Broomhead put forth an interesting question on his recently reactivated blog (which, as an aside, I’m glad to see that Brian is finally writing about his love of soccer, I was urging him to do a soccer blog months ago since he used to Twitter about the beautiful game a lot):

“Why do we post about the stuff that we buy?

There are many aspects of fandom and community (especially ours, IW) that bother me. I don’t understand this one. Many blogs post pictures or text of their recent purchases (GETS) – CDs, DVDs, Photobooks, Magazines, everything.”

Between his original post and Misa’s highlight about it on IW, it’s already gotten a good discussion going amongst our blogosphere.  Everybody has their opinion on the subject, and most seem to be positive. My comrade in Reina and Meetan fandom, CK, pointed out in a comment at TLS that two of the most popular blogs in the IW contingent, Morning Berryz and Hello! Blog, do this on a regular basis, for two reasons: One, to display what the items look like, and two, to keep their blogs active. CK has done this a lot at both of his sites, noting, “I can only do so many ‘think pieces’ and live concert reports. So the natural thing is to report on the items that I have purchased, if for no other reason to give a review.” 

I cannot say I’m not guilty of this, however. The funny thing is, I don’t show off my purchases of J-Pop items all the time, even though I buy a lot of stuff. Most of what I buy is the actual music on CD (and on vinyl if it exists in that format, something I wish would happen with the MoMusu/H!P material – are you listening, JapanFiles?), and since Paul at Hello! Blog in particular does that on the regular, there’s not much of a point of me doing the same thing. 

Recently at YODC, Langdon asked me if I wanted to make a regular feature out of doing something I was doing on occasion over there, showing off bits from my still-growing vinyl collection. Since that feature became regular earlier this year, only two Japanese-related items have been shown off there: a Sayuri Ishikawa best-of LP from 1977 and a copy of AKB48′s first independently released single (something which CK almost openly ogled in his  comment!). The rest of the vinyls that I have shown off there definitely don’t fall within J-pop guidelines. I think the only J-Pop items I’ve ever shown off in any of my blogs before then were a then-newly-acquired Mari Yaguchi MiniMoni plushie over at MotokoAoyama.com V1.0, and a copy of Mika Todd’s post-MiniMoni CD EP and a couple of other MiniMoni stuffies on my LiveJournal.

Does showing off J-items (or even vinyl aquisitions like I do at YODC) mean, as Broomhead suggests, that people are “caught up in material” or looking to fit in with the IW community? I don’t believe so. Again, I think CK nailed it on the head with the reasoning behind such posts. People like these kinds of posts on occasion. The vinyl posts at YODC happened, on-and-off last year and regularly this year, because Langdon and some of the other YODC crew dug them when I did them, and asked me to keep doing them. And, with the exception of two unintentionally missed instances so far this year, I have.

It’s not for me to put “showoff” posts down, firstly because it would be hypocritical of me, and two, it would be absolutely pointless and negative. These posts are done primarily for fun, and without that element, you have nothing – irregardless of what’s in one’s collection.

Paul at Hello!Blog has done it again with his annual desire to combine his love of Hello! Project with some mad coding skills. This time around, the survey incorporates all of Hello! Project, including the Elder Club, making for what should be some rather interesting results. Here’s the “tall” version of my survey graphic (the long version I’m going to use as the basis for a future header).

Now I get to explain myself again… Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, I posted two bakery-related videos from MiniMoni at this blog’s predecessor, Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama, and a post with more substantial food over at So Hot She Shits Fire. Since there’s no way I’m going to repost those videos (or make that joke about the kind of pie people were getting from certain ex-MiniMoni’s around the time of that post), I’m going to do things in reverse: First, here at the Pagoda, some more substantial food, since there’s going to be a boatload of cake going around the IW circuit (I’ve already seen Vee’s at the time I wrote these posts, and it looked multilple levels of great to me). Specifically, one of my favorite chicken recipes:

SMOKED PAPRIKA CHICKEN THIGHS

First, we start off with some music to accompany the food prep: in this case, my iPod in its JBL speaker/dock delivering the Cramps’ first long-player Songs The Lord Taught Us (RIP, Lux Interior).

While Lux’s vocals and Ivy’s guitars permeate the air of my kitchen, we gather the ingredients: 

• 10 – 12 boneless, skinless chicken thighs (appx. 2 packages)
• Extra virgin olive oil
• Smoked paprika
• Kosher or sea salt
• Cracked pepper

On the day I shot the photos for this post, I only made half the recipe, enough for one person (me!). One package of chicken thighs should feed two people, but these are so addictive that often it ends up being one package per person.

Preheat oven to 350°F. Lightly coat the bottom of the baking dish with the olive oil. Open up the chicken thighs as much as possible and arrange in the dish (it is perfectly okay to have the thighs touching together). Cover the thighs with smoked paprika, but not so much that you can’t see the original color of the chicken underneath.

