Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

A few important bird links, plus a beautiful one:

OwlsInTowels.org. (via)

How to pick up a duck. (via)

Woodblock prints of Hasui Kawase, an artist who was a major influence on Hayao Miyazaki.

… in a wonderful balloon

---L.

Subject quote from Joyride, Roxette.

Women Resisting Heterosexuality in Western Art History. More art history. (first link via)

Art nouveau fan art of Miyazaki movies. Another. More fan art. (first link via)

I'm not sure which is more insane in this video, the geology or the skier. NSFAcrophobes. If you need it, more insanity. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from "At Penhurst," Edmund Waller.

Our arthouse cinema's Studio Ghibli fest means I finally got to see Only Yesterday (original title Omohide poroporo, "memories trickling"). This is one of the two Ghibli movies that haven't been distributed in the US even though Disney has the rights -- probably because of the discussions of menstruation sparked by an elementary school health class.

Briefly: Taeko is a 27-year-old single Tokyoite in 1982 who is take a two-week vacation working on a relative's farm (her brother-in-law's sister's), which brings up memories of fifth grade and a frustrated summer trip to the countyside. As the movie progresses, the memories start to literally intrude on her present life, with her younger self and classmates appearing around her as part of flashback transitions. (Once, girl!Taeko peeks around a adult!Taeko's train berth, sees the audience, gasps, and hides again.) Eventually the reason for why that age in particular becomes clear, as her adult self is, like her early adolescent self, also on the threshold of a life change that she's not at first conscious of.

Ghibli is known for its lush landscapes, but this? -- this has the best backgrounds I've seen in a Ghibli movie. A gorgeous and fluidly animated work of cinema. Part of this is driven by the director's soapboxing on the importance of Japanese agriculture, organic farming, and the purity of rural life -- which gets, um, a little heavy-handed. That part is, actually, the movie's main flaw. (Significantly, the entire adult!Taeko story was added by the director/scriptwriter -- the original manga was just a memoir of childhood.)

Otherwise, it is a very good movie. Adult!Taeko is believably wise in some ways and still fumbling in others, girl!Taeko is indeed in early adolescence, and Toshio is adorkable and almost deserves her. And the climax, especially the moment when girl!Taeko shyly shakes her older self's arm, physically interacting for the first time, is moving. As is the final image of girl!Taeko looking after adult!Taeko, having been left behind because the memories are no longer needed.

It deserves to be better known.

---L.

An interesting analysis of the visual rhetoric of the opening of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Good discussion in comments, too. (via)

A useful comic explaining the transgender experience with a simple analogy. (via)

An awesomesauce alt.country cover of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice." (via)

---L.

It probably won't surprise anyone to learn I've enjoyed the heck out of the first 4 episodes of Uta Koi,* being a currently broadcasting anime adaptation of a manga of "super-liberal" interpretations of poems from One Hundred People, One Poem Each -- that is, linked short stories each depicting how particular poems might have come to be written. Despite the lovely visual stylizations, with bright colors, clothing with ostentatiously non-moving patterns, and rainfall marked by ripples across the screen, the best part so far just may be the depiction of Ki no Tsurayuki as a complete dork. "Those were not compliments. Those were insults."

It took me more time than I like to admit to work out the chronology of stories** -- the creators are sticking fairly close to known official history. ( Spoilery details gaze pensively at the late-autumn rains from behind a cut )

I'm impressed by the choice of stories for the first two episodes: Narihira's lesson to Yôzei about how poetry can be used to tell the truth slant is key to the whole enterprise, the elaboration of a sort of secret history for the poems, and they wanted to clue the audience into this as quickly as possible -- which could be done only once Narihira was established as an exemplar. (See also Tales of Ise.) Also, who Munesada/Henjô's poem was written about is kinda brilliant, in a couple different directions. I want to see where they're taking that thread, you betcha.

For course, part of the fun for me is catching the occasional unmarked reference to other poems of the era, outside Teika's One Hundred People -- mostly from the Kokinshu and Man'yoshu, but I suspect I'm missing others. (Note that the poem of Empress Jito that Yoshiko recites in ep.3 is also from OHP.) I'm pretty sure the stories stand on their own without this background, though. The references to some of the darker political overtones are more important, and they explain those.


* Link is to Crunchyroll, which works in the US -- I have no idea whether they'll stream outisde the country, tho'.

** Aside from Narihira's age getting misstated, it's is not as confusing as I initially thought. Tho' drawing all the principals as if in their early 20s, even when they're in their teens or 50s or 70s, is a bit distracting.

There is a scene about three-quarters of the way though Spirited Away in which a girl rides a train for three minutes. Nothing happens, but you don't care, because it is beautiful and astonishing and quiet and the emotional climax of the story.

