#i want to download it illegally and burnt it on a DVD

[galactic-rhea]

I know it's like...the least liked one, but AOTC is genuinely very comforting for me to watch, it's fun and the photography and scenery at times it's awesome!

[eloiseishere]

Studio Ghibli, as a person who is half Japanese(my dad’s Japanese) and grew up here is just something that’s so nostalgic to me. It reminds me of the late nights where I’m not busy with anything, but mostly the late nights spent with my dad and a bowl of popcorn we lowkey burnt when I was small.

My dad is not the most physically affectionate person(he’s also lowkey verbally abusive— he thinks its quirky-kooky to yell at people for the simplest of mistakes, which is the sole reason for why I love him but also hate him), but his affection is definitely there. Japanese people are just not that affectionate in general, lowkey a taboo to even say “I love you”. But I digress— the one thing that I feel like my dad loved while I was growing up(and I hope still do) was spending time with me over our shared interests. We both love our silence, Ghibli and Lupin III, poli-sci, animals, and cars.

The one thing that I vividly remember was when my dad and I used to go to the local grocery store that had a DVD rental place. We go there pretty often, and he does the thing that every other dads seem to do, which is download it illegally onto a blank DVD for later use…

Then there was this week where my mum got hospitalized due to severe stomach pain(it was something that was headed to cancer but avoided because we got in early) and I couldn’t sleep at the hospital with her. An important detail here is that I had attachment issues when I was younger— meaning that I couldn’t sleep without my mum in my proximity, or I would completely just breakdown into sobs. So, having to go home because the hospital didn’t allow me to sleep there was agony to young Eloise. Knowing this, my dad made a deal with me. He’d rent me movies and we’ll buy popcorn and various snacks and eat them if I were to remind myself that I will see my mum again in the morning and that everything would be fine. My child brain was very easily persuaded, we did just that— My dad drove us to the store and we rented three Ghibli movies a night and buy microwaveable popcorn. Then, we’d go home, watch the movies while we ate the popcorn until I fell asleep.

He wanted me to get used to the feel of sleeping on my own, so he’d carry me to my mum’s bed. But I’d wake up cuz I didn’t feel my mum or anyone at all beside me. So I’d go to his room. I remember just standing at the doorway until he feels my presence lmao. But the wholesome thing about it was that he didn’t complain when he saw me, and told me to go back to bed— he just lifted the futon he was under and let me in to fall asleep until we could wake up and go to the hospital again.

A few years later(I was still young tho), my mum and I went to the Philippines for her work, and I feel like I just completely forgot about him. Which is SO sad to me cuz when I went back three years later, we were both so distant towards each other. I may have forgotten how it felt like to spend time with him and how to speak Japanese for a while, but he never forgot that part about me, how I’d cry until I fell asleep cuz my mum wasn’t in the same building.

At that time, my mum had started taking night shifts, which meant that she worked from 9PM to 5AM. I’d cry for her not to go, and he just kinda listens from the other room, not wanting to interfere with me and my mum. Ofc, she goes, she has to work. But this time, there’s no compromise between my Father and I. Just silence, and the knowledge that he’s right in the next room. I started to notice his light being on until some time had passed when I turned my lights off. And I realize now that he stays awake until I fall asleep so that if I were to need comfort cuz my mum isn’t there, he’d be there to stay with me until I fell asleep. Now I’m crying cuz it’s so wholesome… We moved to a bigger place, and he STILL does that. He checks on me one last time before I hear the beep of his light indicating that he’s about to sleep. When he sees me awake cuz of school work or just up for some projects, he’ll ask if I’ll be okay and to sleep soon before he walks back to his room and sleep.

