1960s bubblegum pop meets modern retro stylings with a New Zealand indie vibe. And if you understand that sentence then you’ll enjoy this album. I did.
Review articles
Moral Hazard — Kate Jennings
A wry look at Wall Street, told in the voice of a outsider who has a much bigger problem than mere money to deal with. The world of investment banking may be even more dodgy than we thought. Now they tell me.
Gosford Park
A rollicking English country estate whodunit. Great fun. Stars more famous actors than you could poke a cloak and dagger at.
Amrita — Banana Yoshimoto
The story of an extraordinary few months in the life of an unusual family in Tokyo. The narrator is engagingly curious, with a tendency to wax philosophical; the plot starts off conventionally but then comes over all mystical. Quite fun to read.
Harry Potter to Himitsu no Heya
In deference to the small Japanese children in our party, we went to see “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” dubbed into Japanese. It seemed a bit slow, but maybe that’s just because I only understood every 20th word. Even so, I thought the giant spiders were quite scary, though they didn’t seem to bother the 5-year-old girl next to me.
Waking Life
Amazing animation, though Joanne found the pervasive floatiness a bit disorienting. Lots of interesting talk about dreams.
Eternal Youth — Future Bible Heroes
Not as good as their first album Memories of Love, but still with those mordant lyrics and cheesy synthesizers.
Slash with a Knife — Yoshitomo Nara
This artist beautifully captures the angst of disaffected youth. (Like, 8-year-old youth.)
Prismic — Yuki
I heard Yuki‘s song 66db, an odd, Bjork-ish ballad, in the J-Pop Cafe one night. Later, I bought her album to celebrate my new job, She’s melodious, in a rockin’ kind of way. One of the songs is called The End of Shite.
Botchan — Natsume Soseki
A teacher from Tokyo gets posted to a country town and spends his time getting into misadventures and complaining about the shifty country folk. Quite fun! Maybe one day I will be able to read it in the original Japanese.