ClaRK! Kent

Okay, Basically, this coming term at Uni I'm going to be directing a production of William Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors and I need some music for it. The main production idea I'm working with for it is cultural cohesion, both because the play takes place in a merchant's port (a veritable cultural melting-pot) and as something of a comment on globalisation. The set, costumes, etc are all working within this 'melting-pot' framework, mainly a mixture of European and Asian styles (see: Firefly) into something cohesive and 'one' if you will. My music for the play, despite having it visually set in the early/mid 18th century (the height of mercantilism) is fairly modern, a lot of power pop, punk, and 'Riot Grrl' stuff is on my list so far, a little bit like Sofia Coppola's movie Marie Antoinette if you will, and I really want to get some Asian music into the mix as well to keep the theme running through. So, basically, I'd like some recommendations of good J-Pop and maybe some other Asian music (I'm not overly familiar with the scene in China and such places, really) that I can sift through and find something useful. I'd like stuff that's upbeat, power poppy (my 'theme tracks' for locating other stuff were Lillix's cover of What I Like About You, and You Really Got Me by the Kinks, so that sort of mood) and generally guitar-based if possible, although I'm really after a whole lot of stuff that I can immerse myself in. Thanks very much in advance, guys.

Kou wins the thread, and a free hat. *The hat is not free. Yeah, I went there.

What Skummy said. I've had his Best Of on for an hour so in solemn tribute. It's weird to be listening to it and not attempting to do the funky dancing (it's all in the feet, you know) but it doesn't seem appropriate.

Hmm. My favourite piece of classical would be either the Moonlight Sonata, by Beethoven obviously, or Strauss' (IIRC) On The Beautiful Blue Danube, which is the 'space opera' music from 2001: A Space Odyssey and has been referenced in everything from The Simpsons to Star Trek and heavily ripped off in Final Fantasy VIII's space scene. As for more 'pop' stuff, that's a much harder one. I go through phases with a lot of my stuff, but the only person I constantly listen to is Bob Dylan (swerve... not), so I'd say something from either Blonde on Blonde or Blood on The Tracks... hmm... I'll go with either Tangled Up In Blue or (One of us Must Know) Sooner or Later. At the moment I'm listening to a lot of the Audioslave/Soundgarden/RAtM trifecta, and my 'current favourite' song is Gasoline, by Audioslave, which I'm playing to death right now.

Yeesh, don't get me started on Kent. Yeuch, in general. Almost as bad as Exeter - I went there to look around the Uni a couple of years back, walked around the town for a couple of hours to get a feel of the place... every single girl I saw was varying degrees of hideous.

She doesn't look at all like a dude. I'd say she looks okay, actually. Ringy hit it on the head with the 'Southern England' reference, I'd go so far as to add 'middle class' to that category and you have basically 9 out of every 10 girls in Brighton.

I hate Neighbours. I really do. Some of the women on it are really quite hot, but the fact that they're from Neighbours just gives me this really irrational dislike of them. Only the ones who break away to have the pop careers really seem to escape the hate.

You sure your wife will see it like that?

Who the bloody Hell is that, and where can I meet her?

That's who the dead link in K's post is. I say "meh" a billion times.

I can get on board with Kate Moss, although this year there've been a lot of new entries kinda knocking her off of my list. All she's really done this year is get knocked up by that dough-faced crackhead. Rachel Blanchard is hot, but not a patch on how hot she was like 5 or 6 years ago during the heydey of Clueless. Ah, puberty... *reminisce* Bilson, Alba, and Richards all do it for me out of K's list, although again I'd lump them in with Kate Moss in the "hot, but haven't done much for me this year" bracket, although I do plan to see The Last Kiss at some point so maybe that'll change for Bilson at least. Seriously though K, Jessica Simpson? Vacuous, obvious, and just... dull?

Post your own then That was supposed to be the point.

I'm not really in it for the talking. But, no, what does she sound like? Where is she even from, for that matter?

