madara_blog's Journal

Another great H!P concert, this one from 2005
I watched another previously unseen concert, “Hello! Project 2005 Natsu no Kayou Show ’05 Selection! Collection!” taped July 24, 2005 at the National Yoyogi Gymnasium in Tokyo. I got it chiefly because W performed in it and I’m eager to track down any and all previously unseen W material. It turned out to be quite an enjoyable high-energy all-star concert featuring just about everybody signed with H!P at the time, including the Hello! Pro Eggs, making this possibly the earliest concert I’ve seen them in. It opens with a rousing set performed by the entire ensemble, starting with the “Hello Theme.” All the girls are adorned in exceedingly cute and colorful pop art-style dresses and boots with a distinct 1960s mod feel. (Yossi and Mako-chan are particular standouts in these fashions.) They follow the “Hello Theme” with a song I never heard before, “Koi no Telephone Goal,” followed by “The Manpower.” Then out come the MCs, Makoto (the “troll”) and our one-and-only Mari, which surprised the hell out of me because I thought she was suspended during all of 2005 and didn’t make a comeback until the January 2007 round of concerts. But there she was in full MC mode in July 2005. How nice.

After the first set, other highlights include the following:

V-u-den does a nice song, “Hitorijime,” one of the best I’ve heard them do, and they’re dressed in short yellow cocktail dresses. They all look great but Rika is absolutely stunning, possibly the best-looking I’ve ever seen her. Problem is, the camerawork is weird, shooting them mostly from the side or from the back. (This is partly a result of the awkward way the stages have been set up in this venue.)

W does one number, but because of the strange arrangement of the platforms they perform on, they’re not together for most of the song, but stand on separate stages with the camera cutting back and forth between them. They look great, though, in matching blue-and-white party dresses with red sash and white boots. The song, “Ai no Imi Wo Oshiete,” isn’t a bad one and they perform it well. Alas, it’s the only W song in the concert, but Aibon and Nono do return in other numbers.

The 2005 shuffle units each do their singles of the year. The one I like best is “Inshouha Renoir no You ni” by Elegies (Ai-chan, Reina, Ayumi Shibata and Mai Satoda), a rousing dance number, and the four of them really pull it off, looking great in their green dresses and white boots. In the “elder” shuffle unit, Puripuri Pink, Kei Yasuda has dark hair, the first time I’ve seen her in what may be her natural hair color. The dark hair looks really pretty on her and it’s the best-looking I’ve ever seen her.

Aya Matsuura does a great solo of “Sougen no Hito,” one of my favorite songs of hers. However, in the “Making of” footage, the camera takes us backstage during Aya’s performance and shows us Yuko and Atsuko making fun of it, mouthing the song and imitating Aya’s gestures with such exaggeration that Yuko falls forward to the floor. Maybe not so nice, but funny.

“Love Machine” is performed by everyone from 1st to 4th Gen present except for Mari, who’s restricted to doing MC duty, and Yossi, who was busy backstage getting prepared for the MM set, which came next. (Yossi was, by this point, the only person from 1st to 4th Gen who was still in Morning Musume.) This meant eight girls performing “Love Machine,” the same number as on the original recording. Five of the original performers were there: Yuko, Kaori, Nacchi, Kei, and Maki, joined by three from 4th Gen: Rika, Aibon, and Nono. Nono does Mari’s lines.

MM does a great four-song set. Not necessarily my favorite MM songs (“Iroppoi Jetttai,” “Manatsu no Kousen,” “Happy Summer Wedding,” and “Osaka Koi no Uta”), but the girls are all great and their red “Iroppoi Jettai” costumes have been modified from the ones in the video, with their arms bare, the skirts shorter and black boots instead of red heels. They wear these costumes in all four songs. This was Koharu’s first actual performance in a concert.

After the MM set, the final four songs are done by large ensembles with everyone coming together for the final two numbers, “Go Girl~Ko no Victory” and the big finale, “All for One and One for All.” For this final set, they all come out in new pop art outfits, red-and-white vinyl with white boots, sleeveless tops, shorts on some, skirts on the others.

The costumes throughout were some of the best I’ve ever seen in an H!P concert. In addition to the ones I’ve cited, Maki had a very pretty costume in her solo set – white satin jacket studded with rhinestones, short skirt of similar material but in vertical sections like a Roman soldier’s uniform skirt, plus over-the-knee white boots. (Lots of white boots in this concert.)

Berryz and C-ute acted as backup dancers in a lot of numbers, doing a lot of heavy lifting in the show, with BK doing especially well. For Maki’s solo, “Daite Yo! Please Go On,” she was backed up by four of the taller girls from H!P Kids—Miyabi, Erika, Maimi and the now-gone Megumi Murakami. (And I must say that Megumi is one of the real revelations of this concert--high level of energy and some real force as a dancer. C-ute suffers without her.) I couldn’t initially tell who any of the four were until I paused the DVD and searched frame by frame when they were on camera. Why? Because the camerawork was all over the place with lots of zooms, handheld shots, and quick cuts while the girls were dancing pretty wildly too, with hair flying in all directions. Why, oh why, during fast songs, do the cameramen and switcher have to be frenetic too? If the song is fast, pull the camera back, keep it stationary and let the GIRLS move, not the camera. It’s stupid and frustrating, the sign of a director with no understanding of how these things will look on the home screen.

“Hello Pro Party! 2006: Maki Goto ~Captain Kouen~”
One of the great things about Hello! Project is the way they keep their acts consistently interesting by juggling the girls around in new mini-groups and trying out different combinations of talent, most notably in the Shuffle Units we saw from 2000-2005. This is why I love the two Hello Pro Party Concerts. They put a top solo star with some of the other girls and just let them loose in high-energy concerts that bring out the best in each of the performers. I’ve already covered the Hello Pro Party from 2005 with Aya Matsuura, W and Melon Kinenbi (see April 11, 2008) and now I’ve caught up to Maki Goto’s Hello Pro Party from 2006 where she’s teamed with Nono and V-u-den (Rika, Erika Miyoshi and Yui Okada).

This one’s as exhilarating in its own way as the one with Aya. There’s some marvelous chemistry at work, with Rika and Nono setting the pace for the others and keeping the show going at a fast pace when they’re on stage. Rika and Nono are as good as I’ve ever seen them. Rika displays a fierce performing style that’s way more intense than anything I saw when she was in MM. Erika and Yui are, quite frankly, the best I’ve seen them – ever! Maki was better in her 2007 solo concert, “How to Use Sexy,” but she’s still well above average here, especially when she’s with the others. If anything, her solo numbers slow the show down. She’s a little more restrained than the others, not quite as free to break out as Nono and Rika are, not quite submitting to their energy the way Aya adapted so well to W and MK in the 2005 Hello Pro Party.

Also, the specific Maki songs chosen for this program, whether sung solo by Maki or in trios or quintets with the others, include all of my least favorite Maki songs and few of the many I do like. Furthermore, Maki briefly attempts that awkward writhing routine she broke out with in “Some Boys Touch.” She does it here on “Ekizo na Disco,” when she takes the mike stand and starts treating it as a stripper pole. She doesn’t seem comfortable doing it and it’s a jarring contrast with the rest of the show. In her 2007 concert, she went on to perfect “grown-up sexy without being vulgar,” as I put it in my 12/31/07 entry.

Fortunately there are enough great other numbers to compensate, especially the ones where they all perform together, including a few songs I’d never beard before, like “Rai Rai! ‘Shinfuu’” and “Kacchoii ze! Japan.” Plus something called “Koiing,” done by Maki, Rika and Nono, and it’s quite spectacular. They all join in for a beautiful rendition of the Morning Musume perennial, “I Wish.” One of my favorites, “Ai no Sono ~ Touch My Heart!” from Otome Gumi is performed by Nono and Rika, two of the original performers, with Erika and Yui as back-up. V-u-den does two numbers I’d never heard before and is joined by Nono for “Enryo wa Nashi Yo!,” a high energy dance number. As she did in the 2005 Hello Pro Party, Nono does an Aya song—this time, “Dokki Doki! Love Mail”—and, again, she out Aya’s Aya. Same deal here—she’s performing for herself and having the time of her life, and not playing to the crowd or to her image.

The costumes are great and the girls all look great. I lost count of the costume changes, but I’m guessing there have been entire Morning Musume concerts with fewer costume changes. The credits at the end list two “costume makers,” but no designers. There are three stylists listed and six choreographers.

If I have any problem with this one it’s my usual complaint—the camerawork and switching. The camera’s either too close or too far away, an odd situation for a small-scale concert held in a small venue. I mean, this isn’t the Yokohama Arena, it’s the Ichikawa Town Culture Center. And with five girls you’d think it would be easy to get them all in frame from head to toe and keep them there. But no, the director cuts all over the place and misses cues and dance moves and frustrates the hell out of me. In one of the big ensemble numbers, “Daite Yo! Please Go On,” each of the girls does something acrobatic—Nono does a cartwheel, Rika does a split and Erika does a headstand—yet the director keeps up the rapid cutting to different angles so we don’t see either of these actions in one unbroken full-frame medium shot. This kind of technical misdirection does the girls a great disservice and undercuts all their hard work.

Just curious, but why weren’t there more small-scale concerts like this?

Japan in Brooklyn Day: Murakami, Utagawa, and Sakura Matsuuri
Yesterday was a big Japan-themed day. First I went to the Brooklyn Museum for the Takashi Murakami exhibit. (I was with my daughter and her boyfriend and one of his friends.) I believe this is the first major museum show in New York devoted to Murakami and it takes up nearly two whole floors of the Museum. Murakami’s work is heavily influenced by anime and manga. Or so they say. Sure, his art is filled with cute little cartoon characters and cartoon-like lines and colors, but I would argue that any above-average manga artist or anime creator (animator, designer, director, etc.) boasts a talent and artistic vision far superior to that of Murakami. Murakami’s genius is in making money and forming partnerships with brand names like Louis Vuitton or other pop personalities like Kanye West. Murakami doesn’t even DO most of his art; he just designs it and has teams of craftsmen turn it out. He’s more a brand name than an artist, if you ask me. They even had a shop set up right in the middle of the exhibit space to sell the Louis Vuitton bags and other merchandise.

