Author Archives: Tom Crippen

Impulsive Prediction

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UPDATE: The AFL-CIO had already confirmed the offer.
UPDATE 2:  Bad news for my prediction, though not good news for the GOP.
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Political Animal links to a Greg Sargent bit. Supposedly, the AFL-CIO has told Arlen Specter they’ll back him in his next election if he votes for the Employee Free Choice Act. The idea is that he may jump parties and become a Democrat. My reflex judgment is, yes, he’ll change parties. I saw Bill O’Reilly on the Daily Show in November, and he was saying that basically his outlook was anarchist. These days you can go on national tv and say you’re an anarchist, and that’s better than saying you’re a Republican. And Specter has always struck me as somebody who jumps as survival dictates.

Here’s a clever piece of distancing, by Tom Wolfe in early 2006 (if I remember). He was asked about being a conservative. Wolfe said people know him for what he’s against, they don’t look on him as being in favor of anyone in particular. As I translated it: he wanted to say that, yes, he was still against limousine liberals, but he was not necessarily in favor of Republicans or conservatives. If that was the idea, I think it was a dodge but clever.  “Being against” really is a big part of Wolfe’s outlook, especially being against flossy, pretentious, trend-following would-be elite fops — damn liberals. On the other hand, come on, his beliefs are conservative and so are his loyalties; that’s why his latest book is on sale at Human Events Book Service, along with Ann Coulter and Bernard Goldberg. 

YKK fight !, part 2

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Noah linked to Dirk’s post here. Dirk’s post links to one of mine, a post in which I wrote this about YKK:

The atmosphere bits work fine for me, though the smaller they are, the better. For instance, drinking canned coffee in the early morning worked better than Alpha discovering the different meanings behind tears.

Those mellowed-out roads and so on, the landscape’s details, take the principle the furthest. The moment is so small that nothing is happening, all you do is look at something being what it is. Those moments are the best thing in the series.
When Dirk suggests that I didn’t go for YKK because I don’t care for quiet moments and have never sat watching a landscape, I think he doesn’t take the above passage into account. The passage is pretty clear regarding what I like about the series, and elsewhere in the post I’m clear about what I don’t like, which is not the strip’s quiet but its banal streak, “especially in some of the isolated splash pages where Alpha is posing.”
Dirk’s underlying point seems to be that I don’t like YKK as much as I should, which could be true. 

Saturday Morning Watchmen

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There are a few versions by now. Classic or “Matrix On-line” (the images work nicely) or classic with messed-up editing (stutter effect, imposed bits of speeded-up music).

Via Sullivan, the Schulz-as-Miller parody that’s going around.

Alan Moore’s Simpsons appearance; go to 6:24. Some joker taped the episode off his tv screen; the wobbly effect is actually kind of pleasant, but the sound suffers.

YKK part 3: A quiet inn late in the day ( post b )

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Last post here. This new one started as a comment, but I decided to make a post out of it. 


So, down in comments, Noah and DerikB both assured me that Ashinano, as good as he is, is a long way from peerless. Japan has a lot of artists who would be exceptional over here, but over there they’re just very good artists. 

David Alex asked what I made of Akira. I liked it. This is going back to 1988 when I read 10 issues, probably because Spin mentioned the series in its comics-are-cool issue (white cover with Matt Groening’s Binky).  I bought the series a few issues at a time and felt like I was having a bit of a cross-cultural adventure. The story moved nicely, the panels were worth looking at — detail, as with YKK, but detailed undersides of flying vehicles, not detailed porch floorboards. Then I lost interest. Seeing the movie in, I guess, 1990, I told a kid on line that following comic book series in general was like following a tv show: after a few episodes you kind of got what they had to offer, and then pretty soon you were moving on.  Don’t know if that’s my philosophy now, but it seemed very exact and just at the time. 

Ok, in Comments Bill says the story really is unusual for Japanese comics but that Alpha herself is not — other strips also have a “fantasy girl.” Which brings up something that hit me about the series: yes, it’s beautiful, but it also finds time to be banal. Fulfilled fantasies tend to be banal and that goes for fantasy girls. Alpha’s a mannequin doll who’s there to make the old guys feel good. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a limiting thing.

Noah wanted to know how I put up with the shojo, uh, imagery, given the way I complained about googly eyes. I responded:
  
To tell the truth, I was getting to the faces/eyes issue just before the cafe shut down. So, to be stoic … I think the googly eyes are a drawback, but read manga and you’re going to find them. Not everywhere, but pretty often. Maybe I can adjust.

I do think YKK has a streak of banality that is right in tune with the googly-eye motif, especially in some of the isolated splash pages where Alpha is posing. The story itself I don’t mind, but I’m not tuned into it. It seems like an excuse for stringing together little exercises in atmosphere, like a Bolton-Wodehouse book is an excuse for its show’s score. The atmosphere bits work fine for me, though the smaller they are, the better. For instance, drinking canned coffee in the early morning worked better than Alpha discovering the different meanings behind tears.

Those mellowed-out roads and so on, the landscape’s details, take the principle the furthest. The moment is so small that nothing is happening, all you do is look at something being what it is. Those moments are the best thing in the series.


So, the banality again. But at this stage of my manga exploration I’m just getting used to what’s around me. We’ll see how I react down the road.

YKK part 3: A quiet inn late in the day

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YKK, or Record of a Yokahoma Shopping Trip, ran for about 150 episodes. Here at HU we decided to read the first seven chapters and compare notes. Bill started here, Noah continued here. Miriam will talk tomorrow, and tonight I do my post.