With the year nearly at an end, it's time to look back at the ups, the downs, and the mondo hot women that have graced us from celebrityville over the past 365 days. It's a pretty simple set-up: post your top 10 women of the year and why, discuss, and generally enjoy the skin-feast. I'll get you started, 'cos I'm nice like that... 10 - Olivia Harriman Probably not the best picture, but meh. Sugar Rush was generally a really good series, very fun and suchlike, and she played the role really well. Always had something of a thing for redheads, and she's got a very innocent, pretty vibe going on. She was in Torchwood the other day as well and looked really hot in that too, so yay her. 9 - Maria Kanellis What a find this girl was. She's got something of a different look to the average WWE Diva, which is refreshing, and she happens to be damn hot to say the least. Despite a good few new chicks showing up in 2006, Maria is still the leader of the pack for me by a garden mile. Plus, the character she plays is damned awesome, which helps. 8 - Anne Hathaway I absolutely hated her in The Princess Diaries, and I'd never really found her that appealing, so when my friends dragged me to see The Devil Wears Prada, I wasn't too excited - I was wrong. Hathaway has come on leaps and bounds, not only in terms of her abilities but she also seems to have grown into herself over the last few years and looks a lot less gawky. 2006's Most Improved. 7 - Ellen Pompeo A lot of people think she's unattractive, but I honestly think she's the best of the bunch on Grey's Anatomy, way better than Katherine Heigl. Again, she's got a kind of unusual look which I really go for, and she just looks very hot but in a natural, non-airbrushed kind of way. Which is always better. Newcomer of the Year. 6 - Paris Hilton From one end of the 'natural-airbrushed' spectrum to the other. I have a totally indefensible soft spot for Hilton. I know it's kinda wrong, because she's just trailer trash with money and something of a bimbo... but I can't bring myself to hate her. Maybe it's because she's pretty much a slammin' hottie? I think so. She's not had a bad year, really, and she's always kind of floating halfway up my top 10 list regardless. 5 - Lindsay Lohan Now here's somebody who's had a terrible year, both career-wise and in her personal life, and really hasn't come out of 2006 with very much as her 'BFF' posse have left her high and dry and she's in rehab apparently. But she's done it whilst looking like a million bucks, so yay for her. My redhead fixation probably biases me slightly on this one, but I have no time for people who don't think she's attractive. She really, kinda, is. 4 - Nicole Scherzinger The PCDs have had a pretty good year, they've sold mondo albums and had numerous singles that everybody's been playing to death. All of them are smokin' hot, no doubt about it, but amazingly the one who can actually sing is the hottest one, which is pretty damn rare in this sort of group. There's nothing particularly new about her look, nosiree, but she's hot nonetheless. 3 - Eva Green Possibly the best Bond Girl ever... nah, definitely the best Bond Girl ever. I'd seen her in The Dreamers and figured she was attractive enough, and very talented to boot, but I never figured she'd get the kind of exposure she did with Casino Royale, which has apparently made a lot of people sit up and take notice. She's a real beauty, proof that French women do have a certain je ne sais quoi about them, and she's had a fucking good year. 2 - Zhang Ziyi By contrast, somebody who's done basically nothing this year, although she did kick her way into people's attention in 2005 with Memoirs of a Geisha. Nevertheless, this young woman... moves me to tears. She really does. Okay, it's probably the borderline-Asian-fetish thing I have going on, but she's just jaw-droppingly beautiful in every way. Definitely a heartbreaker. 1 - Angelina Jolie An obvious choice, perhaps? Well, fuck it, she does happen to be the most attractive woman walking the face of the Earth. Yeah, so she's a bit nuts, I actually like that in a woman. In fact, Jolie is probably everything I look for in a girl - intelligent (by all accounts she's very smart), funny, talented, crazier than a bag of cats, inked to within an inch of her life, and also a SLAMMIN' hottie. Even the kids don't put me off. Plus, she's way better at the adoption thing than Madonna. So, yeah, EWB. Post your own, discuss, etc.

Those BT commercials with the guy from My Family in them, the ones with the continuing narrative of a young guy's life set entirely around BT's latest product. They're not big, or clever, and they just annoy me. Plus they're just blatantly trying to be those Nescafe adverts from the 80s with Anthony Head in them. Urgh. Any advert - usually Oust and stuff like that - where the sound doesn't even remotely synch to the moving of the lips on screen. It just fucking irks me. That Lynx advert with the guy and his projectile sweating. I dunno why, it's just very, very annoying. Anybody who doesn't have Sky won't get this, but - those often 5-10 minute long Time Life music collection ads, where they dig up a group of ageing soul/ballad/whatever-the-compilation-is-for singers to exalt the virtues of Nat King Cole/Marvin Gaye for a bit, discuss the CD's awesomeness, and generally use every trick in the book to coax you out of £40 for some crappy songs that nobody ever liked in the first place, with the odd Barry White track in there to try and justify the purchase. Ugh.