They also had a room to show three animated pieces from Murakami's studio. There was a Kanye West music video (“Good Morning”) and two shorts (ten and eleven minutes each) about the adventures of the Murakami cartoon characters, Kaikai and Kiki. The animated pieces were more interesting to me because they at least had some kind of storyline, silly though it may have been, and were at least tenuously ABOUT something, although I don’t know if I could have handled anything longer. (The second one had a giant monster who attacks a high-tech futuristic city and lays gaseous farts that engulf Kaikai and Kiki--that's the level of humor in the piece.)

The one piece of artwork in the whole show that I found noteworthy was called “My Lonesome Cowboy” and was a life-sized factory-made sculpture of a naked young man with long blond hair holding his erect penis and shooting out a thick stream of semen that formed a lasso-like rope above him (hence the cowboy title, which also references the 1968 gay-themed western, “Lonesome Cowboys,” directed by one of Murakami’s role models, Andy Warhol). I laughed because it was positioned quite prominently in the middle of an exhibit that draws thousands of families and young people drawn in by the “kawaii” aspects of Murakami’s style. And it was opposite a similarly-styled sculpture of a buxom young woman jumping rope with a stream of milk emitted by her enormous breasts. It all seemed wildly inappropriate—which made it funny and subversive and made it stand out from the stultifying sameness of the rest of the exhibit. (And why were there so many parents with babies and strollers at this thing?--the museum even devotes a space at the exhibit entrance for parents to park their strollers!)

The real Japanese exhibit to see in the Brooklyn Museum is the one on the first floor devoted to the Utagawa line of color woodblock prints from a hundred-year period from the late 18th century to the late 19th century. Hiroshige and Yoshitoshi are two of the famous artists represented. These have much more in common with the anime and manga I know than anything by Murakami. You can see the sense of detail, the ability to depict and convey intense action, the boldness of the graphic design and the attention to storytelling. There was one showing a mythical character called Golden Boy, depicted nude with his arms around a giant carp. Well, just two nights earlier, I’d re-watched the first episode of “Dragon Ball,” in which Goku, also nude, wrestles with and subdues a giant fish. What also fascinated me among the woodblock prints was the abundance of portraits of actors popular in the theater of the era, usually depicted in the roles that made them famous. A whole show biz industry was flourishing in Edo (Tokyo) long before the mass media as we know them. (These portraits were the precursors of Hello! Project photobooks.)

Afterwards, my daughter and I went to the Cherry Blossom Festival (Sakura Matsuuri) in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, adjacent to the Brooklyn Museum. They have a whole meadow filled with cherry blossom trees and they set up a tent and a stage in the middle of it for various acts and food vendors and such. Big crowds were there including lots of anime cosplayers (“Narutards” as my daughter referred to the Naruto cosplayers) amidst all the many women, both Japanese and non-Japanese, in kimonos. It was the first time I’d seen so many cosplayers outside of an Anime festival or Comic Con. One of the musical acts promised “J-pop ballads” in the program, so I stuck around to see if that were true. No, it was just a band called Love, etc., with a Japanese lead singer, doing their own songs, with more of a rock and jazz beat than a J-pop sound. No “Sakura Mankai” was forthcoming.

So when I got home, I popped in the DVD containing the “Sakura Mankai” video and watched that, the perfect closer to the day.

“Joshi Kashimashi Monogatari” – What the big screen TV was made for...
I found a copy last week of the DVD containing the “Joshi Kashimashi Monogatari” video, complete with “Panic Train” version and “Making of” segment. I put it in the DVD player to watch on my big screen (32-inch) TV set on Sunday night, when, at that moment, a western came on the Western Channel that I’ve wanted to see for years. It’s called “Four Faces West” and it turned out to be partly about a historical figure whom I’ve long been interested in, Pat Garrett, the lawman who killed Billy the Kid. After a few minutes of it, however, the pull of “Joshi Kashimashi” was too strong and I switched to the DVD. This is what the big screen set is for--MM videos. It looked beautiful—the colors, the girls’ pretty features in closeup, their gleaming makeup and hairstyles. And the spotless, clean subway car--something I've never seen in New York!

This was the first time I’ve seen the “Panic Train” version, which is actually a Dance Shot version showing the girls doing the entire song in dance mode in those shiny, brightly colored vinyl tops and accessories—the “sexy” version, the parts we see in the video when they sing, “WowWowWow Seishun / Iro Iro Aru Saaaaa…” I assumed the whole thing was done in one take, but midway through, just before Yossi brings up Mako-chan for her verse, there is an obvious jump cut, indicating to me that the whole thing took two takes. Still, it’s a pretty hard thing to do continuously in one take anyway, given all the dance moves, the constant shifting of the girls into place, and numerous solo lines of dialogue that need to be lip-sync’d. A highlight of this version is the longer glimpse we get of Aibon and Nono in one dance bit they do together.

Which brings us to the “Making of” portion. The great thing about this one, too, is more Aibon and Nono. At one point they leave the train car for a bit of time away from the others, walking on the train rails, each balancing on an opposite rail while holding hands and then just hanging out in their spring school uniforms. I cherish every little bit I can find of these two together because I’m rapidly running out of new unseen material with them.

The video was shot in spring or summer. It’s quite warm where they are—the first “Making of” segment from Japan I’ve seen where the girls aren’t freezing.

The non-dance shots of the girls sitting in their school uniforms and everyday clothes and getting up to sing the verses about each other were all done on a moving train during the daytime. In contrast, the Panic Train shots were all done in a stationary car at night with crew members making patterns of light outside the windows to foster the illusion of a train moving.

On an interesting side note: for years I’ve been wanting to get a DVD copy of the Hello! Project 2004 Winter Concert, “C’mon Let’s Dance,” the one I picked up on VHS one fateful night almost three years ago, my very first Hello! Project purchase and the one that got me hooked on this stuff. Asahiya Books has had a DVD copy on its shelves for years, ever since I first began looking for H!P stuff there, but it cost $46.50, a lot more than I wanted to pay for a concert I already had, and one which I had gotten virtually for free, given that it was purchased as a fifth tape as part of a “Buy 4-get-one-free” deal at another Japanese video store. So, every time I’ve been in Asahiya Books since, I’ve seen that DVD on the shelf and at some point figured I’d eventually be getting it. Well, I was in Asahiya Books last Friday night, looking for (and finding) the new MM Single V, “Resonant Blue,” and—lo and behold!—there was a new shelf of DVDs at sale prices. And there it was, THE concert, marked down to $9.99. So now I have it. Everything's come full circle, hasn't it?

Petit Best 6 – more great H!P videos, including Aya with a boyfriend!
In my quest to find undiscovered gems among Hello! Project’s vast treasure trove of yet unseen (by me) PVs, I ordered Petit (Pucchi) Best 6, containing PVs from 2005, including one from W that I’d never seen, as well as the “Dance Shot Ver.” of “All for One & One for All.” The DVD starts with a song from Def.Diva, whom I’d never seen or heard before. How could I not have seen a video or performance by a group containing four of my H!P favorites, Nacchi, Maki, Rika and Aya??? I first heard this song, “Sukisugite Baka Mitai,” performed by Maki on her Premium Best 1 album, so I assumed it was a Maki song they were covering. No, I learned, it originated with this Def.Diva recording. I’ve never seen Def.Diva in performance and the short staged clips of them dancing and singing in the video are quite tantalizing. However, Wiki.theppn doesn’t list any concert appearances by them. (It also says they performed the song on “Hello Morning” on Oct. 16, 2005, one of the few shows from that fall that I don’t have.)

There are nice solo videos by Nacchi and Maki, just simple presentations of them seen singing in lots of beautiful closeups. Just the way I like my solo videos.

But the big revelation is the fifth video on the disc, “Ki ga Tsukeba Anata,” sung by Aya Matsuura, and one I’d never heard before. This one has a bit of a story, not a common practice in H!P videos, but also, more importantly, it gives Aya not one, but two boyfriends! This is a first for me. Of the dozens of H!P videos I’ve seen, not one has paired any of the girls with a guy. Sure, maybe they sing about a love affair or a missed phone call or something, but you never actually SEE a guy. Here you do. We see one young classmate of Aya’s, who displays a puppy-love kind of affection and is treated by her as an object of fun, and then there’s a taller, handsomer, slightly older guy who actually embraces Aya with his arms around her from behind in one shot and tries to kiss her in another. This is amazing! After years of complaining about the girls getting saddled with moronic comedian companions on “Hello Morning” and the occasional older male professional guest, I finally see Aya paired with relatively handsome guys roughly her own age. Granted, the explanation for it is more mundane than I thought. I asked about this on MM-BBS and learned it was all because of a TV commercial Aya did for bottled iced tea and the footage with the guys was done for the commercial, not the video. Oh, well.

W has a video on this disc, “Miss Love Tantei,” which is cute and fun, although not quite in the same league as “Robokiss” or “Aa Ii Na!” The V-u-den video is “Ajisai Ai Ai Monogatari,” the song of theirs that I like the best. Berryz does a very fast, upbeat rendition of “21ji Made no Cinderella,” which is followed by Melon Kinenbi at their most voluptuous doing “Nikutai wa Shoujiki na Eros,” easily the sexiest video I’ve seen come out of H!P.

After some other odds and ends, the three shuffle units from 2005 are represented by the Dance Shot Versions of their videos. This was the weakest (and last) year for shuffle units. The first one is not a bad song at all, but pairing Miki with the two kids (Megumi and Miyabi) was not the best way to present it, and, in the third, draping Yuko, Kaori, Kei and Atsuko in those frilly pink cocktail dresses didn’t do them any favors either. That said, the dancing in the Elegies video, performed by Ai-chan, Reina, Ayumi Shibata and Mai Satoda in nice green dresses, was energetic and fun to watch. Ai-chan and Ayumi really stand out in this one.

The concert clip of MM doing “Chokkan ~Toki to Shite Koi wa~” was labeled a “LIVE Ver.” although it sounded lip-sync’d to me. Nonetheless, it’s quite enjoyable as a dance number even if I already have the concert it’s from.

Finally, there’s the Dance Shot Version of “All for One & One for All,” the video I first raved about on Petit (Pucchi) Best 5. In this one I wanted to see the mass dancing by all the girls assembled uninterrupted by the closeups. I was only partly satisfied. The big problem here is the tendency to cut away from the important moves, the procession of each successive generation to the camera. The emotional impact of seeing 4th Gen come running up and through the preceding Gens is undercut by a cut to a high-angle shot from stage right, so we don’t see the full movement of them coming forward to us. And quite frequently, as some exciting piece of choreography occurs on one side of the studio, the camera cuts to another, less interesting group. Okay, so there are too many performers (46) assembled in one place for the cameras to capture all the choreography adequately, but it bothers me that some of the best action is missed. It’s still an incredibly exhilarating video, though, and deserves to be watched alongside the other version.

