Week Off

We’re going to take a week off here at HU. Thanks all for reading along with us through our change of address, and we’ll be back bright-tailed and bushy-eyed (or something like that) for the start of the new year. Hope to see you then!

Utilitarian Review 12/26/09

A little quiet this week, what with the major holiday and all. Still, we blogged away…

On HU

We started out the week with a return to my halcyon days of writing scatological prose-poems.

Kinukitty posted about the joys of reading yaoi novels on the Kindle.

Vom Marlowe reviewed How to Draw Manga: Ultimate Manga Lessons Vol. 5: Basics of Portraying Action.

I sneered vigorously at Chris Ware’s Halloween New Yorker cover. If the comments to the post aren’t sufficient, there’s also a thread on the TCJ message board devoted to the topic.

Richard discussed his reaction to the first volume of Lone Wolf and Cub.

And finally this week’s download included no Christmas music at all.

Utilitarians Everywhere

Over on tcj.com, Suat reviews Suat on Carol Tyler’s “You’ll Never Know”

Written in 1994, Carol Tyler’s “The Hannah Story” was a tribute to her mother, Hannah, and her strength in dealing with her in-laws as well as the death of her daughter, Ann. Despite the intervening years, Tyler’s sensitive “voice” remains easily recognizable in her latest book, You’ll Never Know.

At madeloud I have up the first of a two part series on Thai luk thung music videos.

Even more flamboyant is “Arom Sia” by actress and singer Apaporn Nakornsawan. The title means “Sick of It All,” and indeed the performer appears to have become so disgusted at her romantic troubles that she has turned to super-villainy, luring the Justice League into some sort of catastrophic defeat at the hands of a gay pride parade.

At Splice Today I talk about the overcarbonated new dolphin show at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium.

The most heart-tugging moments in the show, though, involve not the cute penguins, nor the noble hawk, but rather the trainers. Demoted from educators to props, they are ruthlessly dressed up in penguin suits or decked out like British hawkers or hoisted up on pulleys and dropped from a height into the water. Yes, they seem cheerful enough about it in general but good lord-it all seems like a rather cruel punishment for the comparatively minor sin of being a zoologist.

Over at Bert Stabler’s blog we continue our conversation about the book of Job, and discuss Stanley Milgram’s experiments, among other things. The quote below is from Bert.

Basically, if you lose everything for no moral or practical reason, whether it’s because God decides to destroy your life arbitrarily or because he can’t stop bad things from happening or because it’s part of some grand scheme for the betterment of the universe, we cannot ultimately hold God to account. He’s God, he’s not a limited being with petty motives. God is like a petty dictator, but he’s also not. He’s not a transparent, contingent demiurge– he’s a remote yet ubuquitous source of energy.

And at metropulse I contributed to a pretty entertaining best of music list.

Other Links

Tom Spurgeon’s been doing a bunch of interviews with critics about some of the best or most influential books of the decade. I think my favorite so far is his discussion with Kristy Valenti about Little Nemo.

Shaenon Garrity has an interesting discussion of manga translation issues on tcj.com.

And finally, I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I often disagree with Jeet Heer on most everything. I have to say, though, that this essay about representations of homosexuality in classic comics is pretty great from start to finish. The essay carries a lot of learning very lightly, and includes a number of zingers, most notably: “Like most professional moralists, Bozell has no real sense of history: he’s a traditionalist with no grounding in the past.” Andrew Sullivan linked to it, and deservedly so.

Music For Middle Brow Snobs: Sex Life of the Fern

A completely not-Christmas-themed music download for Christmas:

1. Edward Williams — The Sex Life of the Fern (Life on Earth Soundtrack)
2. Animal Collective — Graze (Fall Be Kind)
3. Suzuki Junzo — Ameria (Pieces for Hidden Circles)
4. Michio Kurihara — The Old Man and the Evening Star (Sunset Notes)
5. Isaiah Owens — You Without Sin Cast the First Stone (Fire in My Bones)
6. Amazing Farmer Singers — I Got a Telephone in My Bosom (Fire in My Bones)
7. Alice Keys w/Beyonce — Put It In a Love Song (The Element of Freedom)
8. Mariah Carey — Candy Bling (Memoir of an Imperfect Angel)
9. Ina Unt Ina — These Eyes (All Sides of Ina)
10. Antony and the Johnsons — Another World (The Crying Light)
11. Ulrich Schnauss — As If You’ve Never Been Away (Far Away Trains Passing)
12. Daylight Dies — Dismantling Devotion (Dismantling Devotion)

Download Sex Life of the Fern.