I'll second Hamster's love of the Spurs UEFA Cup run. All your bases are belong to us. Music: I haven't bought any new albums in an age 'cos I'm poor, but right now I'm listening to a lot of mid-70s Bob Dylan, some Nick Drake, Dire Straits, and the like. What is really rocking me right now is the Jesus And Mary Chain. I'd kinda kept clear of them, thinking they'd never be as good as Echo & The Bunnymen, but having heard some of their stuff at a party a few weeks back, I've been downloading steadily since then and really, really enjoying it. It's probably not as good as E&TB, but it's damn good besides. TV: Grey's Anatomy. Catching it on LivingTV at the moment, really enjoying it. It's not as dramatic as ER, not as funny as Scrubs, but it seems to hit a balance between the two for somebody who loves hospital drama and has always found ER and Scrubs go too far in the one direction. Grey's is a great balance. Plus, it has Katherine Heigl! Also digging The Sopranos, as I've only just started watching it on DVD, and it's just as good as everybody said. I'd always avoided starting in like season 3 when it was on TV, and I'm looking forward to getting caught up over the next few months. Books: Mostly been reading for my degree lately, but the stuff I've really enjoyed has been for a course called 'The 20th Century Novel & The Supernatural' which studies novels that use the supernatural and such conventions to discuss philosophy and theology, and most of them are very good indeed. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday and Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita were probably my two favourites. When I have a second to myself, I've mostly been reading plays, particularly Beckett and Simon Stevens, who own your souls. Booze: Hmm. Mostly, I'm drinking G'n'T at the moment, because it's quite pleasant and when I've been drinking of late, it's usually not been a binge and I've had to remain alert for other stuff, like taking rehearsals and such. If I'm going to binge, mostly going to cocktail-like places lately, so I've been developing a major hard-on for the mojito. Yum.

Probably been asked already in this thread but what the Hell - anything further than "early 2007" as far as a UK release date yet? And any reason why, if the Yanks have had it for 2 months, we still don't? Surely with the translation done, it's just a case of porting the code from the North American edition over to PAL, right? It never usually takes 3-6 months.

Hmm. I've been a bit out of touch this year, but from what I can remember... X-Tina - Ain't No Other Man. She does soul! And 40s chic! And does it well! Egads. A great pop lick and really, really infectious track. The Automatic - Monster. Insanely cool indie-crossover hit, featuring odd screaming guy on backup vox and more cool sci-fi geek jokes than is healthy for a band made up of supposedly cool people. Yay. Gnarls Barkley - Smiley Faces. 10x better than Crazy, a really great summer tune that had everybody I knew dancing like loons whenever it was on. Plus, the video had Dennis Hopper in it, so instant cool points. Girls Aloud - Their New One I Can't Remember The Name Of Off The Top Of My Head. umm... dunno anymore really. Damn my out-of-touch-ness. A year spent holed up writing essays to Nick Drake albums and my dad's old collection of vintage Dire Straits LPs was clearly not a year well-spent.

Hamster is, as always, correct. Sylvester McCoy's Doctor was supremely underrated and is one of the best of the 10. If you go back and watch seasons 28-29, the direction they were taking the series in during the late 1980s was very similar to how the Russel T. Davies era has been thus far - a more ambiguous, slightly darker Doctor, and a companion (Ace) who wasn't just a one-dimensional character there to scream and be rescued. McCoy also happened to be a great actor, who could play both lighter moments ("I'm fit as a trombone!") and the much darker stuff they were doing as a part of the Cartmel Masterplan later on. Tennant is a great, great actor and he's had 13 good episodes as the Doctor, but until he's done a bit more I dunno if I'm comfortable rating him against people like Baker, Troughton, etc. I'd say he has the potential to be one of the best ever Doctors, but right now... difficult to say, no? Surprised so few people have mentioned Troughton as a candidate for the best Doctor, as he was, let's face it, a fucking brilliant actor who totally re-invigorated the character from the ground up. Let's not forget that in 1966, they were doing something with regeneration that hadn't been done before, and if they'd given the part to a less talented actor than Patrick Troughton, the series would've ended in a year or two. The fact that he also had some amazing episodes and great companions didn't hurt either.

