ANOTHER ANIMU POST. I promise I have a ‘THE Possible’ review on the horizon, and Ash is set to do a Namie Amuro article, but come on, MONSTER TRUMPS ALL in Pink Wota land.

Ash broke the news to Pink Wota readers a few weeks back about the upcoming run of Monster on the SyFy (I cringe to spell it that way, really) Channel. It starts October 12th, but since the news was even a rumor we’ve been watching developments slowly. Our main concerns have been, of course, over the voice acting. As any devout (or formerly devout, as my case should be called) anime fan knows, voice acting can make or break an English dub. And since I plan to use this North American run of Monster to introduce friends and family to my favorite series in the entire history of the world (yeah, GTFO, Evangelion), I want it to be be, you know, GOOD.

CHEER UP, EMO TENMA. (art by Pink Wota's very own Ash - THAT'S RIGHT)

Tenma, mai waifu (?!), and Johan, Ash’s waifu, were of course our main concerns. Well, also Runge. Who will be called Lunge. Even though that’s not a German name. And his badge says Runge. But Richard Epcar has been signed to play Runge, and let me tell you, I’ve eaten dinner with Richard Epcar and he is nothing but a Cool Dude, so I trust him to do justice to Runge. BUT TO GET BACK TO MY POINT, Tenma and Johan will carry the series, and casting is something we’ve been keeping our ear to the ground about.

Ash broke the news via e-mail about an hour ago. Her addendum to the link she sent me? “I don’t know anything about this guy, so I can’t say….XD”

Thus, research was conducted. The voice actor tapped for Dr. Tenma is one Liam O’Brien, isn’t hard on the eyes, and has done a lot of varied voice work, including one of our favorite Bleach characters. He doesn’t screw around, and has a nice website that provides a good portrait of the actor I’ll be hearing from week to week starting in October, bein’ emo and not killin’ dudes. The Character Reel sounds promising, though full of mostly action and comedy. Also…wait….WAIT….WHAT!? WHAT IS THIS.

MOTHERFUCKING ILLIDAN STORMRAGE IS PLAYING KENZO TENMA.

Worlds collide, the potential of this North American release is multiplied by the already-promising involvement of Richard Epcar, and I jizz in my pants.

Liam O’Brien, I wish you all the best. I am not one of those rabid fangirls who will blame you if the subtlety of Monster is lost on the North American audience. However, I am fully prepared to hang that cross on whomever has the unfortunate task of voicing Johan.

As I was driving home from work today, I decided to finally stop over at the Asian market. I really wanted one of those tapioca pearl drinks that I like; I’ve been craving one for a week, but the last time I drove by, the store was closed.

Well, I get there and I find the drink I’m going to buy, but then it occurs to me that I should look around a little more. I was really hoping for some onigiri, but they didn’t have any (that I could see, anyway…), so I starting looking at what they DID have, and well…this is what I came home with:

There WAS an extra soymilk drink, but I drank it. You can imagine what it was like, walking around the store with three freezing cold items in your hands. Sort of uncomfortable, but that didn’t stop me from shopping. 

Read about each of my delicious snacks!

Well, according to wowow’s official website, here’s the setlist for the 9-26 broadcast of avex’s annual summer all-star concert, a-nation:

使用楽曲

Break Down ： AAA
Delightful ： 鈴木亜美 (Ami Suzuki)
Be your wings ： GIRL NEXT DOOR
最後のGAME ： Do As Infinity
バイバイ ： 大塚愛 (Otsuka Ai)
未来タクシー ： 大塚愛 (Otsuka Ai)
Dear My Friend ： Every Little Thing
DREAM GOES ON ： Every Little Thing
FACE ： globe
Lick me ： 倖田來未 (Koda Kumi)
ECSTASY ： 倖田來未 (Koda Kumi)
Stand by U ： 東方神起 (Tohoshinki)
Survivor ： 東方神起 (Tohoshinki)
BOY MEETS GIRL ： TRF
寒い夜だから・・・ ： TRF
Rule ： 浜崎あゆみ (Ayumi Hamasaki)
A Song for xx ： 浜崎あゆみ (Ayumi Hamasaki)
BLUE BIRD ： 浜崎あゆみ (Ayumi Hamasaki)
Sunset ～LOVE is ALL～ ： 浜崎あゆみ (Ayumi Hamasaki)
TO BE ： 浜崎あゆみ (Ayumi Hamasaki)
Boys & Girls ： 浜崎あゆみ (Ayumi Hamasaki)
Sunrise ～LOVE is ALL～ ： 浜崎あゆみ (Ayumi Hamasaki)
July 1st ： 浜崎あゆみ (Ayumi Hamasaki)