Happy holidays!

Xmas Samurai

Lone Wolf and Cub: The Assassin’s Road (Vol. 1)

Writer: Kazuo Koike

Artist: Goseki Kojima

I never read any manga as a kid. The closest I came to it was watching manga-based anime like Akira, so my impression of manga was that it was mainly about teenagers screaming at each other as they fought to the death (depending on the series, these battles might involve giant robots and/or cat-girls). And the manga digests were alien and weird, these thick, little books with black-and-white artwork.

Now I’m older and a little bit wiser, so I’ve decided to let go of my prejudices and see what all the fuss is about. But the sheer size of the manga industry, along with my total unfamiliarity with the major titles, has made it difficult to find a clear point of entry. And while I try to keep an open mind, I’m not quite ready to jump into yaoi. I’m sticking close to my comfort zone, which just so happens to include samurai.

Lone Wolf and Cub proved to be a great starting point. Set during the Tokugawa era, it depicts the adventures of the assassin Ogami Itto and his infant son Daigoro. The chapters in the first volume are episodic. Other than Itto and Daigoro, characters do not carry over from story to story. Also, each chapter tends to follow a simple formula: Itto arrives in some town or village pushing his son around in a cart, he toys with his target for a while, his target ineffectually tries to get rid of him, and Itto then kills his target and everyone who gets in his way. And occasionally, hot women remove their clothes.

Of course, there’s a downside to the episodic approach. Even having just read the volume, it’s hard to remember the specific details of any one story, and all the chapters feel vaguely indistinguishable. Like every procedural on television, enjoying Lone Wolf and Cub is contingent upon enjoying the repetition of particular themes and events. As someone who enjoys reading about samurai, I found the stories entertaining, but it’s easy to imagine someone with different tastes finding it to be a repetitive bore.

The art is actually the bigger selling point. Goseki Kojima’s style is heavily influenced by traditional Japanese artwork, and it’s absolutely perfect for the subject matter. He’s also a capable storyteller. Panels are attractive and uncluttered, spatial relationships are clear, and the panel layout ensures that the narrative is easy to follow. His talents are particularly evident during the fight scenes. Many Western comic artists have trouble creating the illusion of motion in a medium comprised of static images. Kojima is one of the few artists I’ve seen who can plot a fight scene so that  actions that occur between panels are just as obvious as those depicted in the panels.

As these pages make clear, Itto is a sneaky bastard.

The various chapters touch upon themes that will be instantly familiar to fans of samurai stories (honor, self-sacrifice, bravery, etc.). But the most prominent theme throughout the entire volume is the devotion between father and son that survives even as Ogami Itto follows the “assassin’s road.” Itto clearly loves Daigoro, but at the same time Itto is an essentially violent man, and he chooses to work as an assassin as he plots his revenge on the men who disgraced him. His love for Daigoro is conditional on Daigoro being worthy to follow in his footsteps. In practice, this means that Itto frequently risks Daigoro’s life just as he risks his own life. The potential conflict between Itto’s profession and his love for his son never arises, however, because it’s clear from early on that Daigoro truly is his father’s son.

But for all its high-minded pretentions about honor and family devotion, Lone Wolf and Cub is overflowing with violence and sex. At first glance, the book seems to be an uneven combination of high-brow Eastern philosophy and low-brow exploitation. This is partially deliberate. Kazuo Koike no doubt intended to explore the contradiction between bushido ideals and the harsh reality of feudal Japan. But the book is also clearly nostalgic for an era when men were men. Ogami Itto is Koike’s ideal man: strong, relentless, sexually virile, and honorable in his own way (and ignoring all the times he risks his son’s life, he’s a loving father too). In Koike’s vision of feudal Japan, there is a natural coexistence of philosophy, ideals, violence, and sex because only in this era could men achieve both physical and spiritual perfection.

So Lone Wolf and Cub is retrogressive and occasionally quite sleazy. But I couldn’t help but enjoy it. I may be a bleeding heart, but I appreciate action stories with great art and clever plotting. Here’s my favorite panel of the entire volume:

A part of me is offended by how Itto is so unconcerned about Daigoro’s safety. But a much bigger part of me admires the badassery of killing 10 men while giving his son a piggyback ride.