The girl, Chihiro, is traveling with a mouse that used to be a baby, a mosquito-bird-thing that used to be a sorceress's familiar, and a masked spirit that used to be a monster. She herself used to be a ten-year-old brat, and she is taking a one-way trip* on the Soul Train to return a signature seal that was stolen from a witch by her friend, a dragon. Everything Chihiro has gone through and grown through aims toward this scene. That she is even ON the train shows how much she has matured. The rest of the movie is just wrapping things up. Which, yes, involves the plot climaxes of redeeming the dragon and then her parents from bondage, tests of her identity and ability. But her journey is capped by this journey. And it's perfectly animated, directed, and scored.

There's one moment that nearly breaks my heart: departing a station, we look back at a shadow of a girl on the platform watching the train pull away -- waiting for some spirit who didn't get off. Two seconds, nothing dwelled upon. A single moment, and then it's gone, as this is not her tale. Stories, intersecting, departing.

And then there's the music. I've gotten so conditioned, that initial low piano line with its simple progression of slow broken chords, sometimes backed by strings -- just hearing that makes my hair stand up. And then that descant that starts at the shadow-girl's station ... *shiver*

The scene in question (Greek dub, because you don't need to know what little is being said, really).

Live concert performance of the music, with composer Joe Hisaishi on the piano:




* We are told it used to travel both ways. So many implications in that one line.

---L.

An anonymous poem translated by John Brough in Poems from the Sanskrit:

My lord, since you have banished Poverty
From this fair land, I feel it is my duty
To lay an information that the outlaw
Has taken refuge in my humble home.

Ah, the lot of poets everywhere. One hopes he got something for his wit, and not banishment himself.

Remember all my blither about the Cross Game anime? It's been licensed by Viz, and currently being streamed from their website (and Hulu). The first volume of the English manga comes out October. Let's see if a slice-of-life romance with sports mixed in can sell in the Anglosphere.

The Penguin Book of Restoration Verse ed. by Howard Love - Now that was an interesting revelation. I've long admired Dryden, and had read Rochester as well as those Cavalier Holdovers, Waller and Sedley, but otherwise not much from the period, at least that stuck in memory. More fool me.

The Restoration generations were not much good at passions aside from scorn (the bulk of the love poetry is pretty shabby, aside from the smut) -- but they did wonders for creating a conversational tone in poetry, which is a lot harder than you might think. They then used this for descriptions of daily life full of vigor ("full of the thing," as Byron put it), for smooth narratives that carry the story along whatever mood can keep it flowing, and for satires that fit more disdain into a single couplet than most Elizabethans managed in an entire poem. Oh, and smut. I need to track down unexpurgated collections of Rochester and Durfey (or D'Urfey).

The heirs of the Restoration, Pope and his lot, took their achievements and formalized them, in more ways than one. If all you know is Pope and Johnson's sort of closed couplets, you need to back up a few years.

Angel Voice (Tenshi no Uta) by Kumi Makimura - Yes, the story is a fairly standard shoujo music industry romance, complete with love polygon centered on the heroine. But it's got two interesting things going for it: first, that the initial relationship tangles are not shown on stage but are backstory that's slowly dripped into the present, and second, that the concert art, particularly when Mayu is singing, is gorgeous. The best display of music's emotion through silent art I've seen since Nodame Cantabile, and more beautiful than that. (unlicensed, scanlations available through volume 4)

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster - I liked this a lot when I was, what, twelve or so. Now I'm more dubious of the didactic allegory that wears the appealing drapery of logic-chopping whimsy very lightly. It's rather telling that I remembered nothing that happened after leaving Digitopolis, and that's where the message starts to determine the events. The parts between Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, inclusive, where Milo wanders around hardly getting anywhere on the quest are still quite fun, and recommended for the right sort of precocious child of a certain age.

Future Boy Conan, ep.1-15 - When we saw a snippet playing in a Japanese restaurant, my reaction was "low-budget anime TV series from the late-70s directed by someone heavily influenced by Hayao Miyazaki." I wasn't too far off, all things considered: it's actually a low-budget anime TV series from the mid-70s directed by Hayao Miyazaki -- as in, it was his last TV show before graduating to feature movies. Adapted (I gather with some padding to fill out 26 episodes) from The Incredible Tide by Alexander Key, but really, what it looks and feels most like is a first draft of Laputa/Castle in the Sky, with especially Lana and Conan as early versions of Sheeta and Pazu, along with other character analogues. As for the show itself, it is, um, clearly low-budget and while the corners are cut with cleverness, it's still rather languidly paced for an adventure yarn. Possibly the most interesting aspect is seeing what Miyazaki does with a boy-centric story instead of his later stories of strong female protagonists -- though Lana can also rescue herself, as needed. Also, the toy ship? So. Darn. Cute. Especially in episode 8. (unlicensed, fansubs complete)

