Serdar | Genji Press

A common beginning exercise for the budding critic: take the work in question and create an explanatory parallel with another work. With Ghost Slayers Ayashi, f’rinstance, you could come up with something like this: “It’s Mushi-shi for people who liked that series but wanted to see more stuff hacked up and asploded real good.”

I keed, I keed. See, it’s easy to be flip when talking about something this good, not least of all because a) it’s loaded with all the things I savor (feudal Japan, fantasy elements derived from same) and b) it’s a solid piece of manga storytelling entirely apart from all that. Ayashi’s a good manga that happens to contain a great many things I already like, rather than it being a bunch of things I already like justifying the existence of the manga they happen to be in. By all accounts it’s the manga adaptation of the series of the same name, since it sports BONES, the animation studio for Ayashi, as one of the story credits. The other name’s Sho Aikawa—no, not the guy who stars in just about every Takashi Miike movie ever made (and good for him, too), but a screenwriter with a ton of venerable credits: 12 Kingdoms, Love Hina, Legend of the Overfiend (!), the criminally underrated Hakkenden, and many more.

Ayashi kicks off in Japan’s later Edo years—the mid-1800s or so, right before Commodore Perry’s black ships sailed into Yokohama and coined the term gunboat diplomacy. Edo is having a bad time of it regardless: a slew of newly-passed sumptuary laws forbid indulging in exactly the kinds of extravagances that helped drive a good chunk of Edo’s economy. Worse, famine in the countryside has forced many people into the city, which has become a hothouse of the hungry, the restless, the disaffected, and the newly-criminal. And underneath all that is yet another problem: the youi. This is the name the government has applied to various beings that have started to manifest—creatures of ostensibly supernatural origins, wreaking havoc on the peasantry and causing more of exactly the kind of unrest the already-edgy Shogunate doesn’t want. To combat this problem, the government has created the “Office of Barbarian Knowledge Enforcement”—a clandestine group whose mission is to find and put a stop to youi manifestations.

This week alone, two people I am on a first-name basis with lost their jobs. Both were with relatively small companies; in one case I'm fairly positive it was a case of belt-tightening that got dropped on his head an unexpectedly as it did anyone else's. The other one, I'm not so sure of, but I had the feeling the handwriting on that particular wall was not so illegible that he couldn't have made it out without some squinting. I don't think either of them were at fault for anything; everything I see tells me this is just another symptom of the lousy-and-getting-lousier economy and nothing more than that.

The last time I talked to either of these folks face-to-face was earlier in the year, when the economy looked shaky but $50-a-barrel oil and the implosion of the Rust Belt would have been seen as irresponsible doomsaying. And now I can only imagine what will happen in the next six months, although I try not to let such things preoccupy my thoughts -- there's so much to do right in front of me that getting mired down in a general sense of catastrophe isn't going to help.

I hate saying anything as trite as "we'll get by", but that's the only thing I can come back to that feels remotely honest. Somehow, we muddle through -- although I'd rather we be in a position where we didn't have to.

The last word I'll leave to my old friends Front 242:

We will stagger
Lose out bearings
On and on
Yes, there can be no
Obvious answers
As we move on, and on and on,
We must tremble
Lame and humble
On and on ... [*]

I haven't had high hopes -- or much of any hope, really -- for J.J. Abrams's "reboot" of the Star Trek franchise. It doesn't have much to do with Abrams's skill as a filmmaker, really. For me, it breaks down like so:

1. Star Trek, as a franchise, is creatively exhausted. It is played out. It needs to die off. But of course this will never happen, and so I have to turn to Reason #2.
2. The biggest reason for this exhaustion is Paramount/Viacom, who after Gene Roddenberry's death accelerated the franchise's descent into, well, franchising. They may pick someone like Abrams to keep things moving, but in the end he's bound to deliver them the kind of movie they want to see.

Devin Faraci of CHUD put it this way, in his look at some sneak-preview footage of the movie:

... something tells me that these characters [the Trek crew] are going to be about endless 'snappy' banter that's never funny and barely counts as dialogue. This is what screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman bring to all the material they write - terrible, tortured dialogue. They're blockbuster blueprinters, not real writers, and having them on this film is probably the greatest strike against it. ... They're exactly the sort of writers who are killing Hollywood, the writers whose ideas feel as formatted and predictable and friendly as their Final Draft scripts.

And that's the problem: "formatted" and "predictable" and "friendly" is exactly what ViaMount wants from Trek. They don't want anything edgy or daring or (gulp) new, because that doesn't put butts in theaters. Actually, never mind butts in theaters; if we go back to the algebra of the exhibitors being the real customers, what ViaMount cares about most is being able to sell the thing in as many territories as possible.