I hit the jackpot! More H!P DVDs than you can shake a stick at...
On Tuesday evening, after work, I stopped at one of the local stores here where I look for used J-pop CDs and DVDs. I try to keep such visits to a minimum because I keep getting tempted by the Anime shelves, both DVDs and soundtrack CDs, and I keep telling myself to limit purchases only to H!P and MM. Well, there on one shelf were two DVD singles containing MM music videos, “My Dear Boy” and I couldn’t tell what the other one was. Even though I have the complete music video collection, I like to pick up the video singles because they tend to have another version of the video and a cute “Making of” segment. Well, it gets better. I went to the concert DVD shelf and there was a whole stack of MM and H!P concert DVDs. When I weeded out the ones I have already, I found myself with a stack of six: the Otome Gumi concert, the Sakura Gumi one, one from Maki, one from Aya, one from Melon Kinenbi (the first ever MK concert I’ve acquired) and…now get this. Remember three weeks ago when I reported that I’d found in my collection an episode of “Hello Morning” from March 2, 2003 which had over an hour of concert clips from the “Hello! Project 2003 Winter ~Tanoshinjattemasu!~” concert? Well, the sixth DVD I found in the store was indeed that concert. And I had been planning to order it so I could have a good quality copy of it. And here it was for $10, about a quarter of what it would cost from CDJapan.

I headed home with my treasure fully expecting to find a package from CDJapan that I’d ordered a week earlier that would have three concerts plus a Petit Best PV collection. Well, there was a slip in the mailbox telling me I’d have to go to the post office to pick it up since it was too big to fit in the mailbox. (Note to self: don’t get greedy—never order more than three items at once.) So I would have to wait about 12 hours. However, in checking out my purchases of the evening, I learned that the mystery PV single was none other than “Joshi Kashimashi Monogatari”! So now I had the “Panic Train” or Dance Shot version in addition to the main PV. Plus a wonderful “Making of” segment. Does it get better than this? Hardly ever.

The next morning I rushed to the post office (three subway stops away) as soon as it opened, picked up the package and came back home to deposit it here safely before getting ready to go to work. In addition to the Petit Best 6 disc, I got a 2005 H!P concert at which W performs, a 2006 Aya concert, and the Hello Pro Party concert from 2006 with Maki, Nono and Viyuuden.

Because of the ethical framework my consciousness is bound by, I figured I had to do something good for somebody, make some kind of sacrifice in order to be worthy of the good fortune that left me with eight additional MM/H!P DVDs in addition to the four I ordered. So on Wednesday night, instead of rushing back home after work to start enjoying the fruits of my labor, I felt compelled to respond to an invite from a neighborhood friend, a guy who works in the movie industry, to go see a low-budget psychological horror movie he’d executive-produced in Canada last year. I’d missed earlier screenings and this one, for last night, was after work in Manhattan, so I couldn’t say it was inconvenient. I’d checked the website set up for the film and had not found the description or pictures very promising, so I was taking a chance here. To help sweeten the deal, I headed down to Chinatown in the hour before the screening (which was in the East Village, not too far from Chinatown), and went to my favorite DVD store where I picked up a copy of Aya Matsuura’s most recent concert DVD, for about half what I would have paid for it at CDJapan. So that’s three sets of acquisitions in a row.

Anyway, I headed up to the screening, held in some aging film workshop space, and it turned out to be on a DVD and shown on an old projection system. (I’m not going to identify the film because I don’t want this to turn up on a Google search.) The image was very dark and murky and so drained of color as to be almost black-and-white. It was like watching TV underwater. I figured the projection system was at fault. It didn’t help that every scene with actors was shot as a long take, so the camera would capture the whole living room in long shot and the actors would play out the scene without any cuts or closeups. That kind of strategy gets boring real fast. And the movie was all talk for over an hour of its 90-minute running time. To make matters worse, the producer friend sat behind me and five minutes into the film, he leaned over and tapped me on the shoulder and asked, “What do you think of it so far?” Five minutes! Nothing had happened yet!! So all I could do was shrug as theatrically as possible. As many times as I've sat through films or videos in the creator's presence, no one has ever asked me what I thought DURING it, let alone right at the beginning. It went downhill from there.

[Plot description not necessary—it's just not worth it.] So when it was over, and the producer friend pressed me for reaction, I pointed out the inadequate projection and what it did to the image. He insisted that they wanted it dark and that they wanted it drained of color. Oh. So that was all intentional. This shot-on-video film made THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT look like THE TEN COMMANDMENTS! I’m sorry, but I'm old school, I like to SEE the image in order to be able to appreciate it. And if you're gonna make it look black-and-white, then SHOOT IT in black-and-white, dammit!

So I did my penance and now I get to watch all this new Hello! Project material. More in the future!

New York Comic Con: T.M. Revolution, Stan Lee, and a Chilean superhero movie…
Well, I took a break from obsessing over Aibon and W and all and I went to the New York Comic Con on Friday and Saturday. In J-rock news, T.M. Revolution was there and even had a concert scheduled for 9:00 PM last night. I didn’t go to the concert, but I went to his appearance earlier in the day, where they ran montages of his videos and concert appearances and he came out and took a few questions from the audience. Since this is the closest thing to J-pop we were gonna see at this event, I figured I’d better go, just to gauge American fan reaction to a Japanese music act. The packed house seemed to be divided up between American fans, mostly female and mostly teenage, and Japanese fans, mostly female, many older than teenagers. The American girls did that high-pitched screaming routine they’ve learned from “Total Request Live” and shows of that ilk every time they saw a clip in the montage that they recognized. The Japanese fans were more restrained. T.M.R. was polite and gracious and spoke a little bit in English but mostly in Japanese. It was a little disconcerting when the moderator didn’t bother to repeat the questions so we could hear them (it was a big room and the questioners weren’t miked). So all we got were his translations of the answers. The questioners were all non-Japanese, although a couple of them insisted on asking their questions in Japanese. Just to show off. (You know the type.) It also annoyed me that when they finished the video montages they turned the house lights back on only part way, so the room was semi-dark for half the presentation—for no discernible reason.

What struck me about the concert clips was that his audience at these concerts is nearly all female and they do this wave thing where they’re all moving their hands in unison. (Somehow I prefer the less zombielike random waving of glow sticks by Wotas that we see at the MM concerts.) I had never quite seen anything like this before. Probably because I tend not to view concerts by male performers. Also, his flamboyant costumes and high-tech stagecraft remind me of Ayumi Hamasaki, getting me to think that maybe he’s the male equivalent of Ayu. However, his songs didn’t strike me as nearly as good as hers. The only songs of his I was previously familiar with were the ones he’s done for anime series like “Rurouni Kenshin,” “Gundam Seed” and “Gundam Seed Destiny.”

The other big event yesterday was an appearance by the legendary Stan Lee, the guiding genius behind the Silver Age of Marvel Comics. He’s been in the comics business for almost 70 years, but is still pretty spry and lighthearted for someone in his 80s. I grew up reading Marvel Comics (Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, Daredevil, X-Men, The Hulk, Iron Man, the Avengers, Thor, Dr. Strange, Captain America, etc.), particularly in the era when Stan Lee was doing the bulk of the writing of them. So, he’s always been something of a personal hero to me. However, his contentious relationship with Jack Kirby, the genius artist behind so many great Marvel titles, in the last years of Kirby’s life has somewhat soured me on Lee, given his treatment of Kirby while reaping all the rewards and benefits of the Marvel resurgence. Lee is quite full of himself and loves all the attention and loves to crack jokes, even about his own tendency to hire great writers and artists and then take all the credit, although he did say, “Anytime the creators can get more money and recognition is a wonderful thing.” Although he wasn’t saying that when Kirby was forced to sue him. When asked about the popularity of manga, he responded, “Manga is a really strange form of comics. You either like it or you hate it, I haven’t made up my mind which.” Which indicates to me that he clearly doesn’t understand that for kids coming of age in the 1990s and 2000s, manga (and anime) are the counterparts of the Marvel Comics I read in the 1960s and 70s.

On my way to see some anime after the T.M.R. appearance, I ran into a friend who was pushing a martial arts film from Chile that was about to start screening, so I went in, as a favor, and watched the film, which was introduced by its star, Marko Zazor. It was good. It’s called MIRAGEMAN and it’s about a bouncer at a nightclub in Santiago, Chile, who’s a martial artist whose parents were killed by criminals and whose little brother is in a mental hospital suffering from the effects of the attack. The bouncer, Maco, foils a late-night burglary by beating up the burglars with his martial arts skills and taking the mask from one of them so none of the tied-up victims or the other burglars will see his face. When one of the victims, a TV news reporter (played by the beautiful Maria Elena Swett, a huge TV star in Chile), does a story on her mysterious masked rescuer, he decides to become a superhero/crime-fighter in the Batman/Santo mode. His first attempt at a costume is met with ridicule, so he uses one of his brother’s delirious superhero drawings to come up with a new costume. When an e-mail calling for help turns out to be a challenge from a street gang, he has his first large-scale fight and comes out of it a new hero.

It’s an interesting movie, done in a low-budget, indie-realistic style, but with plenty of action scenes. It recognizes the absurdity of the basic situation, so there’s a lot of intentional humor, yet it takes the character quite seriously and plays the whole thing straight, without any tongue in cheek or winking at the audience. Any hint of self-parody would have ruined it. It reminded me of both Martin Scorsese’s TAXI DRIVER (1976) and M. Night Shyamalan’s UNBREAKABLE (2000). It’s coming out in theaters later this year and I highly recommend it. Both the star, Marko Zazor, and the director, Ernesto Diaz Espinoza, were in attendance and took questions afterward. The director acknowledged the influence of TAXI DRIVER, as well as that of the 1970s Spiderman TV show, the French New Wave (in the way it’s shot in the streets of Santiago), and the Mexican movies starring the wrestler Santo as a masked crimefighting superhero.

"Hello Pro Party!" with Aya, W and Melon K – does it get better than this?
So I ordered and got “Hello Pro Party! 2005 ~Matsuura Aya Captain Kouen~” and watched it—twice, so far. What a great show! Easily one of the best Hello! Project concerts I’ve yet seen. Only seven performers are featured, including three of my all-time favorites in the J-pop universe—Aya, Nono and Aibon. Joining them is Melon Kinenbi, a group also high on my list. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of them better than they are here.

