The art is lovely, the story is evocative, but it brings up a problem I’ve noticed in some graphic novels — density.
It’s short story in a book format. Nothing wrong about that, but it left me feeling a little empty. One might argue that Dahm preserved liminal spaces for the reader to insert themselves, but I’m not yet ready to give it the benefit of the doubt.
Part of the problem may be that it’s a serialized piece of fiction. Maybe the openness was to make room for the author to infill in future volumes.
Still, this book is a fun read, worth checking out at the library. Maybe my opinion will shift after I’ve read volumes 2 and 3. I’ve put them on hold at the library, it’s certainly earned that.
The knives in our house were ridiculously dull, so I finally took took to the internet. YouTube did not fail*.
As with any varied collection of DIY videos, I was confronted with a conflicting advice that could have frozen me to inaction**. I could have been intimidated by my lack of good equipment. Fortunately, the knives were so dull I was forced to do something.
I started with 5 pounds of pressure**** on each side. Try putting that much pressure on a kitchen scale. No joke. Once a blade was back to mediocre, I ran descending passes (ten to one) on both sides of knife on both sides of the whetstone — 220 in total for this second phase.
Repeat that process for a house full of knives. My forearms were sore***** the next day.
But I had a meat cleaver that could cut paper******.
**On the other hand, the algorithm fed me videos sharpening the silliest things, like a cardboard box. At least my knives were made of metal.
***Two years later and I’m still using our cheap whetstone. I should spend a $40 Japanese whetstone to see what I’m missing. But that would force me to buy at least one knife that cost as much as the stone…and that’s how the damn hedonic treadmill gets started.
****Burrfection recommends against putting so much weight on a knife while grinding. Pick your poison.
*****I now use my legs in an extremely shallow “bow and arrow stance” to shift my whole body back and forth, minimizing the effort in my arms. That’s about the extent of my martial arts now.
******After writing the initial draft, I chopped up a batch of bad apples for composting. Wow, the new knives were scary sharp. I didn’t notice the seeds as I sliced through the cores.
*******I sharpen the kitchen knives about every other month whenever my wife makes a big meat purchase from Costco. I don’t know how we lived years with such dull blades.
Two years ago, I wrote these sentences to start my notes:
Awesome psychological thriller anime by the legendary director. Highly recommended, available for free (with ads) on Funimation.
All that I remember now:
That was a fucking crazy show.
~
Paranoia Agent hit my key checkboxes at the time.
Genera fiction: Detective, Fantasy, Slice of Life, Horror. A collage with everything.
Auteur: Narrative told in a quirky way with an open ended resolution.
Weird: A crazy story that toys with artistic effects and taps my favorite gimmick — busting the fourth wall.
~
If you haven’t seen anything by Satoshi Kon before, here is a 1 minute short to whet your appetite.
~
Since this was the last piece of Satoshi Kon’s catalog, I should rank his major. It happens to follow the path of heartwarming at the top to darkness at the bottom. But Perfect Blue is still better than almost any other anime film you could watch, it’s a classic like Jin-Roh and competes with the best in Ghibli’s catalog. All are highly recommended.
Tokyo Godfathers
Millennium Actress
Paranoia Agent
Paprika
Perfect Blue
Here is an hour long retrospective of his catalog.
~
Paranoia Agent is a wacky piece, but after watching a couple reviews of the series on YouTube, I agree that it falls in in line with the rest of Satoshi Kon’s catalog.
It’s a mind bending animation that explores the intersection of delusion and media. Kon explores the idea that our brains and our realities exist on different planes which are mediated by mass media. As one review said, it’s an “animated fever dream”.
However, I heard two critiques that are worth countering.
Someone wondered on a podcast if Satoshi Kon lost control along the way. I agree that Kon plays a high wire act where everything spins all over the place. Midway through the series you’re praying that it all comes back together. But he never lost command of the story. The trajectory could have ended badly but he pulled it off.
Also another reviewer thought that a couple of the tangents felt like filler. At a macro level, any narrative could be boiled down to a simple sentence, but the reviewer didn’t mention which episodes could be cut. Since nothing felt like filler to me, I’d say that the show hit its 13 episode length perfectly. This was an expansive, twisted universe that didn’t overstay its welcome.