The New Yorker Hearts Luddites

I found myself reading this essay by Gorjus about Chris Ware’s Halloween New Yorker cover recently. In case you missed it, this is the cover:

And here’s what Gorjus has to say about it:

The children are literally masked, yet still engaging the world—going forth into that terrible night, mashing down on the button at the house they don’t know, mumbling and punching each other to you go first. They are open to the world; the masks are meaningless, the toys of children, soon to be ripped off to suck in the sweet Halloween night…..

The parents of the children wear a different mask; while there is nothing physical upon their faces, the reflection of their email and RSS feeds and status updates smear across their features, shutting them off from the world more than any Wolverine® latex ever could. It is, in one still image, a surpassing and comprehensive look at American society in the 21st century: we send our children out with masks to play-act traditions that were shaky and hoary when we were young, forcing them to play outside and make friends with the neighbor girls, while shutting down ourselves via 3G and electrons and Cymblata and whiskey more then even our own parents could manage.

That Mr. Ware has evoked this without showing us a single costume, or a single face, or truly, anything other than basic shapes coupled with a flat-matte color palette, again validates the dozens of honors that litter his career.

I’ve been reading a lot of comics criticism recently, as it happens, and one thing I’ve noticed is that writing about super-hero comics is almost invariably better than writing about art comics. That’s because writing about art comics tends to be really unendurably sententious. I mean, “going forth into that terrible night”; “traditions that were shaky and hoary when we were young”; “Mr. Ware”; “again validates the dozens of honors that litter his career”…I mean, come on. It’s like we’ve stumbled into the back cover blurb of a volume of contemporary poetry. The stink of reverence is suffocating.

Again, I don’t blame Gorjus personally. This just seems to be how folks write when they write about art comics. It’s particularly unfortunate in this case, though, because…jeez is that cover a drearily cliched piece of crap. I mean, Chris Ware sure goes way out on a limb there, using the pages of the New Yorker to sneer at contemporary technology and those who use it! Boy, I bet that was a hard sell to Francoise Mouly, huh? Imagine…the stodgy old New Yorker being old and stodgy! Really shifts your paradigm, huh?

Obviously, Chris Ware is a talented designer…but I have to say that personally my patience for his antiseptic blocky buildings and antiseptic toy-like people is pretty much exhausted. And, just out of curiosity, where exactly are the Halloween decorations here? Oh, right…if you included those, the picture wouldn’t be quite bland enough. Yes, yes I know that he’s showing the antiseptic emptiness of contemporary life…to which I say “feh,” and also, “yawn.” The bourgeoise literary tradition where you excoriate the bourgeoisie for their empty, lifeless culture by creating empty, lifeless culture — it’s been going on for generations, and I presume it’ll continue as long as two bourgeoisie are alive so that one can sneer at the other, but I don’t see why we (bourgeoise or otherwise) need to pretend that it provides some deep and humane insight.

Because it doesn’t — it’s just glib. Which is what this cover is; overwhelmingly glib, with the self-satisfied glibness that is the inevitable adornment of a real New Yorker cartoon. You could get the same level of insight from the crank at your local bar. “Damn it, cell phones…they’re ruining the world! People just don’t talk anymore like they used to!”

You want to know the technology that actually affects the Halloween ritual? As somebody who went trick-or-treating in the quite affluent neighborhood of Hyde Park, I can tell you that the mechanical device at the end of everyone’s fingers was not the cell phone, but the digital camera — except for the moments when people were using their cell phones as cameras, I guess. Because everyone was taking pictures of their kids in their cute costumes, for even in this soulless, technology-ridden age in which we sadly toil, taking pictures of kids in costumes is still the sort of thing that parents do more or less constantly.

Gorjus finishes his essay by saying, in reference to both the cover and Ware’s interior story, “It’s bleak, this world; it’s rife with cynicism and misanthropy, as can be said of much of Mr. Ware’s work.” But this image, at least, isn’t bleak or cynical. It’s nostalgic and suffused with easy sentiment and easier moralism. It’s a big slab of maudlin hooey concealed under a thin veneer of urbanity. And it, and its critical enablers, deserve to be hooted.

