Going forward

 

Part of this age regression is a coping mechanism being literally the child-like with vulnerabilities me working within what I can actually cope with rather than pushing so hard at appearing to act more grown up and sophisticated I am left to cope with what I can't with no support and guidance and part is coping with how the nervous breakdown affected me.  

I am wearing more child-like attire privately such as this school uniform as it helps to lift me more into that headspace and less likely to be 'read' as a fully grown up feminine boy.

I am looking more at finding people who are more like me to explore it more so I get more from my life on terms that are truly appropriate for me although I will remain at the sites I have belonged for the last few years even if it feels I have to put a bag over my face when it comes to just being open about myself and  my own life beyond.

I am and remain a little sissy gurl who likes to wear skirts and dresses and has a dominant feminine side not transgendered but also sharing the odd mainly masculine trait too.

The Mole Years

One thing that I'm finding myself coming back to is as awkward as it has been for me to deal with is my interests are that of child because I'm an adult little and they remain as they were from childhood.

One area where this is particularly apparent is in my tastes in literature that remain around 10 though 14. 

One series of books I enjoyed during my chronological childhood was Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole series which by pure fluke in diary form connect very much with my recollections of that era as a boy in the fifth and sixth forms.

It's a funny and at time sad story of unrequited love for his girlfriend Pandora, an account of his burgeoning intellectual development including his observations on life, attempts at deep meaningful poetry as well as running social commentary on England in the early 1980's.

It was produced  for tv in 1985 been shown on the ITV network of commercial tv stations.

The Growing Pains covers the period  from 1982 to the UK General Election in 1983, documenting the launch of Breakfast TV and the increasing distance between him and Pandora.

By this point our hero also discovers the need to shave as most of us biological boys did back then.

For me this is book about modern boyhood that is so relatable for being set in my own boyhood era.

Michael Jackson: Hello There

My childhood overlapped very much with the childhood of an artist who belong to a group many of our year followed and re-emerged in my mid teens raising the bar of soul and r&b music contributing hugely to its soundtrack.

In 2009 the specialty arm of Universal Music Group, Hip-O that do direct orders issued this unusual 3 cd set that actually is a coffee table book with enclosed music covering the early Motown era solo recordings Michael Jackson made.

What makes this desirable isn't just the lovely photos and the write up about his time at Motown as good as that is its the fact you get 6 solo albums of which two are currently unavailable anywhere in the world and the original versions of the tracks that came out in 1984 on the Farewell My Summer Love 1984 album in overdubbed form for the very first time.

There are contained across the cds a good many of his early solo hits  such as Ben, Got To Be There, With a Child's Heart, Morning Glow (a personal favourite owning the original '45), We're Almost There and One Day In Your Life, the last two coming from the 'forgotten' Dear Michael album of 1975 (and 'One Day' was a UK #1 single in 1981). The albums do hold up well despite their years as examples of quality 70's soul.

Amazon UK are currently offering this for less than £10 which is very little for a stash of great material.

Michael in death as in his life remains a mixture of contradictions, intensively successful and yet seeming, lonesome with few true friends, impressively innovative for a period  but failing to respond to the rapid changes in black music from the late 80's onward.

For what it is worth, I feel he had an awful lot of the little boy very much in him which can be evidenced by his many animals that he bought as pets and most famously in the Neverland ranch that became his base and to which he sought to share with others in ways that from an 'adult' prospective may have seemed naive and at best easily misunderstood and ultimately caused him more harm.

The same naivety I feel lay behind the row about the initial lyrics for some of the songs on his Dangerous album of 1991 where he was trying to cop a pose without considering it's impact on the wider audience (and his was a much wider one that any Hip-hop artist). He just didn't see the problem with certain words.

He was a at times flawed adult little boy.

This said I feel in the time since his death many have gotten over the 'Wacko Jacko' tag applied since the mid '90's and have rediscovered his very real abilities.
In some respects he never really 'grew up' being a kid-adult not having anything that resembled a regular childhood and suffered from a abusive father.

Recommended listening:
Jackson Five GOLD UK Motown and Soulsation (1995) US Motown box set - The band he was big part of in the beginning.
M Jackson Anthology Motown (1995) - a condensed history of Michael at Motown that sounds marvellous.
Off The Wall (1979) - The solo album that set the standard
Thriller - One of the of not THE biggest selling album in History it broke new ground mixing rock with Funk.
Bad - The last really innovative album by him.

Interests and Influences

 

Anime and manga drawing styles do influence me beyong just reading NEO magazine for upcoming shows and J Pop infomation.

Maico is Japan's newest radio DJ. When she is not working she must stave off assassins, crazed fans and a couple of office workers as well. She believes she was created just to be the perfect DJ. 

