The Garden of Earthly Delights

We have previously discussed Medieval painter Hieronymous Bosch's famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (shown above) several times on NGS/Blog-Tick - not only were details from the painting used as part of the backdrop for "Baudelaire de Nemurenai" on the Arui wa Anarchy hall tour in 2014, but as I mentioned in my article The Cacophony of Mortality, Sakurai also invoked the image of the Medieval grotesque in The Mortal's song "Grotesque," and there's probably no painting in art history that's more chock full of grotesques than Bosch's Garden.

Since the painting is so dense with detail, most digital reproductions haven't been able to do it justice, and even those of you interested in finding out more about the kinds of scenes the painting depicts may have been stymied by everything being too small and pixelated to make out...until now!

Art history nerd Blog-Tickers rejoice: we are pleased to share with you this all-new incredible interactive digital version of The Garden of Earthly Delights, complete with narrations about lust, sin and damnation by an extremely grave British man (he even mentions Memento Mori!). Even if you don't think you like art or history, we urge you to check this out, if for no other reason than to search for the detail where one guy is putting a bouquet of flowers up another guy's butt. Also, we think we spotted some interracial underwater lesbian makeouts, but don't take out word for it, take a look at it HERE. Happy art-farting!

Above: Bosch details on the backdrop for "Baudelaire" at the Anarchy hall tour.

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The World is Ripe With Darkness

The Blog-Tick Phenomenon proudly presents!

An all-new musical production, with lyrics by Cayce.

Guest vocals were provided by our good friend Hollis Henry, formerly of The Curfew.

Mr. Imai doesn't know about this little tribute of ours, but we're sure that when his daughter finds out, she'll be pleased.

Now what are you waiting for...sing with me!

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Disclaimer: we don't claim ownership of this song, but all your cheese are belong to us.

This Buck-Tick Fangirl Flew to Russia, and You Won't Believe What She Found There! My Mind was Blown!!!11

It's no secret that Blog-Tick has a lot of readers in Mother Russia.  In fact, according to our statistics program, after the United States, Russia is where the largest percentage of our audience is located.

We also continued to have a strong suspicion that Buck-Tick based most of the imagery for the Arui wa Anarchy album and tour on Russian Constructivist art and Soviet iconography. But some of you readers took issue with this idea.  Soviet Pioneer scouts? Red flags of revolution?  More like dreams and blood, you cried...but you got us thinking.  How could we settle this question once and for all in a way that would be believable to our readers?  We realized that the answer had been staring us in the face the whole time.   "Pics or it didn't happen" is a generally accepted Rule of the Internet.  Clearly, what we needed to do was buy ourselves a nice camera, and pay a fangirl to fly to Russia to investigate.

It wasn't hard to find volunteers.  After paying off the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Tokyo to give us an expedited visa as an Official State Envoy of This is Not Greatest Autonomous Republic of Buck-Tickistan (an honorary member of the CIS doncha know?), we put this girl on a plane and sent her off to Russia to do our dirty work for us.  Isn't she cute?

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Now, let's take a look at what she found.

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First, here's the silver bracelet from Buck-Tick's Arui wa Anarchy tour goods collection.

Aaand....here's a silver star on the top of a tower in Moscow. Note the Soviet hammer & sickle insignia, for good measure.

And here's a similar star in a Moscow metro station!

And here's the same star on the wall of a metro station in St. Petersburg!

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Now, remember those groovy squares and lines from the Keijijou Ryuusei PV?

Well, here they are on the floor of that same St. Petersburg metro station (note the stars in the background.)

And again, in Moscow this time!

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Now what about that plane in the Arui wa Anarchy promo photo?

Here it is in a mosaic on the ceiling of that same metro station in Moscow! (Russia wins at metro stations, apparently.)

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In fact, our dear fangirl saw red and white lines just about everywhere.

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...but what about stripes? Stripes could come from anywhere, right?

Maybe Imai just pulled those stripes out of his ass?

...or maybe he stole them off the gates of the Peter & Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. This fort was built by Peter the Great to defend the Neva River from a Swedish invasion. It's about 300 years older than Imai!

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Here are some more of those stripes, pictured with the Russian flag, for extra realness.

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These shadows on Hide remind us eerily of the shadows on the headquarters of Ivan the Terrible's Oprichiniki.

In fact, Russia seemed to be full of suggestive shadows.

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But what about that final shot in the Keijijou Ryuusei PV?

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Isn't that what this tour t-shirt was inspired by?

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Maybe it was. Or maybe it was inspired by this secret passageway in the Peter & Paul Fortress wall.  I dunno about you guys, but for me, this picture certainly raises a lot of red flags!

Here it is in black and white, for good measure.

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Those of you who've been keeping up with the tour goods may have noticed that Buck-Tick have just released a new tour t-shirt. The name of this t-shirt is "Pioneer."

It's named after the Pioneers, the Soviet Union version of the Boy Scouts/Girl Scouts (pictured below. We do not own the rights to the below image.)

Do Buck-Tick's red scarves make more sense now?

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Pioneers were the subject of many Soviet promotional posters.

Acchan-chan wants in.

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All right, that's all well and good, you say.  Your lolita friend got a nice Russian vacation and maybe possibly exchanged star charts, drank vodka and ate selodka and pickled beets with Lyudmila Putina (here at NGS, even the lolitas drink vodka!)  But we still refuse to believe that red flag symbolizes anything other than dreams and blood.

I mean, just look at that bloody melancholia!