This is the W concert performance I’ve been looking for. As readers may remember from my March 8 entry, I was disappointed in the two actual official W concerts I’d watched, the ones where they performed with Berryz. In response, I’d gotten a recommendation for this concert, which I'd never heard of before, from Kappa and then an endorsement of it from Gypsychilde. Granted, W only does two songs by themselves as W. But both Aibon and Nono also each do a solo number and they both perform with the other women in different configurations, either separately or together. So we get to see a lot of Aibon and Nono. All told, one or both of them are in 17 numbers here. And they’re around older women, not the kids from Berryz. So they can act older--always a good thing in my book.

W’s performance of “Dekoboko Seventeen” here is easily one of the best numbers I’ve ever seen them do on stage. The other song they do by themselves is “Ai no Imi wo Oshiete!” which I’ve seen them do on “Hello Morning” and is pretty good, too. They perform “Robokiss” with Aya and Nono spanks Aya a lot in this one (again, always a good thing…) Aibon does a solo of Miki Fujimoto’s “Boogie Train” and I must say I think the song is better suited to Aibon. Nono does a solo of Aya’s “Ne~e?” and I have to say she out-Ayas Aya. When Aya does her perky schtick and broad gestures playing to the crowd, it’s because she’s…playing to the crowd! She’s giving them what they want (and nothing wrong with that, either). When Nono does it, she’s doing it for Nono. She’s having fun with it for HERSELF! And WE in turn have fun. (Gypsychilde linked to the videos of these Aibon/Nono solos in her response to my blog entry of February 23.)

The real revelation here is Melon Kinenbi, the first time I’ve seen them do so many numbers in one show. They’re a real sexy, high-energy four-girl group just like another J-pop favorite of mine, Max. I’ve always liked Ayumi and Masae a great deal, mainly from seeing them in shuffle units, so I enjoyed every precious minute of seeing them give it their all here. But I also got to appreciate the other two, Hitomi and Megumi, a lot more. MK does two numbers by themselves and two numbers with Aya, including their most blatantly sexy number, “Nikutai wa Shoujiki na Eros.” Ayumi and Masae perform with Aibon in one number, an exciting and catchy piece called “Anata Nashi de wa Ikite Yukenai,” and Hitomi and Megumi perform with Nono and Aya in another, a cover of the old MM song, “Daite Hold on Me!”

All seven girls perform a total of seven numbers together, including a Country Musume song, “Honey Pie,” two Morning Musume songs, “The Peace” and “Love Machine,” three Aya songs, including a rousing opener of “Yeah! Meccha Holiday,” and a finale of the H!P 2004 anthem, “All for One & One for All.” Their rendition of “Love Machine” is not only complete, but it has new lines for each of the seven girls devised for this performance. It’s also the first time I’ve seen it performed by someone other than Morning Musume.

All seven really enjoyed performing around each other and seemed to fuel each other’s energy. This is the first time I’ve seen so much of Aya outside one of her own solo concerts. And she really seems to enjoy working with the others. Granted, she gets most of the attention and the crowd chants her name most of the time, but she clearly doesn’t mind being upstaged by the antics of Nono and Aibon. And it IS her birthday, after all.

One big problem I had with this concert was one I have quite often with these things: the technical work. Even with only seven performers, the cameramen and the switcher couldn’t keep them in medium shot. The closeups are way too close and the long shots way too long in this relatively small arena. Every so often, they get a correct angle that lets us see all the relevant performers doing a bit of clever choreography, prompting me to yell at the screen, “That’s it! Keep it there, keep it!” And of course they cut to a closeup. Worse, the switcher misses numerous cues, so the camera’s focused on one non-singing performer, while we hear the line coming from another. I kept hearing Nono, but seeing someone like Megumi, who wasn’t singing. Not good. When I hear Nono doing a solo line, dammit, I want to SEE her!

Anyway, it was great to finally get a concert DVD that gives me as much Aibon and Nono as I want. And with Aya and Melon K as very welcome bonuses, I couldn’t go wrong.

Meanwhile, the Aibon thread over on MM-BBS revived the whole discussion of Aibon’s behavior and her exile and termination and possible comeback. I want to say something about all that but I’ll save it for a future entry.

Compiling “The Best of Hello Morning”...
In 2006, I made compilation videotapes of favorite moments from the “Hello Morning” episodes I have on tape and disc, including songs, skits, contests, travel bits, etc. The first tape is really lopsided and includes a little of everything—67 clips!--anything I felt worthy of pulling, including backstage shots of the girls rehearsing “Ribon no Kishi,” TV spots for “Naruto” and “Pokemon,” and commercials featuring Hollywood celebrities who don’t do commercials in the U.S. (e.g. Tommy Lee Jones, Kiefer Sutherland, Meg Ryan). The second tape I made has some good song performances mixed with extended segments I like (the Koreatown segment, the seafood market in Hokkaido, Koharu being welcomed into MM, etc.). So, when I watch the first one I realize I have to sit through all sorts of stuff I’m not that interested in seeing again, e.g. the commercials, and when I watch the second one, I realize that I’d rather have songs all together on one tape and games and travel bits all together on another one. Granted, these tapes are still immensely enjoyable, but I wanted to make them even better.

So, the last couple of weekends I spent some time going through more of the 147 eps. I have of “Hello Morning” to pull out moments that I wanted to see again and transfer to tape (a more convenient format for me than DVD or computer files). This time I went through my stash of 2003 eps. burned to CD-R for me last year by a kind member of MM-BBS, all without commercials, many of which I still haven't viewed.

One of the great discoveries I made was the March 2, 2003 episode, which was longer than an hour and offered 19 clips from the “Hello! Project 2003 Winter ~Tanoshinjattemasu!~” concert, including a six-song MM finale. It’s even got “Shall We Love,” performed by Gomattou (Maki, Miki, and Aya), the first time I’ve gotten to see anything by this trio outside of YouTube. I got to see Tanpopo comprised of Risa, Rika, Asami Konno and Ayumi Shibata, the first time I’ve ever been aware of that grouping, and Pucchi Moni comprised of Yossi, Mako-chan, and Ayaka Kimura, again, a totally new configuration to me. These 19 clips constituted about half of the 37 I eventually compiled for the song tape.

Other great discoveries include tons of in-studio performances by Minimoni, Melon Kinenbi, Maki, and Aya M; the 2003 Shuffle Units doing their hit singles, including “Get Up! Rapper”; MM doing “Shadondama,” “Hyokkori Hyoutanjima,” and “Go Girl~Victory”; and Sakura Gumi and Otome Gumi doing their 2003 hits, “Hare Ame Nochi Suki” and “Ai no Sono ~ Touch My Heart!” Good stuff.

I often prefer in-studio performances to the PV’s and concert performances. Videos are often interrupted by extensive closeups of the girls or staged group shots that detract from the dancing, while concert performances are interrupted by long distance shots from the very end of an immense arena or shots from the audience with the Wotas jumping up and down in front of the camera. Or way too many closeups. In the TV studio, the camera shows some restraint and presents the girls doing their moves in a series of medium and medium long shots. There are closeups, but not too many.

For the tape of games, contests, skits and trips, I found more of the song contests I like, including one from Nov. 2, 2003, where Yossi sings a Japanese version of a childhood song I remember called “My Grandfather’s Clock” (“It stopped short/never to go again/when the old man died”). Another song contest, from June 1, 2003, has the girls divided into teams of four who then have to come up with songs that mention a particular thing in the lyrics (e.g. flowers, numbers) and sing them together until the lyric qualifies and the next team goes. It's great to see them think on their feet and come up with songs, including many they've never performed before. I also pulled out that competition I like from June 29, 2003, where each of the 2003 shuffle units competes in tests of skill that definitively showed me just how competitive Aya and Rika were and why they were so well cast for the action roles in YO YO GIRL COP. When I’d exhausted possibilities from the 2003 episodes, I went back to 2006 and pulled out bits with Nono, Miki and animals, including their encounter with friendly dolphins at a marine park and feeding leopard cubs at a zoo. Can you say, "kawaii?" (The non-song segments I like best tend to involve food and animals.)

One of the things that strikes me about the older HM episodes is the way their best bits involved no outsiders. One of the girls serves as host (Yuko or Nacchi are the ones that come to mind) and then it’s all current or former members of MM. No annoying comedians, no magicians, no coaches, no stodgy old men. Just the girls being themselves around each other (and the offscreen crew, which provides the laughs we hear). They’re so much more unguarded and fun to watch in this format.

So, every time I want to just sit with the “Best of Hello Morning,” I now have five tapes to choose from.

More great H!P videos...
In my ongoing quest for previously unseen Hello! Project music videos that I don’t have in any existing collection and that I might enjoy, I wound up purchasing “Petit Best 5,” which contains 16 assorted PVs done in 2004. I bought it thinking I was getting the Otome Gumi video for “Ai no Sono ~ Touch My Heart” and the Sakura Gumi video for “Hare Ame Nochi Suki,” the two songs which happen to be the very first Morning Musume songs I ever heard, since they’re the first two numbers performed at the Hello! Project 2004 Winter “C’mon Let’s Dance!” Concert on the very first H!P tape I ever watched. Well, instead, this DVD contains the other PVs done by Otome Gumi and Sakura Gumi, “Yuujou~Kokoro no Busuniwa Naranee!” and “Sakura Mankai.” I’d seen “Sakura Mankai” before and desperately wanted it on DVD, figuring I’d have to order the PV single, so I was quite happy to make this discovery. And they’re two great videos. “Sakura Mankai” is just an absolutely beautiful work all around, from the gentle song to the design of the video and the cinematography of Nacchi, Ai-chan, Risa, Yossi, Mari, Aibon, Asami, and Eri in beautiful pink traditional costumes. The other one, “Yuujou~Kokoro no Busuniwa Naranee!,” is pretty awesome in its own right as it gives us Miki, Nono, Rika, Sayumi, Reina, Mako-Chan and Kaori in some dynamic black-and-white-patterned fashions and puts them in a runway-style setting. They get to be glamorous for a change and it looks good on them. And it’s an upbeat song, so they get to sing and dance at a fast pace. It’s fun.