I grew up with old-school Trek, and I have an emotional connection to it that does not transpose easily. I'm fond of it because it is a product of another era, a time when people seemed genuinely afraid of looking forward because they felt like they would see only disaster. That was a time when you could put ad copy like "VALIANT KIRK! GLORIOUS SPOCK!" on the back of one of the James Blish novelization tie-ins and get away with it. It didn't seem silly or self-referential or parodic or wink-wink-nudge-nudge; there was no all-pervading mockery of such things that they had to fight through. People cared about the show because it was something entirely new, in both attitude and form.

That's why this whole thing just smacks of being wrong. It's a puppet play. It's not even a remake or a reboot; it's just another milking of a cow that was out to pasture a long time ago. And the fact that X million dollars is being pumped into it means that much less else out there that's going to be genuinely original.

The last couple of night's catch-up for NaNo / Tokyo Inferno came out a little better than I thought -- I'm still behind, but not as grotesquely as I was before.

One of the beauties of last night's run was getting to a point where I understand now what the story is truly about and where it is headed. It was a kind of cards-on-the-table moment, where all the things that mattered most were finally spread out in front of me, and I could see how they were relating to each other.

Something I've had to accept with this book is that it is not the book I started out to write, but that is not a bad thing. The book I set out to write was nothing more than an idea; the book you write is the book you end up with, and it has the benefit of being something you can actually shape and work with. An idea is nothing more than that.

Curiously enough, Janet Fitch (of White Oleander) chimed in earlier this week in the NaNo Pep Talk email with some notes to that effect:

Working on White Oleander, I kept hitting this wall, about chapter 8. It was all going great, all the wheels in motion, and then WHAM. I just couldn't decide what to do next.  ... Luckily I was seeing an amazing therapist at the time. ... And she gave me the piece of advice which has saved my writing life over and over again, and I will give it to you, absolutely free of charge. She said, "I know it feels like you have all these options and when you make a decision, you lose a world of possibilities. But the reality is, until you make a decision, you have nothing at all." [Emphasis mine]

When I was barely twenty, I was in what amounted to a doomed collaborative project with another writer. Doomed because neither of us really understood how to pull off or sustain something of the size or scope that we wanted to attempt, and because we were both fairly immature and hotheaded in our own respective ways. We had at least some idea of what we were going to write; my take was, let's just start writing the damn thing and, you know, revise it after. His take was that we had to get everything locked down exactly right beforehand, and so that meant endless rounds of actually writing very little. In the end, we went our separate ways for other reasons, and as far as I know that project hasn't moved forward an iota since. (And, from what I can tell, nothing of value was lost.)

I have to wonder how much of the hesitancy on his part was fear of failure -- or, to be more writerly about it, fear of having to endure the drudgery of rewriting. Not all of us are Yukio Mishima, capable of producing a clean first draft that would almost inevitably be sent to the publisher's in exactly that condition. For him, rewriting seemed like an admission of failure in some respect. Well, sure it is -- and if you can't admit to a failure of any scope, even a creative project (to say nothing of learning from the mistake), then that doesn't say much about you as a person, or a creator.

Now how the hell did this slip past me!? Director Barbet Schroeder has adapted Edogawa Rampo's short novel The Beast in the Shadows (in English; see Black Lizard). It apparently took a beating in the press, but I'm still wildly curious about the adaptation. Apparently it's a French coproduction, which makes sense given Rampo's fame in that country (although he continues to remain relatively obscure in English).

Really, this is where it all started with me. Before Godflesh and Merzbow, before Meat Beat Manifesto and Suicide, before John Cage even, there was Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte, recorded over fifty years ago and yet still sounding timeless. Our ears, as Cage himself said, are now in excellent condition.

Aside from being a groundbreaking piece of electronic music—probably the single most important piece of its kind, second only to Stockhausen’s earlier Song of the Youths (which isn’t nearly as impressive or ambitious to me)—Kontakte has something of the flavor of an epic film that would be unrealizable on any budget in today’s world. The whole of Kontakte had been made by taking electronic pulses and manipulating them on tape, processing them with a limited battery of studio effects, and then splicing together and re-recording the results—a process which took two years of work in the WDR Köln studio to pull off. Given that the piece runs 35 minutes total, that meant the average day’s work for Stockhausen yielded up maybe two and a half seconds of sound. It was the sonic version of stop-motion animation—or maybe Stan Brakhage’s filmmaking, which he accomplished by painting and etching directly onto the film itself.

I haven't read the Twilight books. I probably never will, at this rate. After all the negative press from people whose tastes I trust, the well has been poisoned so thoroughly that not even a Superfund cleanup would help.

What I have heard about the books set off alarm bells all up and down my critical faculties, so you can imagine my surprise when I read a critique of the books from a story-construction POV and found that other people were already roasting Twilight for things I suspected it was guilty of. One of the biggest was the relationship between the two principal characters, which sounded creepy / stalkerish in a way that didn't serve the story in the slightest.

