FIFA 16. [iframe width=”420″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/BR0e7UX_eM4″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen]]]>
If it wasn't for video games and Youtube, I'd never hear new music…
FIFA 16. [iframe width=”420″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/BR0e7UX_eM4″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen]]]>
A fan-made movie, with a special guest star (Gary Tibbs) named Dirk wearing White Socks.
Face it, I’m old and you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.
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I’d like to say that I “discovered” Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki this week, but the truth is a bit more nuanced. I’ve known of some of the later films for some time now, from Howl’s Moving Castle
to Spirited Away
which even won an Oscar a few years back. But like the first drops of rain that has you questioning “is it raining” my experience with their films has been on the periphery, rather than a torrential soaking.
But now that I have kids the excuses have come to an end.
About a month ago I made the kids sit through “Arrietty” or The Secret World of Arrietty
as it was called in the US. We followed that up this week with My Neighbor Totoro
which has been on basically daily rotation with the boys. Watching the giant forest spirit Totoro bounce and pounce and smile has the kids humming along the theme song, even though the lyrics are in Japanese. We followed up with Kiki’s Delivery Service
and I watched “Spirited Away” the other night while nursing them through some colds (thank god for the iPhone). The kids watched a bit of Ponyo
but it was in Japanese so they tired quickly from the subtitles.
Ghibli is called the “Disney of Japan” but that’s really a misnomer. The cartoons are far more complex than your standard good vs. evil with an odd speaking sidekick that passes for Disney animation today. Often told from the perspective of a young female lead (as compared to the more male-dominated cartoons of Hollywood)
Since 1984, under the auspices of its founder and chief auteur, Hayao Miyazaki, the studio has rolled out a succession of dense, ambitious fantasy adventures, almost all of them led by strong, intelligent, independent-minded girls. Miyazaki’s movies are exciting and fantastical, often involving flying machines, ecological disasters, clashing civilisations and precarious spiritual values – all rendered in clean, colourful, hand-drawn animation. His heroines also tend towards a certain type. They are adventurous and active, but also compassionate, communicative, pacifist and virtuous. Their “female” qualities and childish innocence are often what resolve the crisis at hand and bridge conflicting worlds…. “He thought heroism was much more complicated than that black hat/white hat stuff,” explains Helen McCarthy, a British author who has written extensively on Miyazaki and Japanese animation. “By making the hero a girl, he took all that macho stuff out of the equation and that gave him the freedom to examine heroism. His career has been a very beautiful building of an idea that the feminine doesn’t preclude the heroic.”
It happened quite awhile ago, actually.
J.J. Jackson, one of the original three VJ’s on MTV, passed away about seven years ago from a heart attack. I didn’t know but it is still very sad.
MTV for me, like many of my age, was an eye-opening and world expanding experience. Now it just sucks, as most anyone will tell you.
But in case you want a bit of a flashback, here are the first ten minutes of MTV captured on Youtube. Watch it quickly before the dickless pinheads that run MTV today have their lawyers take it down.
Rest in peace Triple J, and thanks for showing me there was more to music than that which I heard of my radio in a tiny corner of the world.
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And for those who just watched that and don’t get the meaning of that event, here is a documentary specifically about Queen at Live Aid. ]]>
Girls Generation, a K-Pop group is composed of nine members. They sing in Korean and in Japanese, and their current album is on heavy rotation on MTV over here. It’s not like we get FM radio over here after all. Gotta make do with what you can…(here’s the lyrics) ]]>
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Interstella 5555, which was basically a long music video for Daft Punk’s 2001 album Discovery
is available online in full.
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Fat Angelo’s this weekend having some pizza and listening to a pretty good mix of 80’s new romantics bands on the speakers. Kind of a throwback to sitting in Garcia’s Pizza back at the University of Illinois in the 80s and listening to the same music. It’s kind of funny but there are times when you are focusing on just what is front of you, like your kids or a pizza on the table and music in the air and you really start to lose track of where you are. Yes, I’m in Hong Kong, 6,000 miles from home, but at that moment, I didn’t even notice. Anyway, now this song is stuck in my head. ]]>