The other great video on the DVD is the first one, “All for One & One for All!,” which features every girl then working as a Hello! Project performer. Now, when they’ve done this song at concerts with everyone gathered on stage at one time, it’s never been quite the spectacle I want it to be because the camera crews never give us the best angles to appreciate the entire assemblage and its different layers and the thrill of seeing a mass-choreographed number like this. The normal camera routine seems to be ten close-ups followed by an extreme long shot and then back to the close-ups. In the video, however, the girls are all in a studio, in a smaller, more manageable space than the usual arena and the cameras are set up to give us the optimum angles to appreciate the performers and the choreography, settling on medium and medium long shots when groups, such as Melon Kinenbi step up to deliver song lines. Granted, it’s a weak song, as H!P group numbers go, and is designed only to accommodate such a large number of performers, but it’s exciting to see them all together in a well-photographed, well-choreographed number. And I like the costumes, too.

The W PV of “Robokiss” is on this DVD—another reason I bought it--and its “tale” of a steady stream of arriving packages containing robot duplicates of W means we get multiple Aibons and multiple Nonos, always a plus in my book, even if it means guest star group Berryz Koubou gets short shrift here. (They were seen to better advantage in “Aa Ii Na!”) In one great shot, just to show how special effects have advanced in recent decades, Nono pushes herself out of the way! (A neat trick that Hayley Mills could never have done to her “twin” in Disney’s THE PARENT TRAP back in 1961.) Plus, it’s always great to see Aibon and Nono “act.” I just wish the song was half as good as “Samishii Nettaigyo” or “Aa Ii Na!”

So, now I’ve got to get “Petit Best 4,” which has the other Otome Gumi and Sakura Gumi videos, and “Petit Best 6,” which has the dance shot version of “One for All & All for One!” I also have to watch another new purchase, “Haropuro Party! 2005 Matsuura Aya Captain Koen,” with W and Melon Kinenbi joining Aya for songs and fun.

One amusing little side note: I pulled out my DVD of the Morning Musume “Love is Alive” Spring 2002 Concert to watch something for a future blog entry when I noticed a little post-it note I’d left inside the case. It reads, “Miki Fujimoto’s in this. Which one is she?” Ah, a quaint reminder of the noobie days and the joy of discovery that attended every new purchase. (Not that I should be so smug now--there were some performers in the "One for All" video that I still don't recognize.)

A journey into the past--my own and someone else’s...
A few entries ago, on Feb. 14, 2008, I recalled seeing the Japanese monster film, MOTHRA, at a friend’s house as a youth and I got to wondering if a google search of my friend’s name would turn up the page it was on. So I googled and didn’t get it, but I did get something else interesting. I found an essay on the Bronx County Historical Society website entitled, “To My Old Bronx Street with Love,” by Mary Ellen Clogston. It recounts memories of growing up in my old neighborhood from the period somewhat before my family moved in. And I found a remarkable paragraph in it that offers a snippet of remembered dialogue from the street. (I would link it, but the link doesn’t work anymore—luckily I printed it out and can copy it). Here’s the snippet:

"'Mr. Moore, my mama had twins yesterday, a boy and a girl. Your family is so nice to our family, mama and dad would be honored if you would choose a boy’s name.'
'Won’t he have a Chinese name?'
'No, you pick a nice American name.'
'Tell mom and dad we are honored, and Thomas would be a nice name.'
And so Tommy Chin was named. Another family must have had the honor of picking the baby girl’s name, which was Rose, always known on our block as Rosie."

And that’s the story, at least how the author remembered it, of how the friend I initially referenced got his name. And his twin sister was my public school classmate from second to sixth grade. (Tommy was left back in second grade and my younger sister skipped a grade so he was her classmate, not mine.) I doubt that either Tommy or Rose even know of this story and I’ve lost touch with them, although I’ve passed this on to someone who has passed it on to someone who may be able to pass it on to Tommy.

(Is there even a tenuous link to Morning Musume here? Yes. When I saw Natsumi Abe for the first time in a concert tape—her 2004 graduation concert--I was struck by her resemblance to Rose Chin.)

So I emailed the article, “To My Old Bronx Street with Love,” to my sister in California, the one who was Tommy’s classmate, because I knew she’d find it interesting, too. And in the message I thought to ask about a piece of history that I encountered in her town, San Luis Obispo, when I last visited there in 1998, ten years ago. And it’s related tangentially to the above story insofar as both deal with Chinese immigration to the U.S. When I was in San Luis Obispo, I visited the town’s historical society and found an exhibit devoted to the Ah Louis Store, a town institution that was founded in 1874 by a Chinese immigrant and merchant who was known as Ah Louis and who established the store to serve as a way station for other Chinese immigrants, a means of keeping in touch with China, sending packages and money back home, or receiving packages from home, and offering Chinese goods that immigrants couldn’t easily get elsewhere in California.

During my visit, the Ah Louis Store was still functioning, some 124 years after its founding, although it was now devoted to souvenirs and curios, and was still run by one of Ah Louis’s descendants. I went to the store and met the then-current owner, Howard Louis, and his lovely wife, Yvonne, and was amazed to learn that the two of them had once lived in the Bronx and they’d run a restaurant on Third Avenue near the old courthouse (which was recently the subject of a New York Times article). They’d even lived on the same street I was living on at the time (and still live on).

More amazing, however, was the exact relationship of Howard Louis to Ah Louis. When I told this story to friends back home, I invariably asked, "How many generations were there between the original Ah Louis, who founded the store in 1874, and the current owner of the shop?" I got all kinds of answers--4? 5? 6? Well, the answer was...one. Howard Louis was the youngest son of the original Ah Louis! At the time of my visit, he was about 90 years old. (For the record, I bought a nine-inch statue of Bruce Lee when I visited the store.)

In my e-mail I asked my sister about the current state of the store, as of 2008, and she said it had passed into new hands who’d turned it into something "cutesy," although the original façade remained. She didn't know if Howard Louis was still alive or not.

So, a chance google search based on something in this blog reveals a bit of history intimately related to my own past. And telling someone else about it ties into a piece of history that I encountered on a trip ten years ago. One generation between Ah Louis and his store and the son I met 124 years later. It reminded me of something I’d once heard on a talk radio show in which the host recounted how an old woman he knew told him about the time when she was a little girl listening to her old grandmother tell her about the time she, the grandmother, as a little girl, had seen Napoleon. So this radio host knew someone who knew someone who’d seen Napoleon. It reminds me now of a friend of mine, a woman in her 40s, whose paternal grandfather was born in Ireland in 1839!

History is never as far away as we think it is. And it doesn’t always travel in a straight line. It rebounds, doubles back and moves in circular motions that intersect in odd and unexpected ways.

Happy Easter!

Has it really come to this? I’ve finally watched an episode of “American Idol”
Well, it was bound to happen. After two-and-a-half years of Morning Musume fandom and following the 8th Gen audition process and checking back into old auditions through YouTube and back episodes of “Hello Morning,” and after wondering all this time why there was no American equivalent to MM and wondering if maybe there was and I wasn’t seeing it, and hearing all the hype about “American Idol” over six years and thoroughly resisting it...I finally sat down and watched a two-hour live telecast of “American Idol” (Tuesday, March 11, 2008).

What spurred it was an article in The New York Times on the show that morning and it seemed like the right time given the large number of finalists (12) and the chance to sample their average performance quality. One of the added attractions for me was the Beatles theme for the night--each of the twelve had to do a Beatles song. Since the Beatles was the last English-singing pop group I followed with any kind of devotion, and since I know and like their songs, I figured it would be a good fit for me. (I should point out that the Beatles burst on the scene at just about the time my youthful mind began to embrace popular music.)

Granted, I’m a little too attached to the way the Beatles songs were originally sung to take too kindly to new variations on them, so I was a little harder on these finalists than I might normally have been. But it also meant that if any of them did a really good job on their song, I’d be in a better position to appreciate it. As it happens, three of the finalists acquitted themselves well, bringing some original stylings while respecting their chosen song’s unique essence. The other nine performers were all quite talented, in varying degrees, but didn’t do the songs any favors, at least in my opinion, although the judges appeared to be more generous than I was in some cases.

The ones I liked:

Chikezie, a young Nigerian-American from L.A., did a rousing rendition of “She’s a Woman” that took him all over the stage. He had fun doing it and I had fun watching/listening to him.

Brooke White, a pretty blond woman, played the piano and sang “Let it Be” in an appropriately soulful manner. Nice.

David Cook did an almost-hard rock version of “Eleanor Rigby” with a pleasantly raspy voice. Not my style, but he succeeded at what he set out to do and really sold the song.

Was I particularly musically entertained? Only by the three I liked, although some of the others were appealing for various reasons. E.g., the Oregon cowgirl was cute, even if her country version of “Eight Days a Week” didn’t work for me or any of the three judges. The Filipina girl was very cute, too, and her voice is really nice, even if she needed to bring a little more feeling to her rendition of “In My Life.” On the other end of the spectrum, there were two pretty boy heartthrob-type guys clearly thrown into the mix to keep young girls watching and they were a tad too full of themselves to pay adequate attention to the songs they were singing. Unfortunately, one of them is considered an odds-on favorite by Entertainment Weekly to make it to the end.

Is this something I want to watch every week? Well, I don’t feel particularly hooked, but it might be interesting to see how the finalists who stay in it develop. Will they get better? That would be nice to see.

Is this what I’m looking for in American pop music? Probably not, but I shouldn’t make such a sweeping judgement after only one look.

Is there any similarity to MM here? Not that I can tell. As readers here know, the MM audition process is quite a bit different and fortunately doesn’t require finalists to sing in front of a live audience or on live TV. That would be too grueling for the young, inexperienced, highly vulnerable kids who audition for MM. And they get chosen by Tsunku, not the call-in audience. (Imagine if the Japanese home audience voted and picked new members of MM—I can’t help but think what a mess that would be.)

In any event, my first exposure to "American Idol" was kind of fascinating. I’d heard a lot about the three judges, Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul, and Randy Jackson, and their little routines, and had even heard them when they were all guests on Howard Stern’s radio show, once upon a time. I thought they were sincere, if a tad generous to some of the finalists. Simon’s critical remarks, when he leveled them, seemed to me to be on the mark and, overall, quite constructive. As for Ryan Seacrest, well I guess you need someone on stage who’s young enough and sexually ambiguous enough to be reassuring to all the contestants and non-threatening to both the boys and girls. Everyone seemed to be fulfilling their particular function.