Twin Spica v.1 by Kou Yaginuma - The backstory: 14 years before, when Our Heroine was an infant, Japan's space program was set back by a failed manned rocket launch that crashed in a populated area. Asumi's mother died, she survived, her father, an engineer who worked on the rocket, quits the program, and the ghost of one of the astronauts became her informal mentor to her dream of becoming a "spaceship driver" (as she put it in first grade). And now, today, she is applying for the first class of Japan's new high school for future astronauts. So, a school story with science-fiction elements plus a ghost. In a by-the-numbers series, this would give us, well, a school story like any other. This, though, has a serious indie comix vibe to it, which makes sense as it's a lead title for Vertical's new manga line -- with a sort of melancholy atmosphere that's especially surprising once one realizes that it originally ran in a magazine that features bikini babes on the cover. There's a lot of Past hanging over Asumi's head, and over her friends. And a lot of future to create. Recommended.

Ôoko: The Inner Chambers v.1 by Fumi Yoshinaga - Oh my. Yes. This. Go. Read. Now.

Found handwritten on a bookmark at the start of chapter 14 of a used copy of Romance of the Three Kingdoms:

Desire spawns madness
Madnes collapses into disaster
Mankind never learns

The misspelling is telling, no?

---L.

Recursions and inversions that a time loop can reverse. Along various axes.

Sometimes, the levels of recursion are obvious: Bakuman is about the struggles of a pair of teenagers, a writer and illustrator, to become manga creators for Shonen Jump, the magazine that publishes Bakuman. The loop creates is short-lived -- to be replaced by interest in the struggle to become manga creators for Shonen Jump. The series is at its best with the nitty and gritty details of how the manga business works at the pressure cooker of the industry's largest magazine. Much of the rest is kinda meh, actually -- especially the boys' relationships with their girlfriends, which was almost the sole carrier of civilian drama until the recent hospital arc, which was as stupid as a bag of clown shoes. But the boys' creative lives as they learn the ropes, that's where it fascinates. Licensed edition coming soon from Viz, scans current.

For a better recursion, there's Omae ga Sekai o Kowaishitei nara ("If You Wanna Break Out of This World"). When an old vampire turns a teenage girl who turns out to be the reincarnation of the vampire who turned him, the power games make for interesting feedback loops. The story adds thematic texture with other reincarnation loops, and other short-circuits. Yes, in some ways it's just another vampire story, with very Western vampires, but I love that sketchy art style. Two volumes, unlicensed, scans complete.

Recursing in another direction, there's the time loops of The Girl Who Lept Through Time -- multiple and overlapping, most which ultimately get canceled out in one way or another. I'm not entirely sure it landed the conclusion, as the plot logic seems to have been overridden by emotional logic, but otherwise the plotting is tight -- as needed in a time travel story. The animators made good use of their feature film budget, too, without getting too flashy about it. (Though, am I the only one to get Azumanga Daioh flashbacks from some of the character designs?) Licensed DVD released and readily available.

So why do some recursions work better than others? Meta itself isn't necessarily the best sort, or Bakuman would work better, though when done well meta can be most excellent. Thoughts?

---L.

Since everyone and their grasshopper seems to do television posts, I suppose I should as well. This being the only current show I'm keeping up with.

Anime adaptation of the award-winning manga by one of the modern masters of the form, Mitsuru Adachi. His metier is the sports manga, and this is his third great baseball series (the others being Touch and H2) -- but that ... understates so much. He writes not so much sports stories, as stories in which sports are one medium for the expression of character arcs. A closer approximation to the genre would be "understated romantic comedy with sports". And that includes this series, which like most of his works is unlicensed boo.

The anime has been remarkably faithful to the manga, not only in the sense of sometimes storyboarding directly off the page, but in maintaining the characters as well as story's spirit. The pacing, especially, is pitch perfect -- not so slow that younger viewers will get bored but slow enough to develop exactly why we care about these characters so much. What changes they've made, aside from trimming Adachi's good-natured fanservice,* have been are mostly in two areas:

1. At the start of the of series, events were restructured to put the climax of volume 1 at the end of episode 1 -- which meant moving some scenes later, after the timeskip, to be presented as flashbacks. This on top of Adachi's common use of flashbacks as part of characterization. As a result, after a wowser of an episode closer, the next couple episodes are a bit wobbly as stories-in-themselves. Things shake out by episode 4, though, so stick with it.

