I liked the laidback teacher who lets the students get their lunches, when he’s supposed to stop them. He even orders one himself. I get the feeling the entire chaotic exercise was intended as one big educational activity masterminded by the Principal.

Had a listen to those Australian garage rock tunes I bought from Bandcamp the last few days. They’re damn good!

Read another chapter of Capitalism: a Horror Story. This was on Ghosts and the Haunting of Modernity – basically about internet ghosts. It was a bit more coherent than the previous chapter on Witches. Some good points made about our dependence on the internet (and technology in general) in the Covid era and its potential dangers (and solutions). It looked at the films Pulse, Unfriended: Dark Web and 2020’s Host. All what the author calls ‘screen films’, films totally made up of internet camera imagery. I must check them out. The characters in the film Unfriended start off by playing a game called Cards Against Humanity via Skype. I checked that game out on Wiki. It looks like fun, I like its word play. But I’ll never get my friends to play it. They just don’t play these Trivial Pursuit type games, which is a pity, coz I love them (and have multiple versions languishing in my closet).

Read a bit more of the Capitalism book. Chapter was Crises of Liberalism and Necro Neoliberalism. Cute title, huh? It featured the Saw Film series and The Purge series. Capitalism is basically a machine that chews us workers up and spits us out. When we fall on hard times it’s our fault, not the system’s. Or as Kramer says in the Saw films: ‘Choose: live or die.’ It’s all about individualism and blame.

Had a listen to my City Pop Love album that I bought in Japan. Apart from the opener, the classic Stay With Me by Miki Matsubara, the first half is mostly what I’d call disco. I don’t know why this series does this. It’s advertised as City Pop, but then it adds a bunch of other genres into the mix. The second half, around track 19, brings in the good city pop stuff. It’s definitely worth a few listens. I especially like that 19^th track You’re My Only Shinin’ Star (great trumpet solo), and track 36, Down Town by Epo, which was number one on my City Pop book best of the 80s. I’m familiar with Remember Summer Days and Telephone Number from my Yukika album. It ends with a showstopping ballad, Rainy Blue. Then it’s time to get in the shiny sports car with your beau and leave the beach. A nice compilation overall, but I wish a lot of the tracks weren’t so edited down.

Very hot day with the house all to myself and no work. Bliss! I went to the local JB and bought that Bee Gees compilation I’d been planning to get. It was their Timeless compilation. Not a bad collection, but it omits Run To Me, my fave Bee Gees song, My World and Mr Natural. I would also have liked the song Spirits Having Flown. Otherwise, all the usual hits are present and accounted for, from the early ballads to the later disco phase and beyond. I can’t emphasise enough, this was a necessary poichase.

I listened to it later in the day, just starting with the nine earlier ballady songs before they go disco. It was a good time, but I still missed some of those omissions like My World, Run To Me and Mr Natural. It’s an impressive body of work either way. Just imagine if they only ever had a hit with just one of those songs. Let’s say it was I Started A Joke, if that was the only Bee Gees song we ever got to hear because they had been one-hit wonders. We would forever be wondering what happened to them, who were those guys?, amazed at the potential they showed in just that one song. Luckily, we got so much more, and that’s even without mentioning the disco era songs. Amazing group.

I had a Youtube session of which, as usual, the Twice material stood out. Youtuber Choujimi did a nice vid on My Top 20 Twice B-sides. He covered both the Korean albums and the Japanese albums, plus the EPs. Almost none of his selections would be in my top 20, which got me thinking what would be in my top 20? Here’s what I came up with and made into a Spotify playlist:

Scorpion (Better single b-side) Truth (The Story Begins) Promise (Perfect World) Four Leaf Clover (Perfect World) You Got Me (With You-th) Magical (Strategy) Behind the Mask (Eyes Wide Open) Beyond the Horizon (Dive) Queen of Hearts (Between 1 & 2) Crazy Stupid Love (Set Me Free) Say Something (Eyes Wide Open) Sunset (Yes or Yes) Bittersweet (Celebrate) Pieces of Love (Perfect World) My Headphones On (Page Two) Jaljayo Good Night (Merry & Happy) Shadow (More & More) 21:29 (Feel Special) Rush (With You-th) Girls Like Us (Fancy You) Only You (Signal) Deja Vu (What Is Love) Next Page (Twicecoaster) How U Doin’ (&Twice) Go Hard (Eyes Wide Open) Cactus (Formula Of Love)

After that, I watched a couple of Twice music videos, because why not? They were Brand New Girl and What Is Love. I like it when Twice do guitar-based pop songs like Brand New Girl. One of my all-time faves of theirs is Queen of Hearts, which is also in that genre. The WIL vid is possibly their best. The members sit on or around a big couch reacting to what they see on the TV. What we see on the TV is the members re-enacting various scenes from famous films and TV shows. Tzuyu and Sana do the dance scene from Pulp Fiction. Tzuyu again and Momo do a dance scene from La La Land. Jeongyeon shows up behind an aquarium as handsome Romeo while Tzuyu/Juliet looks on. My favourite is Dahyun as some bearded dude holding a pot plant. I think it’s from a Korean show, but man she steals the show with that. The various shots of the end group dance (including bearded Dahyun) are wonderful. A funny, sly video.