The liberal presence of Ayumi Hamasaki is no surprise – she still carries a majority of avex’s earnings, as do Koda Kumi and Namie Amuro. Amuro, however, does not tend to performing on a-nation. But, AAA? Really? They’ve been relegated to “opening act” status for over four years, and the complete marketing black-out surrounding them is not helping the group break past that. See, kids: THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PLAY AT A USA ANIME CONVENTION. PRAY FOR AKB48 (speaking of which I’d like to take the chance to tell Pata how jealous I am of him at this moment in time. Anwyay…).

Amazing that Koda Kumi only gets two songs. I thought she had a better year than that.

And the exclusion of BoA and Goto Maki are perplexing. avex has always been a label that panders to the established fanbase, plays it safe if you will, so I’m not wholly shocked, but treating BoA like a second-string act is a crime. Maybe her performances just weren’t that good. I highly doubt that. As for Gomaki, I was excited to see that Songstress Yuna outfit of hers in full action. I suppose this is not to be. Let’s hope the DVD setlist expands things a little more. WOWOW, is, of course, looking for ratings, and who pulls in more ratings that TRF, ELT, and Ayumi Hamasaki?

I must admit, I didn’t expect Ayumi’s entire set to be broadcast. I thought that ‘A Song for XX’ would be excised, since it was performed and broadcast last year (but I’m very glad that isn’t the case – the song is timeless). I also didn’t expect ‘TO BE’ to make the cut, but it fills me with glee that it has – such an old school song, and such a solid one.

Nice surprise: Tohoshinki getting the sweet, sweet spot between Koda Kumi and TRF.

One thing I hate about a(yumi)-nation: the big “gondola ride” grouping of songs that usually includes ‘Boys & Girls’ and will probably this year include ‘Sunrise’. That’s such a cop-out. It’s so boring to watch. Seeing it live would be even worse, I could imagine. Even if Ayu passed right by your seat, that’s only going to be for ten seconds or so. Then, you’ve got to watch that gondola make the rest of the trip all the way around the arena. Fuck the gondola.

OK. Here’s what I’m going to say before we even get into this: I have never listened to ‘THE Possible’. I just didn’t see the point. To me, it would be like deciding I liked hockey AS WELL AS football AS WELL AS basketball and then trying to keep up with all the stats and players and games and whatnot. I was like “okay, they’re cool, you do that, Tsunku” and moved on.

The the picboard sort of hit me over the head with this photo:

Beach Blanket BOINGU!

To paraphrase a recent comment on an Ogawa Mana photo on picboard, Nice Girl Project suddenly got all relevant. I’m sorry, I’m that shallow. I’d never noticed how cute and luscious all these girls are. The problem is – I HAVE NO IDEA WHO EVERYONE IS, YET. D: D: D: Picboard isn’t helping, because almost all their photos are either group photos or photos from years ago.

All I need is someone to help identify the young lady with the bodonkadonk and luscious thighs on the far left, and I’m satisfied.

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Recently (okay, like, JUST A FEW DAYS AGO), Tsutaya put up the results of its gender-and-age specific artist popularity rankings. The results aren’t exactly astonishing, but they do offer some quantitative data for those of you wanting to toss around the “so-and-so is more popular than so-and-so in Japan” when we really usually don’t have anything to go by but the Oricon charts.

Mad crazy credit for the translation goes to KarenPang of No Music No Life, who posted this info up at AHS.

(SPOILER: JAPAN FUCKING LOVES ARASHI)

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(Disclaimer: I love Araki to pieces and mean absolutely no disrepect by my commentary).

I’ve been saying for a year now that I need to do a series about Araki’s body language. There are simply too many instances in which I’ve spent the majority of a video determining its content and Araki’s mood simply by watching how he behaves and what gestures he makes. I could probably say a lot about the inner workings of his mind–maybe I would be totally wrong…but maybe not.

I’ll go ahead and say this up front–the content of the videos I use is irrelevant. That I cannot translate them is irrelevant as well. In fact, it’s much better if you don’t know what’s going on.

Exhibit #1: The Karasu 10 Promotional Video

(Embedding for this video was disabled. I have provided the link above so that you may watch the video in live action. You’ll definitely want to do that before you continue reading. Meanwhile, I’ve provided screencaps).