Then I read this gem, on a board dedicated to giving the Twilight books a thorough dressing-down:

... just because something is fantasy does not mean it is unrealistic. The object of writers is to make you believe the story they are telling ... A good fantasy can utilize the idea of soulmates (like Richard and Kahlan in Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series) while still taking time to develop the relationship and the characters in a believable fashion. Attraction =/= everlasting love. Everlasting love happens when you get two people who understand, respect, and enjoy the other in terms of personality and character. Edward's hotness and Bella's delicious blood do not a soulmate make. And justifying the pitiful relationship development with "it's fantasy" is only a crude cop-out reserved for those with no understanding of good storytelling. [*]

That sums it so succinctly there's very little I can add on my own, but here goes.

The other day a friend of mine who'd read both Summerworld and The Four-Day Weekend mentioned that she liked Summerworld, but adored 4DW. The former was fantasy, albeit well-tooled; the latter was her life writ small, and there was so much in it that she recognized and was able to plug right into. I admitted that had been exactly what I was aiming for, but with both books: in Summerworld there's a lot that goes on which is outlandish and fantastic, but it's all rooted in real human need and behavior. It doesn't come out of (or go into) a vacuum. I don't mind a story that features people who suck each other's blood and turn into monsters. I do mind a story that would pretend the logical emotional consequences of such things can be simply hand-waved aside or turned into emotional pornography -- which, from the sound of it, is what Twilight's really, really good at.

People are not heroes because the author tells us so, but because the heroes go out and demonstrate their heroism. Guin is a hero: he sticks his neck out first when there's trouble; he takes responsibility for his actions when they fail and credits those who helped him when they succeed; he keeps his sense of humor about him; he never says die. He makes Edward look like the flabby, sullen wimp he is. Now: which one of these two book franchises is currently selling like mad?

Me and the missus caught a whole buttload of commercials and trailers for $10 each, at the local multigigaplex. Oh, and there was a free movie, too: Quantum of Solace. It was a good-if-somewhat-shy-of-great followup to Casino Battle Royale -- you know, the Bond movie where he ends up on the island with all those high school students all rigged to explode if he says the word "Moneypenny."

</joking>

For a movie that runs 1h 45m including credits, it was surprisingly jammed and edited for maximum density. I was genuinely unsure when I could safely sneak out to the bathroom, but my timing turned out to be spot-on: I left and came back during one of the two or three lulls in the whole movie.

There was no J.J. Trek trailer attached to the print I saw, amazingly. There were trailers for Valkyrie (which looked mighty neefty, Tom Cruise notwithstanding) and the new Will "Serious As An Academy Award" Smith flick Seven Pounds.

It wouldn't be a complete month without some new Criterion announcements, would it?

• Oh happy day! Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel, long unavailable on video in the U.S. (you lucky PAL folks have had copies for a while now), is getting the Crit treatment. It's a 2-disc set with goodies galore.
• And also from Buñuel, Simon of the Desert, a lesser-known short subject that Criterion's packaging with a 1995 documentary about the film to make it worth the full price. (I would personally have preferred this to just be packed with Angel.)
• Godfather of America indie / improv cinema, John Cassavetes, has long been served well by Criterion. Now we get single-disc issues of Faces and Shadows, which are about as essential as it gets from him. (Also be sure to check out the box set.)
• Before David Lean became synonymous with epic (shilling for ponderous) filmmaking, he directed ten other movies between 1942 and 1955. Hobson's Choice, from 1954, stars none other than Charles Laughton -- he who once went behind the camera himself to create Night of the Hunter, his one and only film. As Danny Peary put it, he was in the same league as Leonard (Honeymoon Killers) Kastle: a director whose batting average for masterpieces was 1.000.

It’s like a cross between a funeral procession, a live performance of The Doors’s “The End” taken to its furthest possible extreme, and the incendiary rantings of a street-corner prophet. J.A. Seazer’s Kokkyō Junreika (“A Pilgrimage Across National Borders”) distills most if not all of the glorious excess from the career of one of Japan’s counter-culture rock gods. It’s not a compilation record, but it might as well be—most everything you’d hear in a J.A. Seazer production is all here, in one 53-minute package. Invocations to the gods, tantrums, chants, Buddhist mantras, cries to the heavens, fuzztone guitar vamps—it’s all here.

And yet it all doesn’t sound like an embarrassing leftover from the acid era; it sounds ageless instead of aged. I’ve argued with friends about whether or not this is ethnocentric—i.e., does it sound that much more powerful and exotic by dint of simply not being in English? I don’t think so. There’s something about the way Japan continually transmutes its spiritual roots into popular culture of one kind or another, all without seeming to cheapen it or turn it into just another roadside attraction. When “outsider folk” artists like Shuji Inaba, Kazuki Tomokawa or Kan Mikami (a frequent Seazer collaborator) step up and deliver with speaker-cone-tearing vigor, they transmit something not only deeply felt but deeply believed. It’s not slumming.