Sun, 8 June: Weekly Review 65

I watched a bit of a Youtube video called Great Albums Ruined by One Song from a site called Classic Album Review. It was an interesting idea, but I quickly saw the guy’s ideas of ruinous songs on albums was completely flawed. I mean, okay, he spotted It Ain’t Easy as the bad song on Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album. I definitely agree with that; and in fact I know which song should have replaced it – Sweet Head, an outtake that appeared as an extra on a later CD version. But he thinks Meeting Across the River ruins Springsteen’s Born To Run. No way! It enhances it! It acts as a fantastic prelude to Jungle Land. How could the guy not see this? Most of his other selections, as far as I saw, were equally wrong-headed. He picks It’s Johnny’s Birthday from George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass as the baddie, but geez, it’s just part of the extra Apple Jam thing that’s just an extra disc, not part of the proper album. Anyway, I still like the idea, which is worth pursuing as a thought experiment. Apart from Ziggy Stardust, what other albums can I think of that have one stinker? Well, I’ve always thought The Kinks’ otherwise excellent Misfits album has two bad ones: Black Messiah and Hay Fever. Led Zep’s Physical Graffiti’s final track Sick Again isn’t great (or Bron Y’Aur for that matter). And I never liked the song Home Again on Carol King’s Tapestry. That stupid chorus – ‘Snow is cold, rain is wet’ – could you ever get a more obvious metaphor? I could go on, but I’ll stop there, for now.

I watched another four eps of Akiba Maid Wars anime. There’s an episode where MC Nagomi, a young girl starting out in the maid cafe business, switches to working as a ninja maid. There’s a hilarious scene in it where she retreats from a conversation with one of her maid friends ninja style, walking backwards, going ‘Nin Nin Nin’ back into the kitchen. So funny, The baseball episode was a pleasant surprise. It’s about as warm and fuzzy as the show gets, though blood is spilled on the baseball pitch. This is a fun show.

I watched the last three eps of Akiba Maid Wars. Boy, it did not pull any punches! It’s MC Nagomi and her fellow maids at the pig-themed Oinky Doink Cafe against Akiba’s biggest maid syndicate. The violence is stylised but still pretty gut-wrenching at times, as is the drama. The show constantly pivots between drama and comedy, and cutesiness and ugliness. It’s sometimes hard to get the tone of the show, but I applaud its decision to not cop out in the end. Nagomi wants peace, but it seems everyone else wants revenge. The show tests just how far that can go. I had a good time, but it wasn’t always comfortable.

I’ve been thinking about the Great Vinyl LP to CD era handover of 1990 and wanted to know what were the final albums I ever bought from the original album era. To that end I dug out some old diaries I have from that time and am presently going through them to get the skinny, because I would always write down the albums I bought. So far, from the 1989 diary, I’ve got Green by REM, Oranges and Lemons by XTC, and Bluebird by Emmylou Harris. I kept buying albums after this, but they were almost always second hand by that point. Anything new I bought on CD. I’ve since bought new LPs during the CD era, but they came later during this extended LP revival. FYI I now have a separate shelf for these ‘revival era’ or ‘post-CD’ new LPs.

During a pub dinner with some work friends the conversation turned to my upcoming England trip. Being a bunch of library workers as we were it didn’t take long for the literary recommendations to get going. Isabell in particular had some good hints about Jane Austen tours and places to visit. Chawton is where she wrote her early novels. There’s also a nice Austen tour available in Bath, where we’ll be going. The Cotswolds in general is another good area, for literary and sight-seeing diversions. We’re going to Cardiff too, so there were also reccies from the Whovians (chiefly Isabell). But I already plan to check out Torchwood. Margaret mentioned some quaint villages nearby which could satisfy my Dylan Thomas Under Milkwood cravings, if there’s time.

Ranker Lists had a nice list on The 20 Best New Manga You Have To Read in 2025 by Anna Lindwasser. Some good recommendations here. I liked Kindergarten Wars, which reminded me of the anime I just finished, Akiba Maid Wars. This time it’s a kindergarten teacher, Rita, who’s a convicted criminal assassin working off her sentence by teaching kids (presumably about how to protect themselves?). Ruri Dragon, about a school girl who discovers she’s part dragon when she sprouts horns, sounds like fun. The Color of the End: Mission in the Apocalypse, an end of world tale, focuses on ‘the melancholy atmosphere of an empty world’. I’ll look out for them, and hope they get made into animes.

I watched the bluray of Tron Legacy tonight. This was the 2010 sequel to the 1982 film Tron, starring Jeff Bridges with a soundtrack by Daft Punk. I watched it when it came out, thought it was an okay update, but remembered very little of it. It’s nearly thirty years later, and Bridges’ character Flynn is missing inside the world of Tron, so his son, Sam (played by Garrett Hedlund), also makes the trip into the digital world to find him and bring him back. The updated visuals of this world are spectacular and, like the first film, it’s best to just immerse yourself in the game play and the world and forget about the plot, which is pretty rote. I really loved the mechanic for ‘derezzing’ the digital characters – all micro-cubed bits breaking off and flying everywhere. I liked that when we meet Flynn in this world he’s gone full mystical Zen hermit, preaching stillness and inaction to his son, who just wants to get him out of there. They’re accompanied by Quora (played by Olivia Wilde), an appealing character who is the last of the ISOs, a new breed of digital creatures. They’re all up against CLU, a clone made by Flynn who has turned bad. There’s a wonderful moment where Flynn re-integrates CLU back into himself that’s classic Jungian psychology. Who knew we’d find Jung and Zen in a Disney popcorn movie? Next up, I want to check out the Daft Punk soundtrack.