From the beginning of this video, we can already tell that one of two things is true: (1) Araki is very unhappy about needing to be in this video at all, or (2) He got absolutely no sleep the night before and is running on pure autopilot.

It may be a combination of both. Either that, or he really just hates everyone in the room at this particular moment.

By all means, continue….

…I guess sometimes, the story behind a picture is not even worth telling.

Enjoy this.

Half the credit for this goes to Shirow, but trust me, I did all the work.

Muse threatened to sue Celine Dion and won. I’m not going to go into the details, because if you really want to know the whole story it’s all over the internet and only takes a quick Google. My point is: Muse threatened to sue Celine Dion and won. Whatever your musical tastes (unless you happen to be a Celine Dion devotee), you have to admire that sort of tenacity. Hell, even if you’re a Celine devotee, you should at least admire the balls, there.

For what it's worth, they're not bad to look at, for a bunch of regular British blokes who don't try too hard to dress up.

If I had to name for you my favorite English-speaking musical act, it would have to be Muse. That comes with a caveat, because Muse is still together and Muse is still making new music together. A month ago the answer would have been Nine Inch Nails, but NIN is Trent, and Trent has assured us, after a three and a half hour long final concert this month, that the ship has finally sailed and to stop fucking whining about it (essentially). Considering mine and many a NIN fan’s usual cynicism regarding Trent’s word, our acceptance of this is pretty phenomenal.

Ah, but here’s the rub. I believe part of the reason we all accept the “Wave Goodbye” from Trent and his ever-changing band of misfit musicians was because of the good old ‘parody’ paradigm. You know, when an act becomes too much of an act, when the formula is too good, or too played out, or too anything, and suddenly every critic is using the word “parody”. Elton John became a parody of himself. Whitney Houston became a parody of herself. But even the more esoteric and multifarious acts, such as Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, and REM fell into this ghetto of self-parody from the critics’ perspective. Now, I didn’t have the time before needing to churn this review out, but I have a few Susan Sontag books on order, including “Against Interpretation and Other Essays”, in which this inimitably brilliant woman posits that “the aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” Then again, she also says that “the taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.”

I might be taking Sontag out of context, here, but the parody ghetto is a gasp from critics who try to be more important than they are. We like to assume that a Western musical industry is more advanced than, say, the Japanese idol industry, where there is a distinct “shelf life” on any given artist before he or she even records one track. There is no difference in my confusion over the obvious tendency of well-meaning but ultimately self-important critics’ tendency to fall over themselves adoring a back catalog of an artist while at the same time ripping apart their newest artistic offering. In some cases, this is justified. U2, for example, is doing nothing new, and has indeed become a self-parody (hard as it is to admit sometimes, I am a fan of U2, but I would rather chew glass than listen to No Line on the Horizon again). Look at 311. They were my favorite band throughout high school. Now…just stop, 311.

But, in some cases, critics go over the line. Look at REM. A good friend of mine had the pleasure of interviewing Peter Buck not terribly long ago, and even Buck mentioned, more or less (and I relay this without a direct quotation), that he hated the band, he wanted out before the ground was laid for their latest album. Have you heard Accelerate? Or, like many, did you write it off because the critics panned it as a self-parody of REM? It’s fantastic. It is a back-to-the-basics REM album.Also, who saw Dig! Lazarus! Dig! coming from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds last year?

A band like Muse hardly has passed the “shelf life” date for critics to start throwing out the parody accusations, and yet I check metacritic and…there they are. Everywhere. A stand-out factor for Muse is their consistency. I’ve been steadily impressed by their recordings since I first heard of them (as background music for a Cowboy Bebop AMV at JACON in 2005), and their “old shit” is just as good, sometimes better than, but not always up to par with, their “new shit”. There are times when audible periods of the band’s musical development overlap, which to me smacks of a good formula and a solid musical foundation rather than any stagnation.

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LET’S ALL GET DRUNK, GET CRUNK, AND BREAK OUT OF THIS KOHA-GRADUATION FUNK!

Whoa, I’m sitting down two write this at 9:19 pm on 9-19-09. I just…wanted to point that out. Kinda cool. Anyway. I proposed this idea to Shirow over chat a while back, and I’m not going to go back on it. Why not a rundown of who won at H!O Picboard this week? A quick little yummy list of eyecandy. I call to my fellow eyecandy-loving bloggers to share their favorites, as well!

Below the cut are my Top Ten Picboard Photos of the Moment. WARNING: May induce nosebleeds. Also may not be “new” pics, so to speak, but they’re new to my HD. OKAY!?

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