Sprinkle pinches of kosher or sea salt onto the thighs to taste. (Yes, that is an Alton Brown salt container of my very own, filled with kosher salt. Alton is the man. Fans of any other Food Network star that isn’t Raechel Ray or Masaharu Morimoto from Iron Chef can e-mail toughshit@thegroovemusiclife.com!) 

With a peppermill, add the pepper to taste. Sprinkle the thighs with olive oil. Bake uncovered for at least 45 minutes or until the internal temperature of the thighs reaches the standard 165°F. 

Serve immediately. Devour like you’re Edward Cullen and the chicken is Bella Swann. 

For those of you that still want cake, some special cake is being served over at So Hot She Shits Fire…

MORNING MUSUME
Platinum 9 DISC
(Zetima/Sony [Japan]/JapanFiles.com [USA])
Available on CD and through JapanFiles.com and iTunes US and Japan
Rating:

Man, talk about playing catch-up. The last time I saw a favorite band release a shitload of long-playing albums in such a short period of time was when Black Flag had come back in 1984 from a couple of years of legal limbo during which they couldn’t record or release new material. In one calendar year, they had released the studio albums My War and Slip It In, the live cassette Live ’84 and the half-spoken word/half-instrumental project Family Man – all in one calendar year. While that may sound like an odd comparison anywhere else in the J-pop blogosphere, I myself don’t think so. While Morning Musume didn’t have any legal holdups to speak of, 2008 was a somewhat idle year release-wise for the band, with only two singles and a side-project for them to speak of until the release of COVER YOU last November. Now, we already have a new album and single out, and a second single already in the can and scheduled for release in May – now that’s the MoMusu release schedule I’ve been acquainted with for the past five years! 

On to the album itself… Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to Wota Wonderings! We are a group of english-speaking Japanese music bloggers brought together once a month to answer questions posed by johpan. We strive to be creative and entertaining, and we may even shed a bit of new light on interesting musical and cultural topics. Any questions about how we work should be directed to johpan. Don’t forget to check out the other posts from this month at the bottom of this post. Enjoy!

The question this month:

The music industry has had many tie-ins with animes and doramas. Of those tie-ins, did one manage to capture your interest and get you hooked on their music? Or, did one manage to change your perspective of a musical act?

As a 2nd part, did you end up watching the anime or dorama in its entirety or give up once the musical act’s tie-in ceased?

And for you non-anime/dorama watchers, have there been any CM tie-ins that had a similar effect on you?

This is going to be somewhat brief compared to my usual ramblings. Years ago, I was regularly scouring the DVD bins for interesting anime titles, usually centering around ones that weren’t mecha-laden sci-fi. One of the titles that I got into heavily was Love Hina, based on Ken Akamatsu’s manga. Such was my interest that I started scouring the web for anything Love Hina that I could get my hands on, especially if it featured my favorite character from the series, Motoko Aoyama. Yeah, that’s where the title of my original music blog, Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama, came from.

The search inevitably led to me finding soundtrack CDs from the series (two albums of character songs sung by all the seiyuu on the series and two different soundtracks). I’d found one on eBay, and on a search for a more regular source, discovered CDJapan, ordered up the rest, and started searching out other recordings by the voice actresses on the show, particularly those by Yui Horie (whose singing career I’ve become a devoted fan of) and Yuu Asakawa (who, while putting out three fine mini-albums of music, hasn’t done any solo material since about 2003).

I lost track of what was going on in anime and manga after awhile (its only in the past couple of weeks that I’ve started to look through the latter’s racks again), but discovering CDJapan in my search for these CDs, and knowing in the process that I could find other Japanese CDs easier, led me to start using the site to fill gaps in my Whiteberry collection (specifically at the time, their first EP After School and their trilogy of cover-version singles). This in itself led to me doing a little networking through LiveJournal and elsewhere for more J-music to find, which of course led to my discovering Morning Musume and Hello! Project, and to my blogging adventures.

Funnily enough, I haven’t paid much attention to any acting or anime project involving MoMusu very much. I’ve downloaded the first couple of episodes of the current My Melody series because of Reina Tanaka’s involvement in the voice cast and my general interest in Sanrio characters (Hell, I visit the Sanrio store in Times Square and buy something every time I visit New York City – last time it was a little Kuromi beanbag stuffie and pen). On the opposite hand, even though I have all of Koharu Kusumi’s Kirarin Revolution-related solo albums and think they’re fucking brilliant, I’ve never seen a single episode of the series, although I’ve heard that it may be coming out on DVD in the States at some point. My fingers are crossed…

Wota Wonderings 003 – The Ties That Bind (Selective Hearing)
Wota Wonderings 3 – Tie-Ins (Solo Space)
Wota Wonderings: Mendol – where the guys are girls and the girls are hot. (boylikesmusic)
Wota Wonderings 003: It’s All Yui Horie’s Fault (Somewhat) (The Groove Music Life)
Wota Wonderings 03 – Anime, Dorama, Video Game Tie-Ins (fields of maize and berryz)
Wota Wonderings 003: Kirarin Revolution and Hot Guys (Merry Go Round)