Maico's name stands for Multi-Artificial Intelligence Computer because she is 100% android, not a robot as the director always refers to her as. One would think that an android used for a radio show would look boxy or metallic, but Maico is certainly not robotic looking, in fact, she looks like a normal, pink-haired girl. 

When I was living in the Greater London Area, I used to travel out a lot across and just beyond the City and on one Saturday morning in the spring I was in the Covent Garden area, a favourite part of central London of mine where I came by this:

Aww she's cute, very fluffy and and a hand puppet being made by hand and I just had to have her, walking across the area clutching her tightly afterward. This was well before I had any idea of what being a little even was!!!

Well I used to take her to work - as this is the internet and a public site I won't say where - but the job was super important for children's welfare over here and every lunch time I'd put on an impromptu puppet show. 

We called it Peaches the Panda show and it was ever so funny. At all other times she was on my desk and I'd start playing with her as people drifted about the office.

Shortly afterward I got another fluffy thing but this was more a Plushie I named Spikey cos he's an Hedgehog.

I found them a few days ago as I was sorting out my closet so I give them a bit of clean and fluffing up and their back out on display.

The Second Time Around

And it is in more ways than one!

The soul music group Shalamar formed in 1976 from three dancers who appeared on the US black music show Soul Train were a passion of mine in the late 70's, early 80's being one of the acts that were the link between the seventies Soul (think Ojays' and solo Smokey Robinson) and the Funk that became prevailed as the main genre of black music in the 80's.

Sufficient I feel to say I bought the 45's usually as imports cos they were cheaper and many of their albums that were very satisfying in themselves having ballads as well as uptempo stompers you can dance to.

Of the albums of these that held and still hold great interest for me they are Big Fun issued fall 1979, Three For Love issued January 1981, Friends Early summer '82 and The Look issued May of 1983 and the last album by the classic original line of Jody Watley, Howard Hewitt and Jeffrey Daniels.

Jeffery pioneered the 'Moonwalk' first shown on BBC UK tv's Top Of The Pops in 1982 and was begged by Michael Jackson no less for the secret of them moves!

The records remain in my collection but like many acts it took a while before anything outside of a compilation got issued in the cd era.

That takes us back to the title of this post because in so far as the UK was concerned for a brief point Friends and The Look were issued around 1983/4 when the label was being handled by Warner (WEA) as straight cd issues - no bonus tracks - but had been out of print for a long while. These issues commend a very high price on the collectors market.

In 1996 Sequel Records part of the big re-issue group Castle Copyrights issued all four of these albums on cd, with Big Fun and Three For Love being issued for the very first time with bonus tracks.

It wasn't long however before this set of re-issues themselves were deleted and following the formation of Sanctuary Records from Castle Copyrights and the issuing of new compilations including the nice various artists Soul Classic Soul and Solar Classic Disco two cd sets in late 1999, attention again was placed on revitalizing the Shalamar catalogue.

In 2002 the entire Shalamar album catalogue was re-issued from 1977's Uptown Festival to 1990's Wake Up with new liner notes featuring interviews with Jeffery and Howard and lots of chart related facts.

It was and is a great idea but this set of issues have some flaws for the serious fan.
The first thing is like many contemporary albums an attempt was made to make everything sound loud so the quiet ballad You Can Count On Me has the same average level as a track like Dead Giveaway on the 2002 The Look cd which it never did on vinyl.

They also seem to attempted to remove any hiss and pops from the original tapes - I'm not sure these tapes are the actual 'master tapes' so much as copies of - and this has left the high notes sounding brittle and liking any sense of space around instruments or vocals.

You can hear a filter on the high notes on the intro of You Can Count On Me being lifted electronically on the louder passages which is distracting.

On the 2 albums on one cd issue of Big Fun and Three for Love I was taken aback to see they had shortened several tracks for 12 seconds or sometimes longer compared with the 1996 cd and original vinyl albums and used much shorter edits of Right In The Socket and Full Of Fire with the first song losing over two minutes!

To give you an idea how this impacts on it if you took the two albums minus any bonus tracks, the 1996 issues would run for 80:56 minutes and the 2002 a mere 74:50.

Nowhere in the notes of the 2002 cd does it mention this just proudly informing you of the bonus of The Second Time Around (edit) which was the 45 version (the lp version runs for 7:06) which how they got it all onto one cd!!! In so far as the first two albums go there are more bonus tracks - the edited singles versions - on the 1996 versions too.


Now my original 1996 Three For Love cd got lost in a move several years back and so I ordered up a complete set of the four 1996 cds used and was taken aback by the differences.
Now for The Second Time Around, I'm reunited with the cds that sound really like the vinyl albums I love.
Deja vu!