And just- anyway. This got long, sorry. It just feels bittersweet, cuz I have a love-hate relationship with my Father, and it is killing me cuz I love those small portions of him where he randomly invites me to go to the city, or the mall, or Home Depot just to get me out of the house, or buy me random shit cuz he thought it was interesting and thought I’d find it interesting(which I do, we’re both 5 at heart and find the smallest things amusing). This is basically just me being a Father’s Offspring, or Daddy’s girl, or whatever. I’m getting delirious cuz I’ve been sleep deprived, if you made it this far, thank you for reading along, goodnight, luvs💕

STUDIO GHIBLI + AUTUMN 🍂🍃🍁

The Secret World of Arrietty (2010) Spirited Away (2001) Only Yesterday (1991) My Neighbor Totoro (1988) The Tale of The Princess Kaguya (2013) Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (2008) Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) The Wind Rises (2013)

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4

[miraitaxi]

BUCK-TICK DIQ-2017 live report

Kyoto Rohm hall - Nov. 9th 2017 (Part 1)

First I’d like to state that I don’t consider myself a hardcore fan in the sense that I don’t care for personal lives of the artists, leaks, bootlegs or other obscure contents. Call it a different word if you may, but I think I’d call it a passionate fan - I love the artists for what they do more than their works themselves, and I am always cool with whatever road they wish to take. I think that each song that the band creates has its own life, and although the band can do the best performance of that song because they know it best, the song exists to be brought to life by anyone and everyone. Thus the band is only there to materialize what needs to be materialized, and not for analyzing the expectations of their current fans and producing music only to please them. I started thinking about this when I frequented the perfume fandom and saw how much hate there was when the new album didn’t meet their expectations. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard Otsuka Ai say that she doesn’t want to go back to her previous style, and I’ve also read several reviews of people complaining that her new stuff doesn’t sound like it did before. Artists create what they believe need to be created, even if that means disappointing their previous audiences. I guess that’s what makes some artists go mainstream, which is not a bad thing at all either. It’s just that some people criticize artists for going mainstream, and others for not taking the mainstream path. This is one of the reasons I usually don’t read critics that judge bands with personal opinions, but read instead analyses of the music itself (Cayce does some great analysis at https://sites.google.com/site/lyricsyndrome/articles/reviews). And maybe that’s also one of the reasons why I myself don’t do live reports…

But the reason I had to share that rant, and the actual reason I don’t do live reports, is because I rarely remember what happens at live concerts 😂 Every time I go, the music goes directly from my ears to my follicles and I spend two hours in ecstasy and when I come to my senses I’m all sweaty with a sore throat and arms. I really feel lucky for being a person that experiences musical frisson several times almost on a daily basis. I also enjoy concerts with my eyes closed for considerable amounts of time - missing a few visual seconds of the band is nothing compared to the feeling of being bathed with the raw sound (and the screams of people, if there were any😒. Seriously, listen to e.g. Jupiter live from the Catalogue 1987-2016, disc 3 song 2 - it is CHILLING!). Plus, the last images I see before closing my eyes get burnt right into my brain and they’re the most precious memories that I get to keep. When I got this ask I had to google the playlist of the concert because all I remember was it starting with Dokudanjo beauty and finalizing with New World. So here is the playlist I found. Now that I see it I didn’t even recognize oriental love story

01.独壇場Beauty -R.I.P.- 02.ICONOCLASM 03.ANGELIC CONVERSATION 04.THE SEASIDE STORY 05.Oriental Love Story 06.スピード 07.LOVE PARADE 08.ノクターン -Rain Song- 09.サファイア 10.BABEL 11.BOY septem peccata mortalia 12.Django!!! -眩惑のジャンゴ- 13.絶界 14.Memento mori 15.COSMOS

-アンコール- 16.MACHINE -Remodel- 17.夢魔-The Nightmare 18.愛の葬列

-アンコール- 19.JUPITER 20.MY EYES & YOUR EYES 21.New World

So let’s start. As usual, the audience wasn’t very loud, compared to their early years. I mentioned this sometime before, but I don’t know if it’s because:

A) social behavior has changed - shyness, loudness not being socially acceptable, etc. (I remember seeing other artists with a much livelier audience so i don’t think that’s it)

B) only new fans are loud, and now that only long-term fans remain for BUCK-TICK, the loudness is gone (the 夢見る宇宙 tour dvd sounds amazing and it wasn’t that long ago, so I doubt this either)

C) the idol culture has spread everywhere; people go only to admire their idol and not to listen to me butcher their songs

D) the loudness hasn’t changed, they just used to hide microphones between the audience but I can’t tell because I didn’t go to the first concerts

E) it is forbidden by law

Whatever the reason it is, the band now needs to adapt to it, and I think Dokudanjo beauty was a great opening song, and if it had to be one song from a single it’d have to be either this or Glamorous in my opinion. This song has it all: music starts before the band is revealed, it’s followed by heavy snare and bass with good rhythm, and even though it has one of the easiest choruses which I hoped would have people singing along at least to this, it does have a lot of clapping which people love so at least that created good ambience.

