Otakon!The next-to-last Otakon to be held at Baltimore Convention Center has begun! I decided to take a leaf from others and take some photos around the convention with one of my anime figures, “Danboard” from the manga “Yotsuba and!”. There are a lot of people in Japan and other places that are taking photos of Danboard in various famous sites, so I thought “why not do the same?” Here are a couple of pictures I’ve taken so far, with more (hopefully) to come!
Enjoy!
Danboard checks out the Otakon “ice cold waterworks” signDanboard waits patiently outside the main entranceDanboard meets a cosplayer
Classical music never sounded better than the Piano Guys’ take on it, melding 18th Century instruments and 1970’s funk, as they create a “quartet” playing “I Want You Bach”.
One of the most famous, if not one of the best rock bands from the 1960’s was Iron Butterfly, and their biggest hit was “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida“, a 17+ minute jam session. The performance included vocals and keyboard by Doug Ingle, Ron Bushy on drums, Lee Dorman on bass and vocals, and Erik Braunn on guitar and vocals. Â The song was noted for being so long that it took the entire side of an LP album, and for being a transition from “psychedelic rock” to “heavy metal”. Â It was also the first to have a drum solo as part of the flow of music from the vocals and keyboard at the beginning and end, through the guitar- and bass-centric pieces between. Â A little-known bit of trivia, back in the days before automated radio stations there were people called “disk jockeys” who selected the songs to be played and “cued up” songs on turntables that they switched between to transition songs. Â “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” was a well-known “bathroom break” song, because a DJ that needed a break could cue up this song to play, and know that they had at least 15 minutes before they needed to be back at the control to kick off the next song. Â This song, along with the live recording of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird”, Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, and the live album version of Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do” were often-requested songs, but seldom played, and if you heard one of them, you could bet that the DJ needed to be away from the console for a little bit.
This performance was recorded in May 2012, just a few months before bassist Lee Dorman passed away. Â He was found in December of 2012 in his car, he died of natural causes likely on his way to a doctor’s appointment. Â He was 70 years old. Â I personally love the fact that even after all the years between the original recording and this performance, the men could still bring their best to this piece, to an appreciative audience.
Enjoy these men in their final performance together, as the effortlessly lay down “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” one last time.
What if the fantasy worlds created by authors like L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll and others were real worlds? What if your name was “Dorothy” and you found you were suddenly able to travel into the fantasy world of Oz and you entered an adventure story in that world, just like your “namesake?” What if your name wasn’t Dorothy, but you were drawn into and trapped in the world of Oz, and expected to join the adventure as a new “Dorothy?” And what if there were others like you, “namesakes” of famous characters, who also have the ability to travel to these worlds, and who have formed a covert operation to fight a rival organization of other “namesakes?”
This is the fascinating premise of a webcomic called “Namesake“, created by artist Isabelle Melançon and writer Megan Lavey-Heaton. They have created a richly-detailed world of their own, one where certain people have the power to travel to the fantasy worlds created by famous authors through history, including worlds of myth and mystery. A world where special “writers” can change the world around them, and even create new worlds of their own, merely by writing on paper.
The story centers around Emma Crewe, a young woman who can travel to these worlds, even though she doesn’t have the same name as any of the protagonists of the stories of those worlds. She and her younger sister and her friends get caught up in the adventures of not only the fantasy worlds, but also the conflicts between an organization of Namesakes and Writers called “Calliope” and a rival organization called the “Rippers“, made up of Namesakes and Characters from stories. It’s a fascinating premise, and the characters of Emma and the others are realistic and sympathetic, even the “villains” aren’t all moustache-twirling two-dimensional “bad guys”, even if they might have been written that way at one time! One of the most enjoyable parts of reading this story is recognizing who the Namesakes and characters are from the original stories. Like many of the original fantasy stories, there are moments of terror where Emma and her “crewe” encounter horrible, life-threatening dangers from the stories, but unlike the original stories, a Namesake is not guaranteed to survive their adventure, and often unforseen factors enter the adventure.
The ongoing story is broken up into Books, with Intermissions which are side-stories, set in the past or present and involving characters down through the history of Namesakes, starting with Alice Liddel, the “Alice” of “Alice in Wonderland”. These Intermissions are a great way of building on and explaining events and actions by characters in the present, without suffering from the “wall of text” that some visual story creators use to accomplish the same thing. The archive of stories is well worth diving into, and the creators are very disciplined about updating on the schedule they have set for themselves, so the frustration of waiting for the next page is mitigated by knowing that it’s only a couple of days until the new one is published! There are also lots of links to things like artwork, a list of stories referred to in “Namesake”, and a lot of other things worth exploring the site to find.
In all, I very highly recommend this comic, and I hope Ms. Melançon and Ms. Lavey-Heaton are able to give us much more story for years to come!