How to Draw Manga: Ultimate Manga Lessons, Vol 5: Basics of Portraying Action

Hikaru Hayashi, Go Office

This is a smaller trade sized (6  x 8.5 ) series and contains all new information, drawn by some great artists.  The whole series is good, but I wanted to focus on this volume in particular because it’s a lot of fun and would make a great, fun holiday gift for the budding artist.  It’s kid friendly (no nudity or graphic violence) but far from kid-specific and inexpensive (retails for 13.95 but is much cheaper with the gratuitous Borders coupon).

Each of these volumes covers a similar pattern: focus on a particular topic, pose drawing tips, some ways to express various emotions, practical advice on manga tools (like ink or tone),  a section on using layout as a tool to convey the topic, and some real manga pages analyzed with regards to the topic.

This volume focuses on action poses and expressing action.   One of the things that I love about this series is that they use both male and female bodies as examples.  The other thing they do is show the same pose from different directions.  Drawing the body from different directions really helps an artist understand the underlying anatomy.  This volume does a great job by taking an action and breaking it down into steps like so:

As I mentioned, some of these volumes include reference photos.  Here’s a great example of how to learn to draw hands and how to translate the reality of the shape (hands are darn complex) to a drawn image that works:

There is a good balance of advanced drawing to stretch the artist and simplified but effective techniques that should be doable even by beginners:

One of my favorite things about this series is the hands on pictures of real artists creating the pictures that are included:

 

 

I’ve read and enjoyed each of the volumes in this series.  They’re all good.  This is one of my favorites, however, because it covers how to draw a ninja on water skis and using a blow dart.  Can’t beat that.

Gluey Tart: eManporn on Kindle

I don’t have an iPod. My cell phone is powered by Babbage’s difference engine, and I only got a laptop last year. I don’t even have a digital watch. I am not technologically advanced. I am somewhat technologically reclined. And napping. But trainable, if it’s something I really want.

Which leads to the Kindle. I received one as a holiday gift, and it is one of my favorite toys ever, up there with my MacBook and my Hitatchi Magic Wand. The Kindle is an expensive toy – $259, plus another $30 for the leather folder thing that keeps it from getting all mucked up in your purse – and it does not multitask to any great degree. But it is admirably suited to my yaoi reading.

The thing that might make me the happiest about the Kindle is kind of shallow (quelle surprise), but here goes. Believe it or not, Kinukitty is not a completely shameless creature. Largely shameless, yes. But not without shame entirely. And I must tell you that sitting on the train with a sleek white tablet in a plain black leather sleeve (oooh, that does sound kind of exciting, doesn’t it?) feels more dignified than sitting on the train with a book that has two shirtless, muscular, waxed and well-oiled men twined against each other like the Lacoön Group , but, you know, suggestively. Ditto sitting at my desk at work (during lunch or some other officially sanctioned break period, of course). I could be reading anything. Something important and edifying. No one has to know it’s “Butt Boys from Outer Space: Blasting into Uranus.”

I also read a lot of fan fiction. A lot, a lot. And most of my reading is done on the train, going to and from work, or at work. I don’t want to carry my laptop, and I’m certainly not going to access this stuff on my work computer. In the prehistoric past – PK, or pre-Kindle – I dealt with this problem by copying the stories into Word files and printing them out. Many of these things are hundreds of pages long. That’s a lot of paper and toner, and one grows weary of dealing with all those damned stacks of paper – I have them all over the place. They are messy and unsightly and topple over occasionally, probably presenting some sort of safety hazard (unlike anything else chez Kinukitty). Now, I can put these stories on my Kindle. (As long as they aren’t PDFs – Kindle doesn’t exactly support PDF files. I just added one, and oy vey, yeesh, and Jesus Christ. The type is wee, tiny, and exasperating. I don’t know if I could have read it ten years ago, but I can’t read it now.) I can have as many stories as I want, without carrying around a file cabinet and using up untold tons of toner cartridges and reams of paper. The $259 Kindle device is saving me money! Since I didn’t pay for it. If I had, however, this feature alone would pay for itself in, um, about 13,500 pages, give or take a printer drum. Economical!

