Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama

…to all the mothers everywhere… especially these two new Morning MILFs:

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And to paraphrase Brother Ray, it wouldn’t be Stuck In A Pagoda without throwing in a different set of Mothers for good measure:
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Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama just passed its 2nd Anniversary mark recently. I didn’t make a big deal about it for several reasons… For one, I didn’t make a big deal last year either, and second, the actual date of this blog’s debut has been lost in the ether thanks to the ineptitude of a hair-metal-oldies-band drummer and his not-so-wonderful web hosting staff. I’m guessing that it was April 8th, 2006 when I started this blog, while at the same time I am tempted to make the “official” date April 11th because last year on that day I got to see The Stooges.

Rather than go through some lengthy bullshit on the past, I thought I’d take a cure from the liner notes of Fatboy Slim’s recent greatest-hits anthology and list some of the things this blog and its author have gone through since I started this project:

Two webhosts (only one of which I recommend, Bluehost)
Three laptops (a 2004 Apple PowerBook G4 until 3.17.08, a Dell Inspiron borrowed from my mother, and my present Dell XPS M1530)
Two iPods
Seven Morning Musume singles (counting “Resonant Blue”)
Seven personnel changes in Morning Musume
Three and a half Morning Musume albums (the “half album” being the 7.5 Fuyu Fuyu EP)
Six Berryz Koubou singles
One and a half Berryz Koubou albums (the “half album” being their misnumbered (3) Natsu Natsu Mini Berryz)
Five C-ute singles (all of their major-label releases)
Two and a half C-ute albums
Six Stooges albums (two of those being the remastered editions of their Elektra albums, another being a 180-gram pressing of Raw Power)
Two Koharu Kusumi albums
Four New York Dolls albums (three of those being vinyl editions of all three studio albums)
Four Puffy AmiYumi albums
Four Mission of Burma albums (three of them being the new vinyl reissues on Matador)
Two Panic! At The Disco albums
Two copies of Flyleaf’s first album (one autographed)
Two autographed Sick Puppies CDs
One guitar autographed by Iggy Pop and the Asheton Brothers
Four books autographed by Henry Rollins
One book autographed by Sen. Arlen Specter
One e-mail from Henry Rollins
Two e-mails from Jello Biafra
Three day trips to New York where I spent over $700 combined in one store (Virgin Megastore) alone
Four visits to Apple Stores where I spent $0 (and wish I had been able to spend several times what I spent at Virgin)
Five day trips to Philadelphia
Two day trips to Syracuse, NY
One Stooges concert
One Bon Jovi concert (goddamn motherfucking fuck!)
Two Flyleaf concerts
Two Evanescence concerts
Two Sick Puppies concerts
One missed Puffy AmiYumi concert (goddamn motherfucking fuck!)
Two 100-count spindles of CD-R’s
Two Palm Treo 680 smartphones
Four SD cards
Two phonograph needles (accidentally broke the first one)
Three disbanded Hello! Project groups
Three new Hello! Project groups (not counting Kira Pika and Milky Way)
Two people parting company with Hello! Project altogether one way or another
One Hello! Project-related project getting released in the States (Yo-Yo Girl Cop)
Six Wordpress themes
Four domain names (three for the Pagoda alone, the other for the Reina blog)
Two different Reina Tanaka/Robert Fripp header graphics (Vee improved on the original)
Two years without Ai Kago
One W album that’s gone the way of the original version of SMiLE
One Guns N’ Roses album finally being finished and handed in (whether it gets released may be another story!)
Two knocked-up MoMusus
Two instances where I bitched about Nozomi Tsuji getting knocked up
Three instances where I remarked about what a lucky bastard Taiyo Sugiura is
Three snarky remarks made by me about Avril Lavgine
One snarky remark made by “Reina” about Jamie Lynn Spears
One snarky remark made by me to “Reina” about Beyonce Knowles
Countless snarky remarks about American Idle
Three American Idle contestants losing their recording contracts
Four Reina Tanaka photobooks
One tire
Two illnesses
Two back-to-back NaNoWriMo wins
Three book projects (two simultaneous, one on hold)
One published short story (”The Man In The Hummer” in Deliver Us From Evil, available from Jaded Silence Press)
All three versions of American Wota
One nomination at the IntlWota Awards
Two jokes stolen from Jeff Dunham
One joke stolen from Nothing Nice To Say
Reina Tanaka’s 18th birthday
My 40th birthday
Mike Watt’s 50th birthday
Iggy Pop’s 60th birthday
Several boxes of CD sleeves
Countless mouse and camera batteries
Countless VitaminWaters
Countless instances where I took to heart David Peel’s adage that “fuck” is not a dirty word
A year and a half of lost blog archives (Fuck you, “Vikki Stixx”!)
Not enough trips to Starbucks
More money spent at CDJapan than at Gallery of Sound
More money spent this year on vinyl than CDs
And one girlfriend, since upgraded to fiancée.

Came across this clip almost at random last night while doing a little YouTube surfing; a late 2004 TV appearance by Morning Musume and W. Outside of the presence of “Namida…” and “RoboKiss” in the set list, I can’t peg the clip by anything other than its approximate time of recording and broadcast. Man, how things changed so quickly for many of the participants in this clip:

Nozomi Tsuji became a Morning MILF last month. Kaori Iida will be the next Morning MILF next month. Ai Kago, depending on who you ask, is either exploring the Kama Sutra with that creepy old guy in New York, or planning a post-H!P comeback. Or both, for all we know. Mari Yaguchi left MoMusu a few months after this clip and is way fucking overdue for her solo debut album. Rika Ishikawa left MoMusu right before Mari did to be a full-time Viyuden. Makoto Ogawa went on an educational hiatus in late 2006. Asami Konno went to be a full-time student, but came back to H!P part-time as part of Ongaku Gatas. Hitomi Yoshizawa graduated from the band (and thankfully hasn’t been as musically idle as Marippe, thanks to Ongaku Gatas). Miki Fujimoto is laying low (and getting laid), holding up future GAM and solo releases in the process. Reina Tanaka, Sayumi Michishige, Eri Kamei, and Risa Niigaki all became legal.

It’s things like this that give me more grey hairs than I should have, even at my age. No real complaints though (except for what the fuck was up with those antennae Aibon and Nono were wearing?) - it was real cool to see this clip.

The mix CD that inspired the graphic of MotokoAoyama.com v2.0… or is it the other way around?

In actuality, I had the concept for the graphic first, but while I was thinking about it, I fooled around with a track listing in iTunes (one of the great things about iTunes and iPods – I can fool around with mix CD track listings before committing a final sequence to a CD-R) and this was the result, which probably spurred my making the final graphic for the site in the first place.

Doing mixes like this is second nature to me. There’s a Black Flag vs. TLC mix that I posted at ArtOfTheMix.org in 2002 (and was well received there, mostly for its sheer ballsyness), and back in the days of cassettes I used to put two albums that had nothing in common with each other outside of my liking them both on each side (Somewhere in my house there is a Maxell C-90 with Debbie Gibson’s first album on one side and Soul Asylum’s Hang Time on the other.)

Anyway, I might as well take everyone through this mix, track by track:
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