Then we got some ICONOCLASM, but since I pretend to be able to play the bass for this (all the 3 notes!! 😏0530 3053) I was too busy getting U-ta blow his load all up in my ears to care about everyone else. I did expect Sakurai to let us say “5 for japanese babies”, but that was something that did not happen.

Then there was Angelic Conversation, which also gets the people wild like Jupiter does, but this time I did expect more heat from the fans. Also this is one of the favorite songs of the person who introduced me to BUCK-TICK so it’s a song that I enjoy on a very personal level. Since I was on the 3rd floor and most of the stage lighting was shining upwards directly on my face I had to listen to most of the songs with my eyes closed, but as I said before that’s not problem at all.

After that there was The Seaside Story. The song had the same intro as it did on the Atom Miraiha No. 9 Tour. With the playlist from that tour, the intro blended well with FUTURE SONG, but on this tour I might have missed something because I didn’t feel the same flow between songs. What I’m glad they kept was Sakurai singing the end of the second line from the first and third verses with full throttled anger (どうってことないわ ＆ でもかまわないわ）.

I’d like to skip Oriental Love Story here and instead talk about their wardrobes. Hoshino and Yu-ta were wearing standard Hoshino and Yu-ta clothes, respectively. Yagami先生 was wearing his long-tailed coat and no top-hat. I can’t recall what Imai was wearing, but his hair looked like it was on fire like in the  BABEL single and several if not all the other The Parade photos. Sakurai was wearing, and I haven’t seen other photos of it yet, thigh-high tights with a vertical fishnet strip on the front, with magenta velvet high heel short boots. They weren’t as hidden as his tights from the Atom Miraiha No. 9 tour. I just loved that there were several 12 year olds or so in the audience with their mothers, learning since young that a displaying your tights as a 50 year old male is something to take with pride and confidence.

Speed and LOVE PARADE followed. Both are great songs that are enjoyed without needing to add anything more than their studio versions. In LOVE PARADE, Sakurai stood back in the dark while the parade silhouette was projected on the wall, so it was more of a “letting us sing the lyrics” kind of song, as it was originally designed to be in my opinion.

After that they played Nocturne. Assuming you don’t download all their collection illegally (i’m watching you) without the struggle of finding out of press discs , I don’t think all the people are familiar with maxi-single songs like Nocturne. I don’t even know if they sell the singles in digital format now. The song had beautiful lighting effects, so I hope that those who weren’t familiar with the song before loved this performance enough to go get the single.

It was then that I hit my climax, when they performed Sapphire. One life, One death is one of my favorite albums but other than Baby, I want you I don’t really see other songs from the album being played live. I was just recovering from ICONOCLASM when Yu-ta dropped this on me. I never expected I would be able to experience it live. What I love from this song is that it feels like there’s a part of the lyrics reserved especially for the audience (Don’t let me down - take me to the end of life), that we can sing while Sakurai does his part. It is songs like these that really make me feel connected to the band during live concerts.

Right as I was on my second recovery from bass overload, they played BABEL (after some promotion by Sakurai). I purposely didn’t watch the BABEL PV until after I got my copy, which was to be after the concert. I let the band surprise me with a live performance, and boy did they overdid themselves. I loved the bass line for this song, which I think I have heard before somewhere on a different song but I can’t put my finger on it. (I also think Baby, I love you has a similar to rhythm to Enter Sandman by Metallica but my friends say I’m crazy…). The chorus of this song was also easy to catch up to. Before I knew it I was singing along to a song I’ve never heard before. By this time the fog inside the theater was getting really thick and I think that for the lighting to match the mood in BABEL this would be a song better played on the beginning.

Then they played BOY -septem peccata mortalia-. I still can’t pick a favorite song from Atom Miraiha No. 9, but as its live versions go this is one that I really like. I feel that for songs where they project the lyrics on the back wall, this is one where it really adds to the song (the other one I like: DADA Disco). I really wanted to see Imai play lying on the ground with his feet on the air, but this didn’t happen this time (or at least I don’t recall it).