Trivia that matter
The Field Guide to Convention Cosplayers
The Old School Tribute
Likely Cosplaying:
– Lum from Urusei Yatsura
– Anyone from Ranma ½
– Anyone from Final Fantasy II through VDefining Traits:
– Looking really good in a classic cosplay
– Unless it’s overly complex or revealing, being completely unrecognized and ignored.May I Take A Picture?: Please do.
Do: Thank them for remembering a show that came out before InuYasha.
Do Not: Mistake the Daicon bunny girl for Haruko from FLCL.
More pictures from the Rogers Ballet dance concert last May can be viewed here.
One can hope.
The Wichita anime festival moved to a venue within easy bicycle distance this year. I’ll probably spend most of the weekend there with my camera.
Here’s the first batch of snapshots.
Continue reading “Will the Vocaloids outnumber the Narutards?”
Congratulations to one of the otakusphere’s outstanding members of Anatidae, quacking on .mu.nu for four years now this week.
Here’s the story.
This tune is part of a long tradition in music. An earlier example is No Strings Attached’s “Broken Key Boogie,” which commemorates modifications to Randy Marchany’s keyboard made by another airline (TWA, if I remember correctly).
Anime Expo has come and gone. What got licensed?
Denno Coil?
Kaiba?
Mononoke?
Mind Game?
Uh-uh. There was no mention of anything I’ve been waiting for. The titles that were announced all look like drivel. ((Well, maybe the remainder of Aria isn’t drivel, but I’m one of the few who didn’t find Aria the Animation a life-changing experience.)) Steven has a different list, but he, too, was disappointed.
I’m particularly annoyed that Denno Coil still hasn’t been picked up for region one. Number three of my top five, ((The other four are Haibane Renmei, Serial Experiments Lain, Cardcaptor Sakura and Shingu.)) it is the outstanding first-rate series I’ve seen that remains unlicensed. There are a number of older series on my to-buy list, but there seems to be less and less to look forward to nowadays. Oh, well; I finally got a new pair of glasses and can read all evening long again. Running out of anime won’t be a disaster.
There is a bit of good news regarding licensing: Kino International will release a compilation of Osamu Tezuka’s short films later this month. These date from 1962 to 1988 and are obviously essential for anyone interested in the history of animation. I wrote a little bit about some of them here.
Do you tweet? Are your thoughts expressible in no more than 140 characters? Perhaps you should reconsider. Here are a variety of philosophical arguments against using Twitter. For instance:
Natural Law Argument
(1) It is wrong to do what is not natural.
(2) There is nothing remotely natural about broadcasting the minutiae of your life to all and sundry whenever it takes your fancy.
(3) Therefore, Twittering is wrong.
(Via First Things.)
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A useful term:
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A piece on the Montreaux jazz festival included this note about an unlikely pairing:
Here’s that cartoon, a classic combination of music and violence. The pianist you hear is likely Shura Cherkassky.
At midnight, the date changes. On July 5, it is no longer appropriate to play with explosives. It’s nice that you feel like celebrating, but I really need to sleep.
Charles Ives is often celebrated for having anticipated many of the innovations of twentieth-century music. Less often noted is that he also anticipated, if that’s the right word, P.D.Q. Bach. Some years back, an acquaintance for whom I played a recording of Three Places in New England was scandalized by the second movement — real music isn’t supposed to be funny, he said. (Tell that to Mozart.) Here it is, the ideal music for the Fourth of July:
It’s become trendy in recent years to complain that the music of P.D.Q. Bach overshadows that of the composer Peter Schickele. I’ll grant that the humor is hit-and-miss, with misses predominating on the later recordings. Sometimes, though, the jokes work. Here’s the fourth movement of the “Unbegun Symphony.” ((Strictly speaking, this isn’t P.D.Q. Bach, since Schickele claimed it as his own, so to speak.))
If you’ve got a couple of hours to kill while waiting for it to get dark enough for fireworks tonight, why don’t you invite 35 of your closest friends over with their instruments and run through some American music of a different sort. Here’s the score to Terry Riley’s In C.
It’s lily season. This year’s Botanica pictures can be viewed here.
It’s time for the final round of the current poll: which anime has the best soundtrack? There was a five-way tie for seventh place in the second round, so there are twenty-one to choose from. You can only vote for one this time.
The rematch:
(Via John C. Wright.)
A bit of Copland:
Hoedown from Rodeo from Eleanor Stewart on Vimeo.
(Via dm00.)
And a little dance:
(Via Mark Sullivan.)
The last one reminds me of this classic.
One of the books I tested my new glasses with is Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, recommended by Steven. Here’s a trivia quiz based on it.
Identify the speaker:
1. “I have actually outlived myself.”
2. “Defend me, Spaniards, from the Germans, who do not understand and have never understood music.”
3. “All the doctors who wanted to forbid me to smoke and to drink are dead.”
4. “Beauty of sound is beside the point.”
5. “Thank God! Finally a Reich Chancellor who is interested in art!”
6. “There is, thank God, a large segment of our population that never heard of J.S. Bach.”
7. “Beethoven was wrong!”
8. True or false: Debussy served as the thirty-third grand master of the Prieuré de Sion.
9. Who told a tenor saxophone player to play a descending major seventh with “sex appeal”?
10. Who was known to wear “a peach-colored shirt, a green tie with white polka-dots, a knit belt of the most vivid purple with a large and ostentatious gold buckle, and an unbelievably loud gray suit with lots of black and brown stripes”?
