verbminx

It's insanely cold here: around 7 degrees (F). It won't be much warmer tomorrow; I don't yet know what the forecast looks like for the weekend.

I'm making bean and chicken soup this afternoon -- specifically, Bean Cuisine's White Bean Provencial. It's not the cheapest thing in the world to make -- the mix itself is $4 at World Market, plus it takes three pieces of chicken, some fresh vegetables, a can of tomatos, a few containers of chicken stock, and some wine -- but I find that it goes a long way (three meals or so for two people). Soup with buttered hearty bread is probably my favorite winter meal.

This is full of random cute animal photos, for some reason, but the last one is terrifying! Anyway, one of my favorite songs covered by one of my favorite bands!

I can't help it. I saw this video at least a year ago on one of the cable on-demand services, and for some reason, the song has been stuck in my head the last few days. No, I haven't heard the song since then. I might post a different song tomorrow.



I have been avoiding posting/reading/etc. for several reasons, the primary one being "because I hate election coverage and the attending arguments." This doesn't mean I didn't vote. I'm pleased that Obama won.

In news that is exciting in the bad way, someone crashed into my boyfriend's car last week, putting him in a nasty position in both vehicular and financial terms. He had insurance, but the car is totaled and he still owes thousands on it, and may actually have to take a step down in terms of what he can afford.

I used to upload songs and name them Song of the Week; it would be a mystery what you were getting until you downloaded it and listened to it. I stopped doing this years ago out of a healthy fear of the RIAA.

Anyway, YouTube gives me a way to start this up again. The only problem is that there are a lot of songs, especially older songs, for which I don't really like to watch the videos; they don't jibe with the images in my head.

I heard this song for the first time in a long time the other day, while I was at the drugstore. It makes me want to dance, swaying and leisurely. Enjoy!

I was going to embed this video, Kamisama Mou Sukoshi Dake Ep 1 Pt 1, but as it turns out, the person who uploaded it to YouTube disabled embedding. 

Frustrating! So, you'll have to follow the link. Subsequent parts of each episode (6 per ep, I believe) are always linked from the previous part's page. This is also available as a torrent from various sites and is not difficult to find. There are either 12 or 13 episodes all together. 

I suppose I should tell you what it's about. OK... it's a 10-year-old Japanese TV "dorama." The stars will be familiar to a lot of people: Takeshi Kaneshiro (who was in Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, and House of Flying Daggers, and is basically one of the top ten prettiest men in the world, *swoon*thud*), and Kyoko Fukada (Momoko the BTSSB-obsessed loli-chan from Shimotsuma Monogatari/Kamikaze Girls). It would probably look dated to a Japanese person, but does not look as dated to me as, say, something from 1988 looked in 1998.

Kaneshiro plays Keigo, a songwriter/producer/musician; Fukada's Masaki is a huge fan, still in high school, who would do just about anything to get to his next concert. Will they fall in love? Will she die young? Is HIV/AIDS a major social problem? Will it be a tear-jerking tragedy? The answer to all those questions is YOU KNOW IT! I watched all six parts of the first episode the other day.

The title has been translated as "Please, God, give me more time!" -- which is as good as anything else. Technically, mou sukoshi means "a little more," and Japanese culture isn't particularly monotheistic, so a possible conceptual translation is "Asking the gods for a little more."  I'm not sure what dake is -- it could be "only," in which case "time" would be something that you'd understand in the context of the show's plot -- or it could be a word I don't know, which is significantly more likely.

How did I find it? 

Luna Sea's "I For You" has been one of my favorite songs for about the past decade (it's not a great video, though -- mostly landscape shots). I don't know whether or not it was written for Kamisama mou sukoshi dake, but it was definitely the theme song of the show. It also plays as the recurring theme in the show's instrumental score... I like the oboe motif! There's a variant video for the song that uses footage from the show, which was linked from one of the uploads of the regular video. It was really just a case of serial browsing, like most things on the web.

Anyway, I think a few of you will... be interested to watch the show. (It's a melodrama, so it doesn't seem like "enjoy" is the right descriptor.) Give it a chance. I tend to get drawn in by this stuff the way some of my friends get drawn in by bad reality shows.

***

Judging by what I have out of the library right now, you'd think I was a massive fan of French New Wave cinema (I have: Jules et Jim, which I still haven't watched all the way through, along with Breathless and Bonjour Tristesse, which is not totally Nouvelle Vague... but it does star Jean Seberg, and is based on a 1950s novel that was insanely popular and "alternacool" at the time). 

This is not the case; I have a running list of films I think I really ought to see, and I tend to grab them when I see them. The latter two just happened to be on the shelf, so my theory is that it would be more accurate to say that there are no massive fans of French New Wave cinema who go to the same library as me. Or that they're all done watching movies for now....

It's amazing how nearly-accurate a pastiche this is. Probably the most accurate part is the "hallway scene" with the heart attack. With regard to other elements, I think that the video seems a little later than 1984... a few more posts coming up for contrast.

It's also amazing -- almost annoying -- how catchy a synthpop track this is! I bet you could play it at an 80s night at a club, between Duran Duran and Erasure, and nobody who didn't know it would immediately recognize it as a fake.