Right, then. On to the books. Not everything is available for Kindle, and it requires a serious commitment to Amazon.com. If you’re not a fan, or baby, baby, you’ve got to ramble, this is a deal-breaker. (Assuming the $259 wasn’t.) I have already checked out a good percentage of the yaoi and gay novels available for Kindle. It looks like the supply will more than keep up with me, but you could hit the wall as far as supply (possibly even if you read novels that don’t feature or at least allude to manporn).

On the plus side, you can download the first two or so chapters of any Kindle book for free, allowing you to make an informed buying decision. I love, love, love this feature. The book might sound good, and eight people might have given it five stars for reasons that seemed perfectly valid to them, but I want to know if it’s the kind of thing that pushes my buttons (in a good way) and if the writing isn’t so bad it makes me shake like a wet dog. (Just to be clear, this is in no way a problem that afflicts yaoi and gay novels any more than any other category.) I’m willing to go there, by the way, to a certain extent, if the story is good and the writing isn’t too bad, but I do feel better about paying $5 for an e-copy of a not-great book than $15 or more for a hard copy. (Ditto for anything that’s riddled with typos and editing stupidity, a problem that plagues a surprising number of titles now, from romance to literary fiction, even from the biggest publishers.)

There are also manporn novels that are only available for Kindle. When I first started noticing these, I became jealous and acquisitive. There are many yaoi and gay novels I haven’t read yet, but no matter – I could if I wanted to. You know? I wasn’t being actively thwarted. Now that I have access, though, I can think about considerations other than being book-blocked. Some of these things cost $10, and that’s wrong. Most of the volumes that are also available as printed books average about $5, and that’s about what I feel comfortable paying for something I don’t really get to own. Because you don’t own it. If Amazon pulls the title – which has happened – “your” book will disappear from your Kindle the next time you access the Amazon Web site.

But I do appreciate the overall comfort factor. I have always been the sort of person who worries about running out of things to read. On business trips, I choose to wear the same suit for three days so I can get another book into my suitcase, just in case I need it. I get antsy when I’m nearing the end of a book, too. What if I finish it on my morning train ride? What will I read on my evening train ride? (Welcome to the mind of Kinukitty. Please sign the guest book on your way out.) This will never happen to me again (assuming I can remember to keep the thing charged, which is hardly a given – in fact, I have already failed, in less than two weeks of Kindle ownership, but hope, like disgust, springs eternal) because I can store 1,500 books on the Kindle, and if I read all those, I can use Kindle to check in with the Amazon mother ship (anywhere there’s cell phone coverage) and buy more. You make your selection and they send it within a minute. I cannot tell you how comforting I find all this. Really. Although I do have a caveat. Many people appreciate suspense, but I am not one of them. At the first hint of suspense, I flip ahead to see what’s going to happen, and then I go back and actually read the book. The Kindle does not really encourage this sort of behavior. In fact, the Kindle makes it pretty much impossible. It takes about three screens to read a page, I think (I haven’t done the math, but that’s my sense of things), and there’s no way to flip through to the end easily. At times, this feels like not having a left hand or something. I’ll probably manage, though.

I could tell you more about the Kindle, believe it or not – there’s an on-board dictionary! – but I am not without pity, either. And, in an attempt to actually be useful, I will mention a couple of novels I think the Kindle-having yaoi lover should check out: Zero at the Bone, by Jane Seville, and the annoyingly named St. Nacho’s by Z.A. Maxfield. (Although both are available in print, I think.) I also got sucked into a vampire novel (ha! good one, right?) by Z.A. Maxfield, called Notturno, and it looks pretty good, but I’ve only read the two sample chapters. I bought it, though. Same with HaveMercy by Danielle Bennett and Jaia Jones. I can see both of those going horribly wrong in the next chapter or two, but, you know, you can’t win if you don’t play. (Forget about manga, though – it’s available on Kindle, but it shouldn’t be. Holy bifocals, Batman, that’s a small screen for a full page of art. To say nothing of the type – I don’t know who the hell could read that. Just – no.) (Did I download a manga, just to check? Of course I did. It’s like you don’t even know me.)

My general feeling about this whole thing is that the Kindle is cool and well designed but, really, $259? Are you freaking kidding? Nobody needs a portable reading device. (I think just about anybody would agree with me here, but I have to mention that I felt the same way about CD players for the first, oh, ten years.) But if someone asks if you’d like one for Christmas? Say yes.