~
Here is the my ranking of the anime series I had watched:
Mindbending favorites: Space Dandy, Paranoia Agent
Fun Classics: Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Hilda
Almost Classic: Arcane, Cyberpunk Edgerunners
Decent with weaknesses: Kids on the Slope, Kipo and the Wonderbeasts, Terror in Resonance
WTF, but still worth watching: Neo Genesis Evangelion
Flawed with a few great moments: Carole and Tuesday
Honorable Mention (no storyline): Love Death + Robots
Will I watch rewatch Paranoia Agent anytime soon? I doubt it. I moved on after spending a couple of days scrolling through YouTube commentaries. It takes a lot for me to commit to longform media — my protestant work ethic doesn’t allow me to do regularly indulge in such unproductive activities, even if I already know I’ll love it.
If I were to rewatch anything on that list, it would be Space Dandy. That show hits all the wild stuff with a comedic edge, which my wimpy self prefers over the light horror of Paranoia Agent.
Ultimately, both Paranoia Agent and Space Dandy are great works that routinely surprised me. More often than not, I’d end an episode with my jaw agape, OMG what did I just see?! That wuz fucking Brilliant!?!!
What more can you ask for at 22 minutes a pop?
~
If all this didn’t do it for you, then at least check out the opening and ending credits that was played for each of the shows, with music by the incomparable Susumu Hirasawa (who also composed the excellent Paprika soundtrack)
Opus is Kon’s famously unfinished manga. He was lured away by the big screen and then tragically snatched away by pancreatic cancer.
I had mediocre expectations for an incomplete work by someone who earned their fame in a different medium. Wrong. This book is great, especially with the rough pencil-sketch coda that was discovered after his passing.
I’m a sucker for authorial gimmicks and the conceit of the artist being dragged into his own story was handled expertly. Given that this was written before he started making movies, I would have forgiven a ham-fisted approach by a young creator (Grant Morrison was mediocre in Animal Man), but Satoshi Kon had already developed a strong command of the craft, which was further distilled in his animated work.
No doubt, this book is famous because of its legendary creator. But it should be more famous than it is. Opus stands on its own.
~
I first read this as an ebook on my iPad. I finally bought it for my birthday. So much better reading it on paper!
However, the story has a dark plot twist. The art isn’t graphic, but it’s not suitable for young children, so I hid the book (along with my Sandman graphic novels).
We moved to Vegas ten years ago but still haven’t settled into a permanent home. One day, we’ll find that home, and I’ll build nice bookshelves to display all the boxes of books that have spent the past decade in our in-law’s garage. By the time that happens, the kids will be old enough to read these novels…if they’re still at home!
~
After cleaning up this two year old draft for publication, we went to the library. My daughter handed me The Panda Problem by Deborah Underwood and Hannah Marks. Now that’s breaking the fourth wall!
Synchronicity is all around you! <insert CTA here>
One thing my parents nailed was their Pareto Principle approach towards clothing. (If flashy isn’t the goal, 20% of the effort gets 80% of the results.)
As a man, it’s easy to be decent — button-down shirt, slacks, and dark non-sneaker shoes. That should work for anything outside of a wedding, job interview, funeral, or legislative hearing. (It’s also the most comfortable way to dress.)
I blend in by making sure I’m not the most underdressed guy in the room. If in doubt, I’ve got a cheap sports coat stashed in the trunk of my car, and I slap on a tie. (Yuck…Tuck in that darn shirt…Double Yuck.)
I wear the clothes until they wear out, and then I wear them around the house until they fall apart. Then I thank the rags and move on to the next Costco special or hand-me-down. (I recently got a haul from my retired uncle.)
We’ve been a couple of weeks away from camping, for years.
Last year, we slept in the backyard to test the tent, the sleeping bags, and pads, and stayed properly indoors for the rest of summer.
The year before, we spent Memorial Day weekend testing the kampMATE firebox. It’s a simple contraption: five interlocking stainless steel plates that create a small wood cooktop.
On Friday, we learned that harnessing one of the four elements takes a learning curve! We’ve never cooked with fire before, so we wasted wood to boil water and scramble eggs.
My mother-in-law stepped in the next day. Unlike pampered Americans, she grew up cooking with coals. She danced between wood scraps and charcoal briquettes to build a proper fire. We stir-fried ground pork, added white beans, and stewed for an hour. We switched pots to cook rice. After the rice was cooked, we reheated the stew with cauliflower. It was a legitimate meal, but it took forever. We used 42 briquettes.
