Suzuka

This anime is one I've just completed watching over the last few weeks having bought it a while back.

It's in Funimations really cheap re-issue series called S.A.V.E and was not issued in it's entirety in the UK as ADV who had a license only issued the first three before hitting financial problems and dropped it.

The best way to describe this anime is really a slice of life school romantic comedy albeit one set around a track and field school club.

If you remember high school you just might recall relationship status and how to improve them figured a lot in your thoughts as well as peer popularity pressure. 

Our hero is Yamato who has moved to Tokyo to attend high school but is very clumsy with relationships, a bit immature and not to put too fine a point on it a slacker.

Yamato has just moved in with his Auntie at an all girl bath house and he has fallen head over heels in love with Suzaka, the school's number one athlete. One problem - she hardly realizes he exists. 

In an attempt to try and win over the girl, Yamato tries his hand at sports and finds that he has a hidden talent when it comes to sprinting. 

Not only this, but he soon becomes the object of love and admiration from TWO other girls at school , while Suzuka battles with her conflicting emotions over him.

It may hardly be groundbreaking but it has a good heart, is hugely enjoyable as RomComs go and shows it's never too late for the loser to be the first cross the finishing line.

Meet the gang!

Gladys Knight at Motown

Recently I've finally got around to collecting the five cd series issued by Motown UK in 2006 that features 10 albums by Gladys knight and the pips spread with two albums per cd.
I have a number of these albums some in mono as issued by Tamla-Motown in the UK and so the stereo is new to me although I'd of preferred to have mono for the earlier albums as it's that nothing in centre, with all else hard left and hard right stuff that is so distracting especially on headphones.

Following a period whilst signed to two labels releasing the 45's Letter Full Of Tears and Every Beat Of My Heart re-recorded for their Motown Greatest Hits album, they signed up in 1965 but its fair to say Berry Gordy didn't really know what to do with them.

Everybody Needs Love issued in 1967 was their first Motown album and is a mixture of songs written for them and covers showing from the get go the call and response Gospel infused style they were to become famous for.The Tittle track, Take Me In Your Arms (and love me) ans well as they take on I heard It Through The Grapevine. The first cd couples this with Feelin' Bluesy from 1968 which is all covers as Berry Gordy didn't want then muscling on the Supremes but this nonetheless proved to be great vehicle for displaying Gladys voice on tracks like It Should Of been Me (Yvonne Fair had a top 5 UK hits with this in 1976) and The End Of Our Road.

Disc two kicks of Silk 'N Soul issued in 1968 and is another covers but they were teamed with Norman Whitfield who just put another of a twist to enable the material to become theirs.with songs such as The Look Of Love, I Wish It Would Rain and Every little Bit Hurts.
1969 saw the issue of the second album on this cd, Nitty Gritty, a rousing piece of psychedelic Soul that contains not only the title track, a re-interpretation of Cloud Nine and Didn't You Know You have to Cry Sometime.

Disc three is a gem containing the If You Were My Woman and Standing Ovation albums from 1971.
The first album is a mixture of songs written for the group such as the title track and I don't Want To do Wrong as well as covers such as Let It Be and One Less Bell To Answer.
Standing Ovation was an album of covers -the group felt very much pushed back and were to leave for Buddah Records soon - but amongst the covers includes their sensual remake of Help Me Make It Through The Night and Make Me The Woman Go Home To written for by Clay McMurray

More Classical music

While I been writing a fair bit around anime, this week we're going back to my love of classical music goes back to boyhood and with the advent of the compact disc, I began building my core collection in this format exclusively.

First off, I kind of got off on a lopsided approach to Beethoven, missing out on his Violin and Piano Sonatas completely plowing through the Symphonies and then the Piano Concertos before meeting the Violin Concerto Op.61.

I decided to get the old DG Galleria series of Wilhelm Kempff's masterful Piano Sonatas cycle from the mid 1960's that as recordings weren't unfamiliar to me as I'd borrowed tapes from the public library of them before. I think there was a big box with all thirty two of them but I considered it would be overkill.

I eventually got the cd in the same series yesterday of Menuhin and Kempff's account of the Sonatas for Piano and Violin numbers Five and Nine from 1970 that remains one of the finest ever recorded. I also picked up used the Violinist Anne Sophie-Mutter's recording with Herbert von Karajan of the Triple Concerto from 1980 which was a full price disc issued 1985 which in the last days of new classical vinyl was normal with three overtures tacked on to fill up the disc.

Berlioz and his Fantastique symphony was an early obsession of mine something a psychologist I saw picked up on and I've been hunting for years for a recording I really could enjoy that was in print. I found it via the American arm of EMI Classical 'Angel' in the form of a recording by the London Philharmonic Orchestra from 1960 conducted by André Cluytens a conductor whose records I like.

