As some of you may know, I’m getting married on Saturday.  A lot of the prep for the ceremony and everything related to it has either been taking my time, energy, or both, and what’s been unintentionally getting kicked to the curb? This blog.And to be honest, much of what energy I have had has been devoted to ongoing work on Here Is The Wonderland and other writing projects.

However, I am not closing TGML or any of its related sites, or letting them stay static.

This week, I’ll be making a few special posts, and then when I get back from my honeymoon next week, I’ll be back at a more active schedule.

Thanks for your patience!

- CJ Marsicano

Fourth Blogging Anniversary, that is…

I almost forgot to post something today, but I have a good excuse: Today was also my fiancee’s bridal shower, and guess who had to schlep gifts back and forth in his car? Yep…

I should note that for the past few weeks I’ve been – on top of planning towards the wedding and subsequent move into mine and my wife-to-be’s new apartment – finishing up the novel (yeah, still… but then again if I didn’t have to hold a day job it would have been finished already), working on a screenplay for Script Frenzy, working on a couple of reviews for this blog (they’ll be up this week), and working on my guitar.

And last night, boy, did I work on my guitar… I got this thing (Epiphone Les Paul) a few months ago, but I never changed the strings until last night. Such was my Saturday night:

And to keep things J-pop related, here’s another part of what helped keep me sane, especially today:

Besides, I couldn’t figure how to equal or better the live MoMusu and Stooges clips from last year! But what I can do is (even though I didn’t get this finished until after midnight when the 11th became the 12th) update a list I posted two years ago on my second blogging anniversary at MotokoAoyama.com, which would make this “A List That Took Four Years To Make”:
Read the rest of this entry »

I almost did something here on TGML that I haven’t done since I launched this site, and that’s almost allowed a calendar month to pass without posting something here.

Sorry about that.

My fingers and brain haven’t been idle, and I haven’t not been paying attention to what this blog normally covers. But life has gotten a bit goofy of late – I’ve been trying to get my novel manuscript finished, another old hobby of mine has been adding some inspiration to my life, and as of this writing, my wedding date is less than seven months away. I also had to change computers yet again since I posted last here, which sucks, but I have a better machine at my disposal so I really have no other excuse to not pursue all the projects I need to do, this blog included.

It’s also been a while since I contributed an installment of “Diggin’ in the Crates” to YODC, but I’ll make up for that as well. I’ve only just scratched the surface when it comes to that project.

I have been plotting two little series for this blog and I’ll be attacking both of those throughout December. Stay tuned here and at my Facebook and Twitter pages. Thanks for your patience.

So, what exactly led to me starting over after two and a quarter years at Stuck In A Pagoda?

Well, one of the biggest reasons is the name itself. Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama is a cool title. I used it for a mix CD of traditional Japanese music that I posted at Art of the Mix several years ago, it was the title I semi-facetiously gave my LiveJournal when I started to use it regularly, and it was, for me anyway, a combination of my two biggest musical loves – punk rock and Japanese pop. (The old blog’s title is a parody of a Dickies song from their second LP, replacing the original’s titular heroine [a real-life Los Angeles newscaster] with my favorite Love Hina character.)

But the title has really restricted me of late. There is a lot more music that I want to comment on, and while I have done so in the past (an account of a Bon Jovi stadium concert I was dragged to in 2006 comes to mind), writing about other mainstream music didn’t completely jibe with my loving scrawls about the latest Morning Musume single, my anticipation for the Stooges’ first American tour since 1974, or anything else I normally covered at Stuck In A Pagoda.

In short, I needed to do my usual insanity and then some under a less restrictive name – but for weeks, couldn’t think of any.

And that is when my pre-ordered copy of Berryz Koubou’s Yuke Yuke Monkey Dance arrived and I saw what was written on Miyabi Natsuyaki’s T-shirt. I ran to GoDaddy.com and registered thegroovemusiclife.com before someone else beat me to it. That took five minutes.

Deciding on a design for the blog took longer. It wasn’t until the other day that I found a theme that I liked – so much so that I may be using the design for another new blog that I will debut next week (one even more specific than So Hot She Shits Fire, which will never change as in that case, you can’t really mess with perfection) as well as for the static version of Stuck In A Pagoda sometime later.

So, here’s the basic mission behind The Groove Music Life:

• I’m still going to write about Japanese pop.
• I’m still going to write about punk and alternative rock.

But I’m also going to:

• Write about any other pop or rock music that I choose.
• Continue my exploration of older Japanese musics. (Simply put, The Vinyl Pagoda Project is going to continue, name and all – I’m even going to port the older entries from Stuck In A Pagoda, dates and all, when the next installment goes up late Thursday or early Friday.)

Some other changes:

• Pagoda Video and The Pagoda Five will become Groove Music Video and The Groove Music Five
• No more picking on the Spice Girls and/or Miley Cyrus. I’ve already proved my point.
• There will be more reviews. As a matter of fact, I want to have at least three up before the end of next week.

Some things that will continue on from Stuck In A Pagoda:

• The Morning Musume/J-Pop In America series. I have been plotting further installments in this series since March; other writing activities, including the completion of Here Is The Wonderland, have been taking precedence (and that novel is still a top priority, as is making writing my sole source of income.)
• The LolIdols series, I Can Has J-Pop? (And I welcome ideas for that as well from readers).

…and one thing that might not continue.

• The Pagoda Podcast.

Obviously, the name won’t fit in with this new blog’s expanded vision. But the other, more important reason is, I don’t have the time right now. Putting a podcast together is a pain in the fucking ass, and even though I have a talent for audio editing, I’d rather be using that time to write. I also got no feedback from that second episode, and even though I started to put playlists for two more episodes together, I decided to put the idea of a podcast on hold. Maybe someday I’ll do a new podcast, but as of this writing I don’t see it happening.

So, in short, this little black duck needed a reboot, and this is it.

Now let’s have some fun – I sure intend to.