I borrowed a copy of season three of the Castle TV show from the library. This is the season that has that steampunk-themed episode mentioned in that Steampunk book I read, I watched the ep, which was called Punked. It was pretty solid and I especially liked the steampunk club that was featured. There was also the Back To the Future Delorean, which amusingly fueled Castle’s theory that the perp in this story was a time-traveller. There was also some nice interaction between him and his daughter (always a highlight of the show), who seems to have fallen in love with a boy. This nicely mirrors the suggestion we get in this ep that Castle is also in love – with Kate.

I finished that book on Best Albums of the Nineties. It was an interesting journey, going from 1990 to 1999, seeing the way the music progressed through that decade. The basic trajectory was Grunge, Britpop, Nu Metal, Alt Rock, boy groups and girl groups, and electronica.

I had a listen to the second half of my Easybeats Definitive CD. We’re talking the post-Friday songs. It’s weird how their career was so successful up to the release of Friday On My Mind, and then they rapidly went downhill. I’m pretty familiar with the pre-Friday stuff, but it’s taking me a while to get into this second half. The only familiar things here are Good Times and St Louis, both good songs that coulda-been hits. The other songs are a bit ornate, over-arranged and very hit and miss. I think it’s the difference between writing as or for a band and writing from and for the studio. Basically, they stopped being The Easybeats and became Vanda and Young Inc. Anyway, that’s my take.

I did a little catching up with the Watch Later items on my Youtube tonight. Quite a mixed bag that included a nice clip of Mari Lijima doing her classic Do You Remember Love on some Japanese TV show, and a nice doco of six of the Twice girls helping to plant rice in a rice field in rural Korea. Going by the comments and my own assessment, Jeongyeon seemed to be the star here, planting those seeds like a pro. Even the farmers helping them said she did well. The situation was ripe for face plants into the mud, but all of the members managed to stay upright. There was a mukbang afterwards of home-cooked food and a singalong featuring a traditional song and Cheer Up. Wholesome fun, but where were Dahyun, Nayeon or Tzuyu? There were also wonderful clips by Scandal, Yukika, The Kinks and Nmixx Haewon, plus a fabulous retro clip of a three girl Japanese girl group doing All Shook Up. Featured an early example of wardrobe malfunction when a couple of the girl’s bra straps kept falling down.

I started reading a new novel, Nova by Samuel Delaney. I haven’t read him before, and he’s very highly respected in the field, so it’s about time. It’s the story of a disparate crew joining a seasoned space captain on a quest to capture Illyrium, a valuable elusive substance that powers interstellar space ships. So basically it’s Treasure Island in space. The captain, Von Ray, is even styled as a space pirate complete with scar and salty demeanor. But Delaney writes better than the usual crop of Sixties scifi writers, his style reminding me somewhat of Ray Bradbury. I’m quite enjoying the book so far.

Read a great little list on Ranker Lists titled 12 Things Only Male Sailor Moon Fans Understand by Ryan Bates. Well, yes, there are male Sailor Moon fans, and I’m one of them. I agree with so much that’s on here. ‘The Automatic Assumption That You’re a Pervert’: Check. ‘Having Your Sexuality Questioned’: Check. ‘Being Compared to Tuxedo Kamen’. Uh, not really Check, but then there’s ‘It could be worse…They could be comparing you to Umino’: CHECK! ‘Deciding Which Shenshi is Waifu’: Check (It’s Ami Mizuno – but Usagi is my little rabbit…). ‘Feeling Guilty For Finding Villains a Little Attractive’. Oh yes Check. I’ve mentioned this one before in relation to Yashahime, but it goes here too. And finally, ‘Wondering If You Could’ve Made Chibiusa Less Annoying’: Check. The only way to do that is get rid of her, and I kind of did. I stopped watching the show after the first half of season two, when she appears. Thanks for this, Ryan.

The library I was working at today had a book sale and I picked up one of them. It was Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. I’ve read the classics, 1984 and Animal Farm, but I’m a bigger fan of his Homage To Catalonia. I’ll be very interested to read this earlier account.

Watched TwiceDate 4 on Youtube. This time it was Dahyun and Chaeyoung – AKA Dubchaeng. They were having a movie date, watching mostly JYP artist clips on a big screen in a comfy room with lots of snacks. It was very laidback. It started, of course, with a viewing of their Dubchaeng Melody Project Switch To Me. Both remarked how young they looked, even though it was only three years ago. I thought they would have a laugh about the time during the making of the clip Chae poked Dahyun’s nose with a phone aerial, but they didn’t. It was funny watching them watch Dahyun’s old ‘eagle dance’ clip in the church. It is pretty batshit crazy. Dahyun revealed it was not how she got noticed by JYP. It was just something that went viral after she got picked for the show Sixteen that created Twice. Chaeyoung showed the clip for her Melody Project of Off My Face, the Justin Bieber song, mentioning some fan had done a video putting her together with him. I would have liked her to play the clip for Weatherman, which is one of my absolute faves. I wanted to hear her comments about it, but it was not to be. The clips stayed within the Twice/Solo remit and it’s a pity they didn’t go beyond that. I guess because they were on my mind from the concert, it would’ve been nice if they’d played some Nmixx. I imagine Chaeyoung finally expressing some love for their junior group in JYP. Because famously (to me, at least), she gave it all to NewJeans at the time when both groups debuted. Near the end Chae actually laid back on the couch and looked like she was ready to doze off. Maybe they were too laidback.