11. Who, according to Pierre Boulez, “… had displayed ‘the most ostentatious and obsolete romanticism'”?
12. Who, according to Pierre Boulez, was “… a ‘performing monkey” whose methods betrayed ‘fascist tendencies'”?
13. Who was apparently born near Cologne in 1928, but actually was of extraterrestrial origin and had lived many past lives?
14. What is 8’37” better-known as?
15. Who was “the best drug connection in New York”?
… or, less melodramatically, I finally got the new glasses I needed. I’ve read far less than usual these past few years because reading has been a tedious process: read 20 minutes, holding the book and my head at uncomfortable angles so the print is within the narrow zone of close focus, until my vision blurs; wait 20 minutes, until I can focus on nearby things again; read 15 minutes, until my vision blurs again; throw the book against wall and listen to a CD instead. My health insurance covers eye exams but not the glasses themselves, and even at the cheap mall outlets a new pair of glasses is still beyond my budget, so I tried ordering a pair from 39 Dollar Glasses.com. I need varifocal lenses with hefty corrections for nearsightedness and astigmatism, so my glasses cost about twice $39, but they still were only about a third the price quoted by the salesman at the mall.
Am I satisfied with them? Not entirely. The frames need a bit of adjustment, which I’m hesitant to do myself, and while I do have good distance and close-up vision now, intermediate vision, such as is necessary when working at a computer, is confined to an annoyingly small region. I may need to get a second pair specifically for work.
However, I’ve never been completely satisfied with any of the glasses I’ve purchased in the last 20 years. My new pair, even with its problems, is a better fit than the second-last pair, which was expensively mis-manufactured and ill-fitted by the optician at his shop. And my new pair does pass the crucial test: I can read all evening long.
Alex Ross, in The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, states that Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method of musical composition “… finally reached the silver screen by way of Scott Bradley’s inventive scores for Tom and Jerry cartoons in the forties, notably Puttin’ on the Dog and The Cat That Hated People.” Which gives me an excuse to post some High Culture, courtesy of Tex Avery.
The problem with the poll widget had to do with the update to the plugin, not WordPress 2.8. I was able to get the poll working again by dumping the new version of the plugin and reinstalling the previous one.
This is the second, and last, preliminary round. The top ten from this poll will advance to the final round. You can vote for up to three candidates.
It looks like upgrading to WordPress 2.8 broke the poll widget. Nevertheless, I think there were enough votes to pick the first round winners:
Cowboy Bebop (42%)
FLCL (23%)
Haibane Renmei (23%)
.hack//SIGN (17%)
Aria (15%)
Last Exile (13%)
ef: a tale of memories (11%)
Death Note (11%)
Azumanga Daioh (11%)
Code Geass/R2 (11%)
These ten will advance to the final round of the best anime OST poll. I’ll post the second round once I figure out how to get the poll working again.
Here are some curious items from the most recent batch of search terms:
heresy is not kawaii
gurren lagann knitting
cowboy bebop knitting
knitting anime themes
ponyo on a stick
sailor moon cardboard cutout
a religion based off of sailor moon
canzoni kawaii
languid gay charles solomon
gender critics are idiots
anime girl wolf boy frog
haruhi peanuts
kawaii the murderer pics
safe for work babes
oink supervisor
There were a few that make me glad that I am unlikely ever to meet the searchers:
anime manly girls
armpit hair pictures
kawaii tentacle monster
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Anime cosplayers are normal, sane people — at least compared to these.
Via Steven, who recently discovered Pokémon. (Update: note the third-place item in this list.)
Ubu, meanwhile, has discovered RahXephon. In a comment at Ubu’s place, Avatar confirms what I had suspected:
RahXephon was a show where we constructed a couple of really elaborate theories that explained everything, wrote off to Japan with a “so which one is it, we need to know for the translation”, and got back “huh? We did all those things because they looked cool.”
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I recently watched the first two episodes of El Hazard: The Magnificent World. Good grief. Here’s our hero:
I really wonder sometimes: do Japanese boys want to be girls? If you think I’m exaggering, count the thumbnails on this graphic:
The first El Hazard OVA was written by Ryoe Tsukimura. He also wrote the scripts for the first Tenchi Muyo! movie and the many UFO Princess Valkyries. They have their moments, but they’re all essentially anime junk food. Most of the rest of Tsukimura’s output looks similarly undistinguished. However, he does have one classic to his credit, Noir, which was his idea and his script. In this, he reminds me of Kou Ohtani, a competent, unmemorable soundtrack composer who on one occasion exhibited afflatus.
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Since I closed nominations for the current poll, commenters have mentioned Ghost in the Shell, Tenchi Muyo GXP, Kimagure Orange Road, Spice and Wolf and Wolf’s Rain. The first has been mentioned twice (the second time in an email), so I’ll probably add it to the second round candidates. Would anyone care to second any of the other series?
I had an unnerving experience last week. I made one of my rare forays to the shopping mall and stopped at the bookstore there. I couldn’t find any book I wanted to buy, not a single one. What looked interesting I already have in my library, and everything else looked irrelevant, tedious or dumb. This has never happened to me before. At every bookstore I’ve ever visited, no matter how small or specialized, there was always something that caught my eye. In recent years I’ve minimized the number of trips to bookstores because I’ve run out of space for more bookshelves and I can only pile books on the floor so high before the stacks become unstable. If my experience at the bookstore last week is a harbinger of things to come, bookstores may not be the dangers to my budget that they have been in the past.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, I can still find plenty at Amazon.com.
Something isn’t quite right in this picture. Although the spine of the book on the left end states that it is also “Fugitives of Chaos,” actually it’s “Titans of Chaos,” the conclusion to John C. Wright‘s trilogy.