W in Concert…uh-oh
Well, my W obsession is winding down. And it’s the two W concerts, one from 2004 and one from 2005, that are causing it. Both of them feature Berryz Kobo and while I have nothing against BK as performers, I just found them too distracting here. Granted, their joint performance with W of “Aa Ii Na!” is a highlight in both concerts, but too often I just got annoyed. There’s way too much of Berryz and not enough of W. I wanted to see a W concert, not a BK one, and I feel I got the latter not the former. Maybe that was the intent with these concerts all along--to simply use W to promote Berryz. As a result, the performers I wanted to see got short shrift.

Also, I just didn’t find the material that good. For every good number, there were three or four bad ones. And even some of the good songs got botched. W's rendition of "Samishii Nettaigyo" makes such a great video, yet the stage performance of it in the 2004 concert is way off-track. The choreography is only half-hearted and the staging has Aibon and Nono at opposite ends of the stage platform instead of side-by-side as they are in the video. Since I’ve been unable to find a “Dance Shot Version” of the video on YouTube, I wanted to see them do those nice dance moves uninterrupted. But they hardly did them at all here. (And where were those awesome silver trenchcoats?!)

Much of the material, especially in the 2004 concert, was recycled. Some of it worked, some of it didn’t. I enjoyed “Get Up! Rapper” as performed by Aibon and the five strongest BK girls (Saki, Chinami, Yurina, Momoko and Maasa) in the 2004 concert, but the Minimoni recreation by Nono and the three weakest BK girls didn’t work for me, nor did the decision to have all of them join in to do “Love Machine.” I mean, Risako doing Yuko’s lines?!!! (To be honest, I get antsy any time MM has attempted "Love Machine" since Kaori’s graduation, i.e. when there was no one left from the original eight who performed it.) W and BK did better when they combined for “Mr. Moonlight,” because they’re clearly having fun with it, especially when Aibon took on Yossi’s wonderful shrieking parts. W does Petit Moni’s “Chokotto Love,” but I wasn’t crazy about their rendition of it. BK had one great number at the beginning of the 2004 concert, “Anata Nashi de wa Ikite Yukenai,” but not much thereafter. Also, there were numbers that BK did that would have been fine for girls 17-to-19-years-old, but not for girls this young.

The camerawork and editing really bothered me in both concerts. What's the matter, they can’t hold a shot for even five seconds? Many shots were only a second long or shorter! The camera was all over the place, the angles were bad and the cuts from closeup to closeup kept us from seeing how good the performers were in those numbers that were well choreographed. I want to SEE the dancing. Two or three of the cameras should be framing the girls so you can see them from head-to-toe and the director should let them complete a dance move or two before cutting to another angle. You can’t do that when you’re cutting back and forth among ten different faces or shots from the side or shots from the audience with the friggin’ Wotas shaking those glow sticks in front of the lens. Drives me nuts. I don't think I'd have had such a bad reaction to these concerts if the camerawork and cutting had been better.

Also, the audience infuriated me more than ever before and I’m not sure why. Maybe it was the creepy spectacle of thousands of screaming older men who can’t wait to get their grubby paws on the future stream of Risako photobooks. I’ve tolerated this in the past because it comes with the territory, but I was feeling considerably less tolerant here. Maybe it was because the audience seemed to overwhelm the performers at times, something that never happens at an MM concert.

All I wanted was to see two delightful and enormously talented entertainers shine on their own and I didn’t see it. They weren’t allowed to let loose and entertain me in the inimitable way they did when they were in MM. Granted, this is all a moot point since W disbanded a long time ago, but I was hoping for a greater legacy in the material that they managed to complete. (I only just learned about the "Hello Pro Party! 2005 Captain Kouen" concert in which W was featured with Aya Matsuura. So now I've gotta get that. And many thanks to Kappa from MM-BBS for alerting me to it.)

So, to “get back to where I once belonged” after watching the W concerts, I put in my tape of “Morning Musume Concert Tour 2004 Haru: The Best of Japan” and watched a fantastic set by Sakura Gumi and Otome Gumi just to see Aibon and Nono (and several of the others) at their peak. In fact, Nono’s far more energetic in this show than in the W concerts. After the two “Gumi” groups alternate for a total of four songs, “Sakura Mankai,” “Yuujou~Kokoro no Busuniwa Naranee!,” “Hare Ame Nochi Suki,” and “Ai no sono ~ Touch My Heart!” they all joined in for a rousing performance of “Say Yeah! Motto Miracle Night,” one of my favorite group numbers from the golden era of MM. This 14-minute five-song set is one of the greatest distinct concert segments I’ve seen MM do--ever. Sure, the camerawork and staging are awkward here too, but the performers' dynamism makes up for it.

Thanks for the feedback, plus some odds and ends...
Sorry about not responding to comments that people leave, but here’s the message I get when I try:

"Sorry, you aren't allowed to post comments until your email address has been validated. If you've lost the confirmation email to do this, you can have it re-sent."

So I click on the the “have it re-sent” link and here’s what I get:

"A validation email has been sent to madara_music_blog@yahoo.com. In order to complete validation, you need to click the link in that email."

So I go to my Yahoo account and find that it’s been deactivated, so I can’t get that email that I need to click the link in to complete the validation. What to do? (In fact, I once did all the right steps, when I first registered and the account was supposedly active, and it didn’t validate then either.)

Anyway, I want to thank everyone for feedback and corrections and helpful info. (Now I want to find an episode of “Doraemon” that has “Aa Ii Na!” as its theme song. That's gotta be fun.) And I especially want to thank Gypsychilde for linking to those videos of Aibon and Nono solos. Great stuff. The more I see of these girls, the more versatile I find them. However, I have to confess that the reference to W looking like the Olsen Twins in those beautiful trenchcoats was totally unexpected. Luckily, my daughter is older than the Olsen Twins and was never part of their target audience. Hence, I never had to purchase or view any of those videos. So, I never had to see the Olsen Twins in their trenchcoats.

I remember when the Olsen Twins’ one theatrical movie, NEW YORK MINUTE, came out in 2004 and I saw the trailer for it. It looked pretty funny and looked like it might even make good cinematic use of New York locations. At that point, I hadn't seen the Olsen Twins in anything since "Full House" and an episode of "Seventh Heaven." I wound up waiting till the movie came on cable and started watching it one night and turned it off after about ten minutes. The girls looked so uninterested in what they were doing. It’s as if they couldn’t wait to finish the scene so they could run back to their trailer to make phone calls and go about whatever mundane business occupied the rest of their waking hours. I mean, you get a chance to make a movie for the big screen and you treat it like it’s the lowest priority on your To-Do list? So why should I be bothered to watch it? Hmmm...no wonder there’s been no follow-up movie.

Getting back to W, I received the two W concert DVDs that I ordered from CDJapan. I watched about the first half of the 2005 one. They’ve got Berryz Kobo with them in both concerts and they seem to be there an awful lot. I wouldn’t mind so much except for two things. One, BK doesn’t seem to have much in the way of good material, at least in what I've seen so far. Two, when W and BK perform onstage together, the camera hardly ever cuts to Aibon and Nono, the two stars of the show. So they do their routines and we hardly get to see them 'cause the director is cutting back and forth between closeups of each of the BK members. Huh? Unless I’m wrong and BK is actually the star act of the two concerts and W is just a guest act. That’s what it seems like at times. And, worse, the camera is all over the place, but hardly ever where it needs to be. The quick cutting and bad camera angles rob us of the chance to see Aibon and Nono do their stuff in uninterrupted takes. The camera’s either too far away or too close. Whenever the angle and framing are just right, it’s only for a quick second before the director cuts away to yet another bad angle. This kind of thing infuriates me and makes some of the concerts extremely hard to watch, no matter how good the performers are. So these concerts will have to be taken in stages.

I was watching the classic Hollywood musical, SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952), with Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor, on the Turner Classic Movie channel on Saturday while waiting for my daughter and her cousin from California to come and get me so I could accompany them to the Bronx Zoo. When they arrived they sat and watched the last 20 or so minutes with me, which include both "Singin' in the Rain" and the big "Gotta Dance/Broadway Melody" dance number. Now why can’t the video crews hired by Hello! Project watch this movie so they can learn how to shoot a musical number properly?

Later, when we came back from the zoo I showed the two a clip from the Indian musical, DEVDAS, so they could see the great Aishwarya Rai in a big Bollywood musical number. The closest either had seen to a Bollywood movie was BRIDE AND PREJUDICE, also starring Aishwarya Rai. My daughter’s cousin is an anime fan who has taught herself Japanese and she and her sister and my daughter used to do a lot of cosplay at anime cons and such. The cousin is also a fan of J-rock and some J-pop. So she went through my CDs and borrowed some Ayumi Hamasaki and Koda Kumi. I lent them YO YO GIRL COP as well. And the cousin recommended some CDs by Hikaru Utada, someone I’ve never managed to get into. That was nice. (In fact, I picked up a Hikaru CD, “Single Collection, Vol. 1,” from Book Off tonight and I’m listening to it as I type this.)

I’ll give a fuller report on the W concert DVDs when I get through them, plus some reactions to more recent H!P purchases.

Another W cover inspires a trip to the YouTube archives
After doing the previous entry on W’s videos, I’ve been watching the other videos more and am now quite a fan of “Shiroi Iro wa Koibito no Iro” (White is My Lover’s Color). It’s a sweet, gentle song and the girls sing it beautifully and harmonize quite well. I’ve never heard anybody declare Aibon and Nono to be great singers, but the more W recordings I hear the more I think this is so. Granted, they’re called on to distort their voices in song after song to achieve different effects, some of them quite pleasing, some not so much. But, on those rare occasions when they just sing in their natural voices, it’s as lovely as anything I’ve heard coming out of Hello! Project.

I also did a little more research and found the original version of “Shiroi Iro wa Koibito no Iro,” as sung by Betsy & Chris. I was quite surprised to learn that Betsy Curtis and Chris Rolseth were two white girls from Hawaii (shades of Coconuts Musume!) who sang in Japan starting in 1970. Betsy’s music teacher was Hedwig von Trapp, one of the famous Trapp Family Singers immortalized in THE SOUND OF MUSIC. (Momoe Yamaguchi sings some songs from THE SOUND OF MUSIC, in Japanese, on one of her live albums. The story of the Trapp Family was also immortalized in a popular Japanese animated TV series in 1991.)

