Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama

If I have one bad habit as a writer – and in the interest of completely disclosing my own self-analysis, I have more than one – it’s having too many ideas. A published author that I met over this past weekend (Savannah Russe, author of the Darkwing Chronicles series) told me in conversation that there is nothing wrong with having too many ideas, and I have to agree. The only caveat is, there are unfortunately not enough hours in the day to actually put all those ideas to use.

At the time I am writing this, it is around 8:30 at night on June 24, 2008. I have a lot on my mind concerning things both at and away from my laptop. I have a novel manuscript I want to finish by the end of summer, a non-fiction book project whose outline and sample chapters were recently sent (with me hoping that they got there OK – electronic submissions are easy to accomplish but, unlike the world of snail mail with its delivery confirmation sheets and green return receipts for the mailman to send back, hard to trace the path of), two short story ideas that are screaming to be finished, and a shitload of other ideas sitting in various fragmented states on my hard drive – some of which were transferred to my present computer via a CD-R I had fortuitously burned as backup days before my beloved 2004 Apple PowerBook G4 achieved ex-parrot status this past St. Patrick’s Day. There’s a bunch of CD and single reviews I’ve been wanting to do for this blog for several weeks, and I intend to do at least a few of them at some point. (I’ll do one this week, I promise.)
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I originally sent the answers to Broomhead’s blogging survey right to him, but decided to share them here, especially with some other fellow bloggers in the IW community posting their entries publicly. Some of these answers seem like I’m giving variations on the same answer to variations on the same questions to me, though.

For the record, this survey goes for both the Pagoda and So Hot She Shits Fire. Also, for the curious, I liked Vee’s answers the best of all. (It’s a Cancerian thing).

Brian, I hope you got the results you were looking for with this survey. I’m curious as to see his summary of everything.
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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.

My new computer (a Dell XPS M1530) just arrived. This should keep The Pagoda, the Reina worship blog, and my writing career going for the next several months.

A new era is (reluctantly) beginning at Stuck In A Pagoda and So Hot She Shits Fire.

This morning, my beloved Apple PowerBook G4 died on me. The hard drive simply refused to cooperate anymore. It gave me three and a half years of good service before its sudden passing.

I had an odd premonition about the imminent demise of my machine over the weekend and backed up to burnable media the two items most important to my personal and (intended) professional world: my Microsoft Word files and my iTunes files. Everything else can be easily downloaded.

I am presently working with a borrowed laptop running Windoze XP and thanks to some bad timing (I’m trying to budget for both car insurance and my impending marriage in 2010), buying a new Mac will have to wait several months, barring a financial miracle. For now, future posts will be coming from a new Dell laptop that I will be ordering later this afternoon.

If anyone wants to start a fundraiser to help get me back to the land of Mac OS X before the end of the year, I’m all for it.

Stuck In A Pagoda is amongst the nominees for Best Established Blog at International Wota’s inaugural awards.

I am flattered to receive this nomination because of the company I am keeping, and yet I am also embarrassed since many of the entries that led to this nomination no longer exist, thanks to the ineptitude and greed incurred by “Vikki Stixx” and his Aqua-Net-poisoned hosting company, which seems to play second fiddle to his equally inept and Aqua-Net-poisoned oldies band.

In conclusion, as far as the awards themselves go… I’m rooting for my fellow Cancerian Vee.

The reaction so far to my previous post about Radicalquisling has been, save for one sole dissenter, absolutely positive. Thank you, everyone that has commented so far.

And in a further rocking of my whole f’n sock drawer, the lovely Vee chose tonight to surprise me with a new version of the Reina Tanaka/Robert Fripp banner for this blog. Thank you, Vee, you are a true friend.

One of our own in the J-Pop Blogosphere is in mourning right now.

Veronica Hoffman, known to everyone as Vee from Pink Wota, lost her mother to cancer at about 2 AM this morning, January 5th, 2008.

Everyone, please send Veronica and her family your prayers, positive thoughts, or whatever methodology you prefer to help get them through these times.

Here’s, along with the news of my first publishing credit happening next year, what Ray was alluding to at IntlWota.com yesterday: On Christmas Eve, I proposed to my girlfriend of three years, Tara Welsh. She said Yes.

The next day, if I hadn’t done that the night before, I probably would have eloped with her after what she did this year.

Tara had been teasing me with tales of how I was going to love the big gift she’d gotten me for Christmas this year. As I was about to find, she wasn’t kidding…

When I got to her house on Christmas Day, after opening the smaller items she’d gotten me, she told me to close my eyes and put my hands on the couch at my sides. I did so. I closed them tight. She went into the other room, came in, and laid this big surprise gift on my lap. When I am told to open my eyes. I look down and see this:

A GUITAR SIGNED BY IGGY POP, RON ASHETON, AND SCOTT ASHETON, THE ORIGINAL AND FOUNDING MEMBERS OF THE STOOGES. It immediately registered to me that it was a Stooges-signed guitar because Ron Asheton’s signature is the biggest one. I am surprised that I didn’t shit myself. The Stooges are, along with Morning Musume, my favorite band, and Ron Asheton is one of my favorite guitarists ever. At the same time Tara put the guitar on my lap, she also put framed pics of the Stooges signing the pickguard and the letter and certificate of authenticity on the coffee table in front of me. Seeing the Stooges picture really drove it home for me.

The guitar itself is a Glen Burton Stratocaster. Coincidentally, if I were to ever buy a new electric guitar, it would probably be black and have a rosewood fretboard like this one.

A close-up of the signed pickguard. From top to bottom, the signatures are Scott Asheton (drummer), Ron Asheton (guitarist), and Iggy Pop.

When Tara got the guitar, these pictures and a certificate of authenticity came with it. She framed the pictures, a very nice touch suggested by a friend of hers.

To quote my good friend Vee, “Tara will be great for you, for the rest of your life. …AND THAT [referring to the guitar] PROVES IT.”

Best Albums of 2007 feature will happen soon, sorry it’s been late in starting.

What happened is this… I made the mistake of trusting MotokoAoyama.com with a local hosting company since its inception.

OK, maybe that’s too harsh of a criticism. In fact, it’s pretty snarky. But here’s what happened.

Since 2007 started, my former server company began having a series of little problems. The problems included frequent server outages (including one that took this site out for over a week) that made me want to tear my hair out and go postal.
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