Almost exactly 2 years ago today, October 23Â 2012, IÂ was on the first full day of my third trip to Japan, a month-long excursion I called “Nerdtour 2012” (I blogged it on this site). Â One of the best places I went was this little slice of old Tokyo park design, called Kiyosumi Garden. Â It was just about 1 or 1.25 miles up the road from the apartment I stayed at, and my buddy John had been there before, so on a somewhat rainy day we set off to see this. Â It’s a nicely laid-out park, with a large pond or small lake in the middle, beautiful landscaping, and more turtles in one place than I had seen in a long time! Â I took this picture of a couple having their picture taken, I don’t know if they were models, or of they were a genuine couple preparing to get married. Â Either way, it was a stroke of luck getting this shot from across the lake, given it had been raining off and on with breaks in the clouds allowing the sun to shine. Â I plan to go back sometime in the next year, if all goes well, if not, then the year after. Â There is so much more of Japan to see!
Strolling through the Youtube archives is one of my favorite pastimes, since you never know what you’ll come across. I knew James Cagney could dance, even though he also played gangsters and other tough guys in the old movies, but I never knew that Bob Hope could hold his own in tap-dancing. If I had ever seen the movie “The Seven Little Foys” I would have learned better. This is a great scene with Hope playing Eddie Foy and Cagney playing George M. Cohan, doing a tap-dance “face-off”, and it is a joy to behold. Today’s pop-and-lock dancers do similar competitions with each other, but these guys were hitting it 60 years ago! If you watch closely there’s a part where Hope almost does a “moonwalk” while tap-dancing.
Back in the early 2000’s, I was just getting into anime watching heavily, and one of my favorite shows from that time was “Noir”, a mystery about two young women who work as assassins for hire. Their assignments mostly involved killing people who deserved to die, at least as determined by the ones hiring them, but there was also they recurring mystery of how they became killers, and what secrets of their relationship to each other and to their employers would be revealed. One of the girls was amnesiac, who woke up in a room in Japan with no memory, but with a school uniform and ID, and an innate knowledge of how to field-strip, clean and reassemble almost any gun. The other young woman initially worked alone using the code name “Noir”, but she encountered the other girl when both of them tried to kill the same set of gangsters. The younger girl ended up working with the older, and they ended up on various assignments throughout Europe and the Middle East, all the while learning more and more about who hired them and why, and what tied them together from many years earlier.
What most added to the show for me was the atmospheric music of Kajiura Yuki, who wrote music that spanned several genres, but mostly faux-Medieval European music, such as the song in this video clip, “Salva Nos”. Also, there was a recurring theme, where the amnesiac girl had a musical watch which played a theme song that the other girl remembered from childhood. Ms. Kajiura played many variations on that theme throughout the show’s episodes, and it added a haunting current to the scenes of both violence and stillness.
This was one of the first anime in the “girls with guns” genre, which led to two follow-on anime by the same production company, Bee Train, called “Madlax” and “El Cazador de la Bruja”, but with different characters and no relation plot-wise. Other anime in this genre include “Gunslinger Girls” and even parodies such as the currently running “Sabagebu”.
This video clip is a music video of “Salva Nos”, with many action scenes from various episodes of “Noir.” Enjoy!
One of the most famous, if not one of the best rock bands from the 1960’s was Iron Butterfly, and their biggest hit was “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida“, a 17+ minute jam session. The performance included vocals and keyboard by Doug Ingle, Ron Bushy on drums, Lee Dorman on bass and vocals, and Erik Braunn on guitar and vocals. Â The song was noted for being so long that it took the entire side of an LP album, and for being a transition from “psychedelic rock” to “heavy metal”. Â It was also the first to have a drum solo as part of the flow of music from the vocals and keyboard at the beginning and end, through the guitar- and bass-centric pieces between. Â A little-known bit of trivia, back in the days before automated radio stations there were people called “disk jockeys” who selected the songs to be played and “cued up” songs on turntables that they switched between to transition songs. Â “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” was a well-known “bathroom break” song, because a DJ that needed a break could cue up this song to play, and know that they had at least 15 minutes before they needed to be back at the control to kick off the next song. Â This song, along with the live recording of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird”, Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, and the live album version of Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do” were often-requested songs, but seldom played, and if you heard one of them, you could bet that the DJ needed to be away from the console for a little bit.
Back in the early 2000’s, I was just getting into anime watching heavily, and one of my favorite shows from that time was “Noir”, a mystery about two young women who work as assassins for hire. Their assignments mostly involved killing people who deserved to die, at least as determined by the ones hiring them, but there was also they recurring mystery of how they became killers, and what secrets of their relationship to each other and to their employers would be revealed. One of the girls was amnesiac, who woke up in a room in Japan with no memory, but with a school uniform and ID, and an innate knowledge of how to field-strip, clean and reassemble almost any gun. The other young woman initially worked alone using the code name “Noir”, but she encountered the other girl when both of them tried to kill the same set of gangsters. The younger girl ended up working with the older, and they ended up on various assignments throughout Europe and the Middle East, all the while learning more and more about who hired them and why, and what tied them together from many years earlier.