Here’s a link to the website I got the biographical info on Betsy and Chris from:
http://www.betsyko.com/

Here’s W’s music video of “Shiroi Iro wa Koibito no Iro”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSYCqDSb_Sc&feature=related

+ (subtitled version):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd_u67gknE8

And here’s a video of Betsy & Chris singing the original:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdO_3HdT7cU&feature=related

They’re both beautiful renditions of a lovely, melodic song (written by Kazuhiko Kato). I tend to prefer the W version, but it’s a slight bias you can forgive me for, can’t you?

The translation of the song title is given on Wiki.theppn as “White is My Lover’s Color” and on YouTube as “White is the Color of Love.” On the Betsy Curtis website I linked to above, it is listed as “Color of Love.” Given the lyrics provided in the subtitled video, the “color of love” translation makes more sense to me.

What an interesting journey into the past this obsession has become, with a side trip leading to an amazing discovery connected to my own past. More in a future entry...

Aibon and Nono shine in W videos
(Happy Valentine's Day!)

I’ve been checking out the W Videos on the DVD, “W no Eizo no Sekai, Vol. 1.” There are six of them, five from W’s first CD, "Duo U&U," and one from their second CD, "2nd W." What’s fascinating to me is that the songs on W’s first album are all covers of songs originally done by earlier female duos of J-pop. The first song on the DVD is "Koi no Vacance," which was originally done by the Peanuts, a twin sister act that marked my very first exposure to Japanese pop music and, dare I say it, that of many Americans of a certain age. The Peanuts, Yumi and Emi Ito, appeared in the Japanese monster film, MOTHRA (1961), as a pair of “twin fairies” who stand less than a foot high and are the guardians of the title creature, a giant caterpillar which eventually transforms into a butterfly which attacks the civilized world after the girls are abducted from their island home and taken to Tokyo by an unscrupulous showman to be exhibited as exotic creatures. Their song chant to Mothra plays on the English-dubbed soundtrack exactly as it did on the Japanese track. “Mo-su-ra-ya! Mo-su-ra!” And those bits of harmonizing were the first we’d hear in America of anything remotely classified as J-pop. I remember watching this movie at my friend Tommy Chin’s house as a youth and he and his sisters knew they were called the Peanuts (they may be listed that way in the film's credits). Here's a link to a clip of the Peanuts singing the call to Mothra from MOTHRA:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX4bpVxpUpE

When, decades later, I saw the longer Japanese version of MOTHRA, I learned that the Peanuts perform an entire song that was cut from the English dub. The Peanuts appeared in the same roles in two more films, both co-starring Godzilla, GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA (1964) and GHIDRAH, THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER (1965). (These two are both out on DVD in beautiful Region 1 editions that include the English dub and the original Japanese-language version. MOTHRA, however, is still missing-in-action on Region 1 DVD, although I have VHS copies of both the English dub and Japanese original.)

I looked on YouTube and found a compilation of three Peanuts music videos, two in black-and-white and one in color, to give you an idea of what they looked and sounded like outside of the Godzilla movies. The first song on it is "Koi no Fuga." Here's a link to the compilation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CzFppQFcKs

And here's a clip of W performing "Koi no Fuga" (which is not on the DVD I ordered):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfWFT20g_9E&feature=related

So, getting back to the W collection of PVs, my two favorite videos on it are “Samishii Nettaigyo” (Lonely Tropical Fish) and “Aa Ii Na!” (Ah, How Nice). The former was originally performed by a late-disco-era duo called Wink. I found the original video by Wink on YouTube and watched it and W’s version back-to-back. The Wink version is cute and charming and the two girls have nice voices. Their girlish costumes—frills and silly hats—may be fairly typical of 1980s J-pop. There are lots of shots of the musical accompaniment on keyboard, guitar and drum. And the girls do extremely simple dance moves. (I have since located and picked up two Wink CDS and am listening to one as I type this.) Here's a link to the Wink version of "Samishii Nettaigyo": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qazEhYX5Qkk&feature=related

I prefer the W version. Aibon and Nono’s dance moves are a lot more intricate and stylish and their costumes—full-length silver satin trenchcoats—are way cooler. In fact, in the annals of way cool J-pop fashions, they’re right up there with the red tailored men’s suits, black shirts and black ties that the girls of Speed sport in their Final Dome Tour Real Life concert (covered in this blog on Feb. 21, 2006, almost two years ago). Here's a link to the W version of "Samishii Nettaigyo": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KypQ0yC0LTY&feature=related

The other video I like, “Aa Ii Na!,” is an original song and is taken from the girls’ second CD. This one is the only video on the DVD that allows the girls to fully indulge the playful side we see so much of in the MM concerts and TV shows. It’s got quite a catchy tune also, as it shows the girls marching on a treadmill in lock-step with exaggerated arm movements past all kinds of clever CGI-created backgrounds, including ancient temples in Thailand, a scene from feudal Japan, a moonscape (on which they "moonwalk"), and the entrance to the Empire State Building, a block away from my office! A UFO speeds by in some shots and pioneering American astronaut John Glenn (the first to orbit the earth) is glimpsed in one bit of NASA footage. Berryz Koubo show up as background dancers in two nicely choreographed bits. It’s fun! Here's a link to "Aa Ii Na!": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EwXHVKf_o4

Spurred on by this DVD, I’ve gone ahead and ordered W’s concert DVDs. Aibon and Nono may never perform together again, so I might as well try to get my hands on everything these two delightful entertainers managed to accomplish during their short time together.

(P.S.: After watching these videos repeatedly, I have to confess that, as much as I adore Nono, Aibon strikes me as clearly the more magnetic of the two.)

Anime series with a J-pop theme
“Full Moon o Sagashite” is an animated TV series that deals with an adolescent girl named Mitsuki who is transformed by a “Death Spirit” into a 16-year-old aspiring pop singer named Full Moon. As someone who’s always been intrigued by anime’s portrayal of J-pop, I picked up the two available DVDs from the series, Volumes 3 and 5, at a store closing sale and watched them recently, a total of eight episodes. From a J-pop standpoint, I found the girl’s hit single in the show, entitled “Myself” and sung over the end credits, to be a very sweet and enjoyable song. The credits list the performer as “Changin’ My Life,” a group (person?) I’ve never heard of. One episode, #10, is particularly interesting because it shows a confrontation between Full Moon and an older female performer named Fuyuko Komaki, an Enka singer who shows contempt for “newcomers” and whose weasel of a manager tries to prevent Full Moon from performing on the same TV show as Komaki. Eventually, Full Moon’s spunkiness and ability to stand up for herself impress Komaki who flashes back to her own days as a newcomer when her management company refused to let her sing Enka songs and instead positioned her as an “idol” against her will. In this episode, Full Moon gets to sing her song in its entirety in a studio performance. We later see Komaki being interviewed about the confrontation and admitting to having a change of heart about newcomers.

In more than one episode, media coverage of the new young singer plays a key role in the narrative, including a news story on TV about her missing an audition. Episode #11, in fact, focuses on a pesky tabloid photographer who's trying to get the real story on Full Moon, about whom almost nothing is known. The Death Spirits work overtime helping Full Moon elude his telephoto lens and transforming Mitsuki back into her 12-year-old self as soon as she can get out of view. But the crafty photographer soon figures out that the little girl has some connection to Full Moon.

Most of the episodes, of the eight I’ve seen, tend not to focus on the music industry, but on Mitsuki’s various dramatic travails, including her tumultuous relationship with her two accompanying “shinigami,” or Death Spirits, who are guiding her towards her dream in the one year she has left to live. So there’s an element of tragedy underlying everything. In one episode, adolescent Mitsuki is sick and leaves her hospital bed to try to get to a crucial audition for a shampoo commercial, but Tokuto, the Death Spirit who has the power to transform her into the blond Full Moon, is nowhere to be found. Sick, she wanders the streets, lies dazed on a park bench, and finally gets on a bus. By this point, Tokuto has gotten alarmed and is flying over the streets trying to find her. He even peeks into the bus but doesn’t see her because she’s lying down, having fallen asleep on the back seat. She gets off the bus and collapses in a busy Tokyo intersection and sees her life flash before her eyes and all the people who mean anything to her. It’s all quite moving, as we experience her vulnerability and get inside her head, allowing us to see things as she sees them. Ultimately, the audition turns out not to matter so much.

According to Wikipedia, Mitsuki’s hairstyle in the series was borrowed from Ai Kago, who would have been in MM only a year or two when this series went into production. Well, it doesn’t look like it to me. I’ve seen those early concerts/videos with Aibon and I don’t recall her hairstyle looking anything like Mitsuki’s in the series. Granted, Aibon may have had hair like that in some appearance or other and I just may not have seen it. But it's still a bit of a stretch.

The copyright date on the show itself says 2001, although Anime News Network lists 2002 as the series’ premiere date in Japan. A calendar in Mitsuki’s room says 2000, although a flyer announcing an appearance by Full Moon lists a June 2002 date. So I’m not really clear on exactly when the series was produced.

Recent viewings: Rika’s graduation, GAM’s first concert, Avex all-star tour, MM’s Samurai musical...
I recently acquired a DVD of the Morning Musume 2005 Spring Concert, the one where Rika Ishikawa graduated. I liked it a lot. It was streamlined the way the best MM concerts are—no MC’s and few guest stars. There isn’t a troll (Makoto) or Atsuko Inaba in sight and the only other H!P performers around are Viyuuden, which does one song—the only one I’ve heard them perform that I actually like--and Country Musume, which does two songs. I like the song selection, the costume changes, and the overall energy level of the girls. As for Rika’s graduation, I must confess that I didn’t find it much of an emotional spectacle, nor did I expect it to be. Rika herself was notably dry-eyed, as were, expectedly, Yossi and Miki. The others all cried, of course. I’m sorry to see Rika go (written almost three years after it happened—d’uuuh), but without Nacchi, Kaori, Mari, Aibon and Nono, Rika didn’t fill such a necessary spot in the mix. Without older girls to play off (or goofy younger ones), Rika’s “kawaii” act didn’t really resonate. With Rika gone, it would become Yossi and Miki’s combined gravitas balancing the wide-eyed, having-to-work-way-harder-than-Rika-at-being-cute younger ones—Sayumi, Reina, and newly arrived Koharu--with Ai-chan and Risa taking up the comfortable middle ground, where they seemed to thrive.