On Sunday, I started the fire using charcoal, paper, and dried leaves. We made a savory stew with stir-fried onions, garlic, sweet potatoes, and garbanzo beans. Surprisingly good; more surprising than good. The meal was supplemented with veggies and rice cooked in the house as the stew simmered for two hours. We used 20 briquettes.
We celebrated Memorial Day with an all-American chili. We filled the box with rocks to pushing the charcoal up to the pot. Unfortunately, the red beans were uncooperative and took hours to soften so it still took 20 briquettes.
We closed the long weekend buying a dutch oven from Home Depot. We planned one-pot meals by adding rice to the stews and watched outdoor bread baking videos.
The firebox spent the summer in the sun before moving permanently into the shed. (The dutch oven is a cast iron bread box on the kitchen island.)
Still, $25 was a cheap diversion for a long weekend.
I wonder when we’ll go camping, two weekends from whenever.
The story of man versus fauna in America is a dreary one, starting with the ancient forebears who came across the Bering Straits, the spread of Europeans in the 1800’s, and the industrialization of death in the 1900’s.
The one bright spot amidst the devastation has been the coyote, which has used its persecution in the 20th century to spread throughout the nation, entering its final state (Delaware) in the continental United States during the 2010’s.
Having evolved as both predator and prey, they can’t rely upon their alpha physique like wolves. Instead, coyotes are whip-smart. They’ve developed a unique social mobility with “Fission-Fusion” tactics, being pack animals when it suited them and becoming loners if necessary. Howling is their means of long distance communication, which influences the local coyote density affecting their litter sizes (ranging from two to nineteen!).
Aside litters from nineteen, the coyote’s story is quite similar to ours — chatty creatures in the middle of the food chain with a wide range of social flexibility.
Unfortunately, we also mirror the coyote’s ingeniousness with our deranged attempts to eradicate these “prairie wolves”. It’s a story of brash humans coalescing government power, aiding corporate cronies with cruel policies. As always, it’s appalling to read about our blindness to the destructiveness of our obsessions, even if things have slightly improved with the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970’s.
Through it all, the coyote survived and spread. It was ranked lower than a cockroach in the 1950’s opinion polls. Now it has admirers among city slicker liberals. It is regaining its place as an avatar god of this land, even among the colonizers of this new world.
Unlike most nature books, this one does not end on a dreary note. But that’s no credit to us. Almost every other creature has disappeared under such slaughter. This time, we’ve been outwitted by the trickster, much to our delight.
~
I started the audiobook at 1.5x but slowed down to 1.0x before the introduction was over. Even though the high speed narration was perfectly intelligible, some books are meant to be savored. It would be disrespectful to rush through such a well told story.
I wrote the initial draft of this note this two years ago and publishing this post reminds me to listen to it again. It’s still a two month wait at the library, not bad for a book that’s been out for seven years.
~
As a complete tangent, I just stumbled across the album Prairiewolf. It has nothing to do with coyotes, but it’s a chill groove and I hate to ignore synchronicities.
Both of these games are stuck in the mediocre middle. They have decent components and a reasonable starting concepts, but they don’t create compelling experiences.
The kids enjoyed them for a moment, but they’re just OK. With tweaks, I suspect we could unearth a decent game within the pieces.
These perfectly middlin’ products make me ponder my own career. It feels unfair to demand excellence from my purchases but not from myself.
I’m good at what I do. I put in the best effort I got while I’m at the office, but I’m not willing to sacrifice the time to get to the “next level”.
Should I be chasing something beyond the horizon? Am I maximizing my potential? Am I making the most of this time?
Maybe, the questions shouldn’t be applied to work. I’m in a good spot at work, do I really have to press for more? If I was single and unattached, maybe the pursuit of career greatness would be warranted. It could be a great way to serve the world and enrich myself. Heck, it might be worth a big roll of the dice.
Is there an epic quest waiting for me?
Sounds enticing, but I’m not skipping out on my kids to find out.
99 Variations on a Proof, Philip Ordlin (the last two were recommendations from post.news over the past few months)
Not shown:
In the West, Avedon, a big birthday splurge (let’s hope the “cheap” $100 copy from Amazon isn’t totally beat up when it arrives)
How to Say Goodbye, Wendy MacNaughton. The preorder was just announced. Unfortunately this subject will be all too relevant as I cross through my mid 40’s.
Absolutely on Music, Murakami & Ozawa
I Think, Therefore I Draw, Cathcart & Klein (the last two were lucky library finds from yesterday’s excursion).