I'm Tottenham 'til I die, I'm Tottenham 'til I die, I know I am I'm sure I am, I'm Tottenham 'til I die! I also like to see Bristol City do well as they're my dad's team/I lived there for a long while, and lately I smile when Brighton do well 'cos I live there now. I also like AS Roma, Barcelona, and AS Monaco in European terms. Internationally, I support England and Ireland with equal gusto, dunno who I'd pick if they ever met, and my second team would be Argentina or France. I also enjoy whoever is beating Scotland at the time.

Mal: "Now, we need to know how much you told the feds about us. So, I've given Jayne here the job of finding out." Jayne: *brandishes knife* "He was non-specific as to how." Mal: (whispers) "Now, you only gotta scare him." Jayne: "Pain is scary." And to get some non-Jayne quotes in... Mal, after spending ages telling Kaylee off for slacking in Inara's room when there's work to be done... "Do you have time to do my hair?" "Out." Mal: "Hey, I actually thought I was defending your honour, and I never back down from a fight!" Inara: "Yes you do! You do all the time!" River: "You're afraid. Afraid we'll die gasping." Book: "...Yes." River: "We won't. ... We'll freeze to death first." *Mal gets off the comm with feds, who have been continually shooting at the ship for a while before even speaking to them* Wash: "Police procedure has changed since I was little." Operative: "I'm not here to fight. I'm not threatening you, I'm unarmed..." Mal: "Good" *shoots him, goes to leave. Operative gets up and tackles him* Operative: "I am of course wearing full body armour. I am not a moron!"

Some more Jayne-age, 'cos I watched the whole series/movie with my mum last week to get her into it, so I'm all wistful/full of quotes. "It's a code word, to send River to sleep. When I speak the words Etu Korum Na..." "WELL DON'T SAY IT!" "...It only works on her, Jayne." "Well now I know that." "They don't, y'know, cut it off or nothin'?" "No. I simply... I direct my energies elsewhere." "Like, masturbating?" "I feel so stupid, so helpless." "Yeah, all them years of priest training, and you get taken out by one bounty hunter." SING IT WITH ME! Our love for him now ain't hard to explain, the hero of Canton, THE MAN THEY CALL JAAAAAAAAAAAAAYNE!

Apparently, the major arc for Season 1 was going to be the continual chase of the Hands of Blue, which would finally culminate in like the final episodes, standard 22 episode season permitting. So yeah, we got halfway through. According to a few websites, we'd also recieve more information, or sketchy clues at least, regarding Book's past, Inara would stay as Mal refused to go anywhere she could get off (as happened in the comic book, Those Left Behind) and then we'd get Season 2 spent covering "what happened to River?" in a less "here's what they did in 3 minutes, here's the consequence" way than the movie, and apparently some more of Book's past would come out then too. Plus, Kaylee and Simon would've got it right eventually, and Mal would've gone after Inara. Or something. Essentially, minus the stuff about Book, the movie condensed like 30-odd episodes' worth of storylines into 2 hours, and did it without seeming rushed or choppy. The stuff about the Reavers was probably new, I think, as it made for a good movie plotline the way it played out, it kinda had a 'movie' pacing about it, rather than a lengthy arc. Whedon FTW.

Zoe gets like one scene with River and Book, when River's terrified of Book's hair and Zoe has to try and coax her out of the cargo hold. That's basically it. She's awesome though, she barely needs to interact with anybody on a 'deep' level, 'cos she's such a badass. Her interaction with Jayne is wicked. Jayne and Book is really good, I forgot about them, and I hate that they not only finished the series without exploring it, but never gave them any interaction in the movie, and killed Book without answering any of Jayne's questions about who and what Book used to be before becoming a preacher. Jayne is damn awesome, one of the best fall guys on TV in recent memory. The scene at the end of the teaser in The Message, where Mal's dead army buddy has been mailed to them in a cryptic and weird fashion, is priceless, as they all look in, looking very upset, and Jayne just looks confused. "What'd y'all order a dead guy for?"

I don't buy it. Look at his parents.