This is the first manga I’ve sat down and read thru, not counting 10 issues of Akira back in 1988. It’s all new terrain to me. So I will treat this post as live blogging and just record my impressions.

Two things hit me right off:

1)  the drawing is excellent
2)  the story is close to nonexistent
A third realization hits me:
3)  the setting is the future and everything has fallen apart. But it’s pleasant.
That last one throws me a bit: a pleasant post-apocalypse. But we’re talking Japan, so whatever.
I read the pages fast. They’re printed out from my computer, one page per file, 150 total: the first seven chapters, published back in 1994 for (I gather) middle-aged Japanese men riding the train between office and home. My printer’s ok, and the art is all black and white, but the pictures still drop a notch from the originals. They’re in decent form but not at their best. Even so … that is some great art. A pile of it, just like that.
This is my first time around with right-left pages, but the layouts are huge and that helps. The series has got flow like crazy; every page has a gentle sway that starts in the linework and runs up into the panel arrangements, or vice versa. The detail work is splendid: look at that man draw a sack of rice or a porch’s floorboards or the mellowed, going-to-seed, post-apocalyptic motorways the characters travel along. And everything has life: bodies, trees, clouds in the sky. Page after page. Is this ordinary for Japan?
From Bill and Noah, and from Bill’s links to Dirk Deppey,  Jog, and Madink, [UPDATE: I just found out Madink is DerikB] I gather that this level of play is admirable but not exceptional. I would gather that Ashinano is respected but not held out as an outstanding master. Well, damn. That’s encouraging as to the state of Japanese art.
The story … well, the story’s title is Record of a Yokohama Shopping Trip, that’s for the whole series, and there’s just one shopping trip to Yokohama, in the prologue. When you’ve been gaslighted like that, it’s hard to think straight about story. You don’t expect to be in a frame of mind where you can make reasonable judgments about connections. Does the story make sense? Is it worth following? Yeah, I don’t know.
From the posts before mine, I gather that YKK is especially uneventful. Other Japanese comics aren’t this tranquil.
 The style of caricature … but the counter guy just told me they’re closing the Cafe Depot, so there goes my Internet. I will go now. Miriam can pick up tomorrow.

Just Saw Watchmen

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It’s terrible. I’m just glad the thing ended; for a while there the question seemed touch and go.


I guess the film wins the award for biggest falloff from credits to movie. I loved the credit sequence. The movie itself … to quote a dispassionate observer, the movie is “hollow and disjointed, the actors moving stiffly from one overdetermined tableau to another.”  It’s like a well-meaning eccentric decided to tell the story of Watchmen thru parade floats, after which an absolute hack shot and edited together the parade floats using techniques made familiar by low-budget rock videos of the 1980s. The movie helps you appreciate how quiet the comic book is, not to mention understated, deft, elegant. The comic book is pretty much told in medium shot, without sound effects, and at a measured pace. The movie’s approach would be the opposite  of all those things.

No big problems with Malin Ackerman or her character. All the cast seemed pretty lame, lightweights chosen for their resemblance to the characters, then stranded amid the dioramas and looped dialogue. The Ozymandias chap was the feeblest all around, but the biggest disappointment was Rorschach’s voice.  He sounded like a cartoon dog.

Most regrettable switch from the movie: Rorschach’s business with the handcuffs and file is gone. Instead he just brings an ax down on the child killer’s head.

New Wonderful Sentence

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This one’s a corker. It’s by Thomas L. Friedman, and it reads like The Onion doing a parody of a dork journalist quoting The Onion:


Sometimes the satirical newspaper The Onion is so right on, I can’t resist quoting from it. Consider this faux article from June 2005 about America’s addiction to Chinese exports …


The rest of the column warns of ecological apocalypse. Well, all right. But I have a Friedman Reflex that’s viciously developed: whatever he says, I want him to shut up.
The Onion article interviews a Chinese factory worker (a “faux” Chinese factory worker, as Friedman might put it) who can’t believe the crap his factory turns out for the American market. Friedman doesn’t get that part of the joke is that the factory worker is saying exactly what western critics of consumption have been saying for years. The Onion does that kind of thing, takes language and ideas that are perfectly commonplace in one setting and transposes them to a different setting. Then Tom Friedman comes along, filters out the odd setting, and focuses on the commonplace sentiments, which he treats as his personal discovery.

I’m not saying Friedman is wrong or right about runaway western consumption and ecological crisis. But if he is right, he is right in exactly the same way as many, many others who have gone before him. And he thinks he’s doing everyone else a favor by getting on his hind legs and making his announcement. It’s official! (Over in Japan, ecological doom predictions are such a mainstay they’ve even generated a new form of pastoral, as Bill tells us.) 

Bonus: A classic piece of op-ed Slop Logic. Take two big issues, drop one top of the other, and figure you’re drawing a connection. As in:
 

What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”


I’m not against life in balance. But the US and Europe deregulated banking and let their financial sectors run wild. Canada, for example, didn’t. The US and Europe encountered market disaster; Canada didn’t, it just has to deal with the rest of the world sagging.
The global crisis didn’t happen because ordinary people like to buy stuff. It happened because rich financial professionals were allowed to make themselves richer by running the economy in a cackhanded way that generated profits for them.

Friedman, just do me a favor. Don’t think, okay?

(Footnote: a Friedman Reflex is similar to a Dowd Impulse, which is the urge to seal shut Maureen Dowd’s mouth as soon as she opens it, if not sooner.)