Anime:

I am very fond of animation... all kind. I must confess I grew up watching the regular stuff on Tv: Anime and Disney.

In Italy anime arrived in the mid seventies... the most famous ones were about robots... or orphans.
I must confess when I talk about those series with my Japanese friend, they laugh at me, cuz I remember such obsolete stuff! Sugoi! he he he... Some of them don't even know what I am talking about because they weren't born yet!

Some of the anime main title songs were completely translated and adapted in Italian... it once happen to me to go Karaoke with my friend... and we ended up singing the same song: them in Japanese me in Italian. It's hilarious! Of course with time Italians built a whole industry around anime... and had their own composers and singers.... one of which is my idol Cristina D'Avena. There I said it: I love her! It's my trashy side, I like certain types of trash culture, it belongs to pop culture and is a sign of our times.

I would consider her as a popular culture icon. Most intelligent people despises her, children love her... I once was about to tell her: I grew up singing your songs... to soon realize she was not much older than me... or at least she did not look that old!!!

Anyway never say that to someone you like... I would never tell Harrison Ford, I had a crush on you when I was a child, that would make him feel old... and I still love my Indy very much.

Going back to anime, I was so otaku (big fan) of anime that my passion soon led me to reading manga. I collect manga more than any other kind of comics, I have over 255 titles in my archive, and over 1500 tankoboun in several languages! I sometimes prefer the "paper" version of a story than its animated version. If I really like a story under any circumstances I would have it in both formats... plus some extra stuff, I guess.

I like old manga and anime: on one hand they remind me of my childhood and on the other hand it is interesting how ideas are not etched in stones and that a whole society can think one thing and its exact opposite just in a matter of a few years. Take Osamu Tezuka, for example, some of his character would not be considered politically correct and he would use words like negro, yankee, and very offensive stereotypes of Frenchmen, Spaniards and Italians too. Nowadays, when they publish his works the publisher has to put a disclaimer or explain what was going through this man's mind at the time he was writing the story. Most people would find him offensive, I think it's amazing how mankind way of thinking about certain things change and set a standard for the times: we are now living in the age of echology, vegetarians, politically correct and so forth. When I was a child, recycling garbage was not even contemplated!!!!!

I love Tezuka, the way his characters are always so true to themselves, the way he describes how everyone is black and white, good and evil and no one is safe from tempations, mistakes, fall and selfdestruction. Most of his manga are as dense and heavy as a real book, with all the narrative elements in the right place. The 3 Adolf is paragonable to me to Art Spiegelman's Mauss (a comic who won the pulitzer price)... if you can give it a shot, try some of his manga... he is also very funny. Not to mention that Black Jack is absolutely amazing: you know something? Tezuka was a real doctor!!! Myabe he wanted to be Black Jack.

I will talk about my favorite mangaka (artists) in the future... and about anime too... now I need to write down a list of anime I want to download...

First of all I wanna finish d/l the rest of Slayers (which I already have in Italian but I wanna see in Japanese). After that I want to see if I can find really old anime...

list:
slayer (try/ next)
sailor moon (five series)
ultra maniac
last exile... maybe
Himechan no ribon
versailles no bara
glass no kamen
majo no jouken (this is a tv show)

Kazaa is so slow... and I am not good with bit torren either.... uffi...

will update the list later!

peace

WELCOME ON BOARD....

Being myself a pure pirate... and the captain of this ship, a log is most required.

I am not the kind of person who keeps a log, actually, but navigation always requires some osrt of record of the journey, otherwise there would be no proof that navigation exists and lands have been discovered.
It is important for the journey to be smooth, that's wishful thinking I know, butthe waves or the bumps on the road should not stop us from following a star and find a new bay or a new harbor to dock our ship and rest before we sail again.

Well, enough with the sailing metaphors... the Journey is the destination.

I don't actually believe people would ever bother to go and read someone else's blog... then again there's always the nosy kind... (I am a curious person too). If you want to stick with this log you will learn a lot about me, my journey and my destination... oh I could so write a book about it.

Instead I will write a log.

Deda