This is totally definitely not a flag.  This is SYMBOLISM, man.

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Well, we can't disagree with you there, and neither can Russia.

Red flags: symbolizing revolution in Russian politics since 1917. What have your Bolsheviks done for YOU lately?

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(For those of you who've been living a quiet sheltered life under a rock all these years, in 1917, the Bolshevik revolutionaries overthrew the Russian tsars after centuries of autocratic rule. This mosaic in Baltiskaya Station, St. Petersburg, depicts the successful revolutionaries hoisting the flag over the city. Look familiar?)

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In conclusion: this has been a Not Greatest Visual Historical Retrospective Photo-Essay. Special thanks to our Russian-speaking lolita-for-hire Maria Anastasia Hisashiyevna Sakuraina for her willingness to travel to Russia to make our dream a reality. We couldn't have done it without you.

Speak Gibberish or Die

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Hugo Ball recites "Gadji Beri Bimba" at the Cabaret Voltaire.

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And by that I mean, all the translations and lyrics for the songs on Arui wa Anarchy are now up over at Not Greatest Site, but you can access them from here:

01. DADA DISCO -g a g a b l u n g -

02. Cosmic Sex

03. masQue

04. Devil'N Angel

05. Baudelaire on the Beach

06. Melancholia -less electria than the other one-

07. Lullaby IV

08. TEQUILA

09. Satanic Sex

10. [file not found]

11. Sekai blah blah blah ken morioka and i are lactating this baby together

12. Once Upon a Time, Imai got High...

13. Mudai

14. Keijijou Ryuusei

Feel free to leave your comments here. Please try to keep your comments polite, concise, and constructive. Gibberish responses welcome. I reserve the right to mock you if you say something stupid. Word to the wise: if you only have something stupid to say, speak gibberish instead.

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In other news, we have seen the tour, and we can say already that it was quite something to see. We're not going to spoil the set list here because some people enjoy being surprised. For now, we'll just say...that song you never ever thought would come back? It came back. Like the cat came back. Which cat, you ask?  I dunno, I think he belongs to that crazy physicist guy, I think his name was Schrödinger.

Cafe Manduuka

On June 3rd, after enjoying the celebratory displays for the release of Arui wa Anarchy in Tower Records Shibuya, Blog-Tick & friends headed next door to the Buck-Tick Cafe event at Cafe Manduuka. This is the second time Buck-Tick have held a pop-up cafe event to celebrate the release of an album, the first being the NicoNico Buck-Tick Cafe event which was held in honor of the release of Yumemiru Uchuu. Though the NicoNico Buck-Tick cafe had the distinct disadvantages of closing at the young hour of 8PM and not serving alcohol, the exhibit was extensive, and included displays of the band members' costumes and instruments, as well as a Buck-Tick purikura machine.

How would the Cafe Manduuka measure up? There was only one way to find out.

On our way in, we were greeted by this giant banner, which ran the length of the front window.

Inside, the walls were hung tastefully with prints of various promotional photos, though due to their small size, they didn't intrude nearly as much as I had hoped on the dining experience of the numerous Normal People who had come to the cafe for no other reason than to eat food.

Though Blog-Tick & friends spotted a number of Buck-Tick tour-following regulars drinking beer at the tables near the entrance hall, in the back, there were several birthday party groups of Shibuya teenyboppers who looked to be about twenty years too young to have ever heard of Buck-Tick on TV. Though Arui wa Anarchy was playing on shuffle over the cafe speakers, annoyingly, when the various birthday guests of honor were presented with cake, cafe staff dimmed the lights in the whole restaurant, stepped up to the DJ booth and turned on a loud, canned, j-pop lounge version of "Happy Birthday To You," severely detracting from the Buck-Tick atmosphere. I strongly feel they should have played "Iconoclasm" instead, but no one ever listens to me.

The appeal of Cafe Manduuka's food outstripped the horrifying NicoNico black curry by a large margin, though the prices were high and the drinks were weak. Shop staff had been directed to hand the special Buck-Tick coasters and placemats only to customers who asked for them, so as to avoid giving away coveted Buck-Tick items to undeserving Normal People. However, it seemed a waste to actually use the coasters and placemats, so most fans simply pocketed them and carried them home.

As the album had not been officially released yet, none of us had yet had a chance to listen to the new songs, and we strained to hear over the din of cafe conversation, while watching silent clips from Buck-Tick: The Movie, the Day in Question 2013, and the Keijijou Ryuusei PV on the projection screen conveniently located near our table, groaning in unison as "Sekai wa Yame de Michiteiru" came up over the speakers. We took bets on which sorry band member was responsible for the epic fail this time, and all four of us lost - we all bet Hide, but this song is 100% Imai's fault. Sorry, fans.

And kids, listen good, cuz I'm only gonna say this once: friends don't let friends have babies. Reproduction is rock-n-roll suicide in the making.

Though it would have been nice to sit there in the cafe all night, they kicked us out after two hours to make room for more fans...but not before we got a nice shot of this banner hanging in the entryway.

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So how would Cayce rate the Cafe Manduuka experience overall?

Ultimately, while it was nice to be able to sit down and eat dinner and have a beer, I would have appreciated a bit more aggressive Buck-Tickery - larger panels, louder music, more bananas, and most importantly, TEQUILA!

Bring those tequila shots to the tour, guys. Y'all know exactly when to take them.

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P.S. For those of you wondering whether you will see Cayce on the tour, just remember, this is what I look like:

If you were convinced I was someone else, you're wrong.

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