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And found myself in a familiar song*
Lying with one's legs up against a wall can get very boring unless you're an experienced meditator which lord knows I'm not, so I rousted out my luddite's walkman and listened to a random tape instead. (I can't do mp3s or whatever the latest digital is. Most of my tapes were made from obscure records in the 80s and 90s. Best I could do now is get one of those players that records to digital, but the state of my records after 30 years is not to be considered, and I have nothing to play the files on even if I did.)
Random tape turned out to be the Harlock sound track. That dates to the late 90s, that half decade lost to reverse culture shock, but references a much earlier fannish golden age. Not that I was personally involved in it. My sister was, and American friends in Tokyo, and I caught sideways glimpses of those mid-80s glorious days from her APAs and their conversation. The reality may have been excruciating- raw tapes if you were lucky, appalling butchered dubs as the norm- but the ethos, as reflected both in the fans' recollections and, oddly, in the gung-ho Harlock music itself, is of a brave new world and an immense buoyancy.
The complete ending theme is at
https://youtu.be/u7BFIAn9wug
Translation text here, from .mit.edu. Fannish, as I say.
http://www.mit.edu/~rei/MANGA/harlock-song
* More Than a Feeling was roundly panned when it first came out-- lightweight, lacking musical complexity, blah blah blah, as if anything 70s had depth-- but now it's a locus classicus of some kind.
Random tape turned out to be the Harlock sound track. That dates to the late 90s, that half decade lost to reverse culture shock, but references a much earlier fannish golden age. Not that I was personally involved in it. My sister was, and American friends in Tokyo, and I caught sideways glimpses of those mid-80s glorious days from her APAs and their conversation. The reality may have been excruciating- raw tapes if you were lucky, appalling butchered dubs as the norm- but the ethos, as reflected both in the fans' recollections and, oddly, in the gung-ho Harlock music itself, is of a brave new world and an immense buoyancy.
The complete ending theme is at
https://youtu.be/u7BFIAn9wug
Translation text here, from .mit.edu. Fannish, as I say.
http://www.mit.edu/~rei/MANGA/harlock-song
* More Than a Feeling was roundly panned when it first came out-- lightweight, lacking musical complexity, blah blah blah, as if anything 70s had depth-- but now it's a locus classicus of some kind.