2. Aoba, one of the two protagonists, is even better served by the anime. Specifically, the anime-original characters and the so-far two-and-a-half episodes of original story all serve the purpose of focusing attention on why, given girls' baseball is a growing thing in Japan, she joins a boys' team even though she can't play in tournament games. This question is somewhat glossed over in the manga. The anime hasn't answered the question yet -- indeed, it's only recently, now that Aoba has been excluded for the first time, become a conscious question for her -- and if the producers are any good the answer won't come until the series climax. But the result is already a more complex characterization of what was already Adachi's best female character yet.

(Added bonus: getting to hear how Aoba drawls "Kitamura-semmmpai" at Kou is delicious. Cranky obsequiousness FTW.)

The series, both anime and manga, are ongoing. At the current pace, the anime will catch up with the manga somewhere around episode 52, at the end of volume 18.** And that happens to coincide with my sense of about how much is needed to wrap up all storylines in flight -- the manga is currently in the middle of what should be*** the penultimate game. The final game, of course, will be Wakaba's dream: Kou, Akaishi, and Aoba in Koshien, seen in the anime's opening scene, and we don't even need to watch the game played out -- I eagerly await learning how its starting somehow resolves the four relationships between the five central characters and their attitudes towards Wakaba.

Anyone else following this? or just us grasshoppers?


* Not only skipping his frequent cheesecake scene-setting panels (bikinis, cheerleaders, sports bras, et cet.) but also removing the panty-shots from the handful of plot-relevant scenes that had them. The show airs 10am Sunday, prime children's market -- current episodes have been running a drawing contest complete with catchy theme song, with winners mostly 5-9 years old. No loss, really.

** Episode 25 adapts a couple chapters from the middle of volume 9. The latest chapter is from mid-what-will-be-volume 16, so another 25 weeks of manga serialization, including breaks, gives us almost exactly enough chapters to fill volume 18.

*** Unless, of course, Wakaba's dream isn't of the team's first game in Koshien. Adachi does like to play ironies upon reader expectations.

---L.

Oh, Japanese popular culture. Don't stop doing that. The output artifacts may be too much sometimes and exhibit disturbing cultural norms, but that's part of the charm.

Saint Young Men - One's Buddha! The other's Jesus! Together, they fight crime share a cramped Tokyo apartment while on vacation from their respective paradises. No really, that's it: two bachelors living slacker lives -- who happen to be, well, Jesus and Buddha. Manga only, thank all the saints and bodhisattvas. And a best-seller in Japan. A handful of chapters are scanned.

Binchou-tan - The name is a pun: binchoutan is a kind of charcoal. Make a chibi mascot for a forestry company, put a piece of charcoal in her hair, call her Binchou and use an honorific that's a cutesy pronounciation of -chan, and you've got moe dripping off your anime spinoff faster than the viewer's insulin shots can take effect. Bonus points for the lush scenery porn, though. 12 fifteen-minute episodes, all fansubbed.

Three in Love - High school love comedy about a (semi)-stable threesome. Girl A is an academic star, cool and popular type -- the sort who not only gets adolation and gifties from younger girls but who revels in the attention from her "kittens". She is also competitive to the point of being unable stand losing and has a longtime crush on Boy C, a childhood friend, so when Girl B (the plunge ahead energetic type) asks Boy C out, Girl A insists that he also date her at the same time. Girl A comes to like her rival, and soon begins refering to B as her girlfriend as well -- even unto imagining the three of them married together -- to B's annoyance because, as she puts it, she is not a pervert. Ah, the joys of societal acceptance of bisexuality. Most of the drama comes from romantic complications from other boys. Licensed manga, a couple volumes out. Fair warning: this was the first serial by the mangaka (she was much better by the time she wrote Crossroad) and boy howdy does it show, in the storytelling (we pretty much have NO IDEA why Boy C is going along with this, at least so far) as well as the incredibly scratchy art.

First Girl - Like all Chiho Saito manga, this is hard to summarize without sounding stupid (YOU try it with Revolutionary Girl Utena) but here goes. 18-year-old Miu is sold as a bride by her mother, a professional lounge dancer, to a wealthy South American to pay off her debts -- only to get caught up in revolution, true love lost on a wedding night, a military coup, dancing tangos for a living, counter-revolution, angsty revolutionaries, a boat trip to New York, drug smugglers, dancing more tangos for a living (on Broadway!), and ... that takes us only halfway through, but rest assured there's still more cracktastic melodrama, all it perfumed with (what else?) Significant Roses. Oh, and there's a dog, too. All five volumes are scanned.


On the other hand, I await the day when someone deconstructs of the magical-girlfriend-falls-from-sky-into-shounen-hero's-arms story by taking the premises to their logically destructive ends, the way Neon Genesis Evangelion did for teen mecha pilots. Because until then, we'll have to put up with the likes of This Ugly Yet Beautiful World clogging the id-waves. Gah.

---L.