Dvorák: Well I always had a soft spot from his work but outside of the odd Piano Sonata plus recordings of his Cello and Violin Concertos, hadn't gone beyond his famous Ninth symphony (the New World).

I replaced my original cd from 1987 of the Slavonic Dances which was the two records combined to lp for this newer  remastered version from the 1990's.

I bought a re-issue of a 1991 cd set packaged in a cardboard box and card sleeves of Rafael Kubelik's complete cycle of nine symphonies recorded 1968 through1973 for DG, something I'd always dreamt of getting as a kid which were amongst the strongest interpretations ever and anyway I've always loved theses performances having the Ninth on lp at the time.

I also got a complete set of his Violin Sonatas recently too by the Prague Quartet in a similar inexpensive box set.

In my earliest days of buying cds, many were short measure being literally the cd version of the record issue which for technical reasons cannot be 'too long' otherwise the sound suffers and recently I replaced my original of just the Lalo and short piece by Berlioz by this version from 1994 that was newly mastered that removed some of the harshness of the early digital recording.

Eden Of The East

Recently I bought Eden Of The East directed by Kenji Kamiyama that came out late last year as it was on special offer at Amazon.

The story goes something like this:

On November 22nd, 2010, ten missiles strike Japan. Known as "Careless Monday," this attack does not result in any apparent victims, and is soon forgotten by almost everyone. Then, three months later... Saki Morimi, a young woman currently Washington D.C. on her graduation trip, is saved by a mysterious man, who has lost his memory, and has nothing except for a gun and a phone with 8.2 BILLION yen in digital cash. 

At the heart of the story is the fate of young disenfranchised Japanese people and their struggle against the conservative and traditional ruling establishment that holds them back from realising their true potential in a modern globalized world, represented here not only by Saki and her friends who are developing a revolutionary computer program, but by the existence and the role of NEETs or Shut-ins, young men who have dropped out of conventional society in favour of a locked-room, computer-oriented existence.

It's this that lifts this 11 part anime from being a run of the mill apocalypse story which is not uncommon as a subject.

*Updated for Blu Ray 2019*

Rush: Roll The Bones

The Hard Rock Canadian Group Rush, this month have a specialty cd reissue out of an album that originally came out in 1991 called Roll The Bones which was the follow up to 1989's Presto, the first for their deal with Atlantic records.

This album saw them move further away from longer compositions, setting the tone for all newer albums such as Snakes And Arrows and Clockwork Angels.

 As you can see it is pressed on gold plated disc for better light reflection leading to less errors on reply that your cd player has to correct.

This edition, mastered using the HDCD process to allow better resolution on equipped players has improved bass definition and better dynamics

Meadow time

It's Summer Time time to go out and explore which with me is more a  grey shorts and cute socks thing

Welcome to a bit of The Meadow where I live in a picture I took a short while back and for the photographically knowledgeable I made exposure corrections electronically to deal with the high contrast on the original.

I'm near woodland  and that was left as bowling green flat grass dead land where I walk often that was taken over by locals and made into a bit of roadside meadow.

If you look toward the bottom you'll see the Bluebells were out together with other vegetation because they made a space for them, tending to their needs.

There's a metaphor in that picture: You created a meadow to which I landed tendering to my needs so I grew and blossoming as the Little Gurl you know, gaining strength.

Like that Meadow you too can find all manner of things down in it, things you may have forgotten and much that you need to get by in this world.

A friend wrote elsewhere about how much she enjoyed the sense in which it's all about the experience of the innocent of the little child, how safe that environment felt compared to others and the positive nature of the experience.

I think she hit the proverbial nail on the head.

I always loved Beatrix Potter's world for its whimsical but not too soppy tail of rural life and not least Peter Rabbit.

It didn't matter that Benjamin Bunny got punished for breaking the rules. We all do.

  

Being honest about the Bigger Side

This time last year was different for feeling like there was a massive eruption inside me as with Miss D's influence layers of the more adult side of me were unpeeled rather like an onion as she found what was hidden, what if the right circumstances occurred just spring forth as much as most of the time I'm more littles so that stuff would be off limits. 

It would all be about curves and looking your sexiest enjoying the feel and looks sure but with an eye towards where that would take me.

Indeed it would be what happens next to Tammy?

In adult sissy mode we found out most of this would apply - it was what I felt I truly desired with only actual enslavement rejected and that I only need to be what I am - a Gurl - and not girl because I do not desire being an adult female by sex being only feminine by gender with all that goes with it.

In some ways the shift from Little to Big is more like this, a means to fulfilling those post adolescent needs but not connected to bdsm culture and where any domination is "soft".

It's also about having the confidence to break out and let it all happen.