I also watched GAM’s 1st Concert Tour 2007 Early Summer: Great Aya & Miki DVD. Miki and Aya look absolutely gorgeous and have remarkable chemistry together. I enjoyed it well enough and will certainly watch it again, although I have to say I was dismayed by the lack of good material. The best songs were two that I’d come to associate with Maki Goto, although one, “Shall We Love?” had in fact originally been sung by Aya, Miki and Maki together. I don’t know the title of the other one. The newer songs didn’t grab me. They’re such a great act, I wish they’d get better material—pretty much the complaint I have with so many H!P acts these days. Although, given Miki's situation, who knows if there'll ever even be another GAM concert.

I also finally watched in its entirety the A-nation '06 Avex concert. I’d originally picked this up last July and sort of picked and choosed among its acts to watch at the time, most notably Ayumi Hamasaki’s closing 20-minute set, which sparked my interest in her and subsequent leap into Ayu fandom. I have to confess that, after watching the whole thing, the only other acts I really like are the ones I liked already or picked up on during the first viewing: Koda Kumi, Every Little Thing, and BoA, although I am intrigued now by Ami Suzuki, who opens the concert. Good voice and good song—and she’s pretty cute, too. Also, in the extra entitled “Opening Acts,” there’s a female trio called Rin’ that does instrumentals on traditional string and woodwind instruments. A little on the New Age side, but I enjoyed their playing very much. I could go for a CD of that. And a four-girl group that went unidentified in English, but which I’ve since learned is a Korean group called Tenjo Chiki, did a performance I like of a song called “Boomerang.” Have they done more? Since this DVD consisted basically of selected cuts from a much longer concert (we see the sky go from bright sunset during Ami Suzuki’s set to well past dark by the time Ayumi comes out), I wonder what the experience of seeing an entire concert like this on DVD would be like. Have they ever released such a thing?

I also watched the MM musical, “Edokko Chushingura,” again—the one set in feudal Japan, where the girls all seem to become samurai warriors to take on a corrupt lord and save a beleaguered princess (Miki)--at least that's how it looked to me. What can I say? I enjoy it immensely, although I sure wish I had a transcript or at least a good plot synopsis since my copy doesn't have subtitles. I’d love to be able to follow the drama a little better. Even so, there’s the wonderful spectacle of seeing the girls in such beautiful period costumes, hairstyles and makeup. And especially seeing ¾ of Minimoni in color-coded high-fashion ninja outfits. (And Nono doing her unforgettable ninja clone routine: “Kasha, kasha?” Take THAT, Naruto!) And seeing all the girls fight bad guys. And there are some great musical numbers in it, especially the title song, which is performed about three times. Plus, MM comes out and does a fantastic 29-minute 2003 set after the show proper ends, consisting of “As For One Day,” “The Peace,” “Souda, We’re Alive,” “Do it! Now” and “Koko ni Iruzee.” Does it get better than this? Yeah, but not that often.

Morning Musume All Singles Complete Zen 35 Kyoku ~10th Anniversary~
Last fall, I ordered two discs of MM videos from CDJapan, “Picture of the Morning Musume” Vols. 2 & 3, containing everything from “I Wish” (2000) to “The Manpower” (2005). I wish I’d checked into things a little more and waited. There on the shelf at Asahiya Books last Friday night was the new 2-disc set containing all 35 MM videos, from “Morning Coffee” to “Mikan.” Plus extras. Since there were ten videos I hadn’t seen, including the two latest, I said, what the hell, and sprang for it. (In case you hadn't already noticed, I much prefer watching music videos on DVD than on YouTube.) At $58 it probably would have been cheaper on CDJapan, but I couldn’t wait. Aasahiya also had Koharu’s latest CD but I had actually already ordered that from CDJapan along with a W CD (and I’m still waiting for them). Anyway, watching the videos at home, starting with the ten I didn’t already have and continuing with the extras, I felt better about the purchase.

I still think their best videos were contained in that marvelous run from their eleventh video, “Renai Revolution 21” (2000) to their 23rd, “Joshi Kashimashi Monogatari” (2004). Of the ones made since then, I give high marks to “Iroppoi Jettai,” “Sexy Boy,” and “Egao Yes Nude.” I like the latter a lot as a song, too. I like “Ambitious,” very much, but I prefer its in-studio performance on “Hello! Morning” on June 18, 2006 to the PV. I’m not crazy about MM’s last three songs at all. There’s nothing there for me. No catchy melody or rhythms, no hook, no particularly musical style to intrigue me. The videos are interesting because the girls get to do full-scale dance numbers in them. And the dancing’s good, although not up to the high standards set by “Egao Yes Nude.” “Kanashimi Twilight” is important because it’s the last MM video with Yossi and Miki (and the only time in MM video history where we get to see Miki in a leather mini-skirt and boots—where’s the photobook for that?). The last two videos, “Onna ni Sachi Are” and “Mikan,” have some value because they’re the first to have all three of the new girls (Aika, JunJun and LinLin) in them and we get to see all the girls function purely as a unified team, as a dance unit rather than a collection of disparate personalities as we used to see so gloriously displayed in the days when 4th Gen ruled. Now the girls all tend to look alike, sound alike, and dance alike.

I’m not necessarily knocking that. There’s some entertainment value in it, but it’s different from what I’d gotten used to watching all the old videos/concerts where Aibon and Nono and Rika and Yossi (4th Gen ruled!) each did their own little schtick in the middle of a song. Also, I tend to lament the absence of star performers. As much as I love Ai-chan and Risa, I have to come to grips with the fact that they’re team players and not distinct star personalities like Nacchi, Maki, Yossi, Miki, Rika, et al. Again, not a bad thing necessarily and we do see MM perform as a more smoothly functioning cohesive unit than at any time since pre-3rd Gen (Maki). But it could get boring. And for some it already has.

There is one exception however--Koharu. She’s a team player, too, but she wants attention. In fact she’s the only one in the group now who seems to actively seek attention. She’s doing it in subtle ways right now (is she being quietly coached?), e.g. directing her eyes downward in a group shot, but she’s starting to stand out from the pack. She can easily overshadow Ai-chan and Risa and become the real star of this bunch if she’s allowed to and as long as management continues to adore her. Of course, she might leave for a solo career any time before that can happen. Personally I’d rather she stay in MM and keep it interesting there for a while longer.

Maki’s Triumph + End-of-Year Report
I picked up a DVD of Maki Goto’s latest concert, HOW TO USE SEXY: MAKI GOTO LIVE TOUR 2007 G-EMOTION II at a Chinatown store, and watched it over the weekend. It’s easily the best concert of hers I’ve ever seen. Her voice is the best it’s ever been and she mixes fast-beat dance numbers with slow, soulful pieces. She dances up a storm and has four excellent back-up dancers with her, two male and two female. She’s the most confident I’ve ever seen her and she carries the two-hour-and-six minute show without a flaw.

Her first set is in full “sexy” mode. I’ve complained in the past about the “writhing-on-the-floor” routine Maki’s done while performing “Some Boys Touch” at earlier concerts/shows and how awkward it looked in contrast to her usual performing style. Well, this time she comes out in a very nice short black dress with long lace sleeves, with fish-net stockings and over-the-knee black leather boots, an outfit that is grown-up sexy without being vulgar. The choreography is new and different and much more sophisticated. Nothing to complain about here. She’s clearly venturing into Koda Kumi/Namie Amuro territory, especially in the strutting-around-the-stage-in-boots action, but she beats them at their own game. For one thing, she’s a better singer with better songs and, for another, she’s more beautiful, a quality enhanced by the expert makeup, hairstyling, lighting and camerawork. This is not meant as a knock on Koda or Namie, both of whom I like a lot and whose concerts I enjoy and who have their own unique sources of appeal. It’s just that I feel Maki has surpassed them with this concert. She's not the "dorky" Maki anymore (to borrow a description from Kappa, over on MM-BBS). She can do what other sexy J-pop stars can do, plus a whole lot more, as evidenced by the later sets in this concert.

Maki has a number of nice costume changes throughout the concert, including a full-scale 18th-century-style French court number and a more Broadway-style white satin jacket-shorts-and-top hat ensemble. I especially liked the pink cowboy hat-shorts-and-boots outfit late in the show. Her back-up dancers have some solo bits while Maki changes costumes. The concert boasts a mix of new songs from her latest album (“How to Use Sexy”) and older hits from past albums. She doesn’t sing my favorites, “Paint it Gold” and “Shiawase Desu ka,” but the choices of past hits are generally good ones and she doesn’t sing the ones that annoyed me, like that one (the name of which I forget) that she always did at H!P concerts with the Hello! Project Kids.

After watching the concert, I put in a tape of the “Love Machine” music video to take me back to Maki’s debut, the very beginning, where it all started. Wow.

So, Maki’s greatest concert is not a bad way to end the year. And what a year it’s been for Hello! Project, Morning Musume and their fans. The big news of course was Nono’s pregnancy and the birth of her baby, Noa. And Kaori’s pregnancy. (When’s her baby due?) And Miki’s scandal and resignation from MM. And Yossi’s graduation. With the loss of Yossi and Miki, MM lost its two strongest performers. As much as I love Ai-chan and Risa, I don’t think either has the gravitas to carry the six others, Koharu excepted (I predict a solo career for her). To me, Aika, JunJun and LinLin are still untested—I haven’t seen enough of them to judge their talent or performing capabilities. Sayumi, Reina and Eri work well when they’ve got a stronger lineup around them, but that lineup just isn’t there anymore. It was fine when Yossi and Miki were the leads, with Ai-chan, Risa and Koharu as solid co-stars, as evidenced by the “Egao Yes Nude” video, but that balance is now gone. Morning Musume has never before had a lineup with this many (six) below-par performers at once. Will enough of the six improve (it's a possibility) to make the group a viable concern again? We'll know soon enough. That's what 2008 will bring--watching and waiting.

The other big news of 2007, of course, was the release of YO YO GIRL COP in the U.S., giving Americans the chance to see Aya Matsuura and Rika Ishikawa in a movie and hear GAM on the soundtrack. I saw it on the big screen (but a tape projection, alas) at the New York Asian Film Festival in July and picked up the DVD two weeks later. The DVD includes “Yo Yo Girl Mission,” a “Making of…” feature that’s even better than the movie. The DVD even made it onto the racks at my local DVD/CD store, a FYE outlet in the Bronx. My J-pop faves finally reached my neighborhood. Can a J-pop CD section be far behind? (Well, yeah, it can—very far behind--but YO YO GIRL COP is still a great start.)